K – SECURITY – BFHR 2019

1NC SECURITY K
The 1ac’s security rhetoric sanitizes global militaristic violence --- repudiating that
discourse is crucial to preventing extinction
Chossudovsky 19 (Michel, award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the
University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG),
Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe,
Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to
governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international
organizations, Centre of Research for Globalization, “NATO-Exit: Dismantle NATO, Close Down
800 US Military Bases, Prosecute the War Criminals” https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-exit-
dismantle-nato-close-down-800-us-military-bases-prosecute-the-war-
criminals/5670610)NFleming **images and graphs omitted**

We are at an important threshold in our history In relation to all previous wars, today’s
advanced military arsenal includes nuclear, biological, chemical and
electromagnetic weapons which have the ability to destroy human life on a
Worldwide scale. War Propanganda This military agenda is supported by an extensive propaganda apparatus. The
dangers of a World War are casually dismissed. War is portrayed as a humanitarian endeavor. The Mainstream media contends that
war is a peace-making undertaking and that NATO should be granted the Nobel Peace prize. Propaganda sustains the war
agenda. It provides a human face to war criminals in high office. Without media disinformation
which upholds war as a peacemaking endeavor, America’s military agenda would collapse like a house of
cards. The imminent dangers of modern warfare are not front page news. War is portrayed as a Peace-making
endeavour. War Becomes Peace, Realities are turned upside down. When the Lie
becomes the Truth, there is no turning backwards. War criminals are portrayed as
peace-makers. War and Globalization. The Neoliberal Agenda War and globalization go hand in hand.
Militarization supports the imposition of macro-economic restructuring on targeted countries. It
imposes military spending in support of the war economy at the expense of the civilian economy. It leads to economic
destabilization and the demise of national institutions. Military interventions are
coupled with concurrent acts of economic sabotage and financial manipulation.
The ultimate objective is conquest of both human and natural resources as well as
political institutions. Acts of war support a process of outright economic conquest. America’s
hegemonic project is to transform sovereign countries into open territories. Debt
conditionalities are imposed by foreign creditors. In turn, large sectors of the World population
are impoverished through the concurrent imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms. 9/11 and
the Invasion of Afghanistan. NATO and the “Global War on Terrorism” The September 11, 2001 attacks (9/11) constitute an
important and historical threshold. On the 12th of September 2001, the North Atlantic Council in Brussels invoking for the first time
the doctrine of collective security (art. 5 of the Washington Treaty) adopted the following resolution: “if it is determined that the
[September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it
shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added) This historic decision was
supported by media propaganda. There was no attack against the US by a foreign power. There were no Afghan jet fighters in the
skies of New York. There was a terror event. But it was not an act of war by a foreign power against the United States of America.
Without a shred of evidence, Afghanistan was tagged as the state sponsor of the 9/11 high-jackers, all of whom were Saudi nationals.
Allegedly Afghanistan was “protecting” 9/11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden (who was an “intelligence asset”, recruited in the
early 1980s by the CIA ). Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known. On the 10th of September (as documented by Dan Rather
CBS News) Osama had been admitted to the urology department of a military hospital in Rawalpindi, by America’s staunchest ally
Pakistan.
Moreover, in the course of September and early October 2001, the Afghan Taliban government on two occasions contacted the US
State Department through diplomatic channels and offered to extradite bin Laden to the U.S. This issue was not covered by the
media. Bush responded:” We do not negotiate with terrorists”. Barely 4 weeks following the 9/11 attack on October 7, 2001, US-
NATO invaded Afghanistan, invoking the doctrine of collective security. There was no evidence that “Afghanistan had attacked
America” on September 11, 2001. It is worth noting, confirmed by military analysts that you do not prepare a large scale theatre war
in Central Asia, thousands of miles away in a matter of 28 days. This issue was casually dismissed by the mainstream media. The war
on Afghanistan had been prepared PRIOR to 9/11. US-NATO’s Role in Recruiting and Financing Al Qaeda Affiliated Terrorists
NATO was involved in
NATO has self-proclaimed mandate to go after the terrorists. Yet there is ample evidence that
supporting as well as recruiting Al Qaeda affiliated mercenaries in Kosovo, Libya
and Syria.(among other countries) Video: NATO is Helping to Fight Terrorism Every Day (Source NATO) In
Syria, from Day One (March 17, 2011), the Islamist “freedom fighters” were supported, trained and equipped by NATO and Turkey’s
High Command. According to Israeli intelligence sources (Debka, August 14, 2011): NATO headquarters in Brussels and the
Turkish high command are meanwhile drawing up plans for their first military step in Syria, which is to arm the rebels with weapons
for combating the tanks and helicopters spearheading the Assad regime’s crackdown on dissent. … NATO strategists are thinking
more in terms of pouring large quantities of anti-tank and anti-air rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns into the protest centers
for beating back the government armored forces. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011)
This initiative, which was also supported by Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States involved a process of organized
recruitment of thousands of jihadist “freedom fighters”, reminiscent of the enlistment of the
Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-89). In
NATO’s war on Libya in 2011, support was channelled to the Al Qaeda affiliated jihadist opposition to the Gadaffi government. The
Legitimacy of Humanitarian Warfare The twisted justifications for US-NATO led wars are: “The Just War” (Jus ad
Bellum). NATO contends that all its wars are morally justifiable. This is tantamount to
legitimizing extensive war crimes. “The Global War on Terrorism”. The counter-terrorism campaign
is fake. Amply documented, NATO is involved in supporting and recruiting jihadist
mercenaries (Syria 2011). “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) with a view to instilling (Trump style) Western “democracy”
Worldwide. Pre-emptive war as a means of “self-defense”, Attack them before they attack us. This doctrine also pertains to nuclear
weapons, i.e. blow up the planet as a means of ‘self-defense” RussiaGate, “Self-defense” against Russia under the doctrine of
collective security Pivot to Asia, Targeting China. Financing US-NATO led Wars In recent developments, President Trump has
proposed major spending cuts in health, education, social infrastructure “while seeking a large increase
for the Pentagon”. At the outset of his administration, president Trump confirmed that he was increasing the budget for the nuclear
weapons program launched by Obama from 1.0 trillion to 1.2 trillion dollars. The stated objective was to make the world safer.
Throughout the EU, extended military spending coupled with austerity measures is leading to the
demise of what was called the “Welfare State”. NATO is committed to increasing military spending. It is the right thing to
do to “keep our people secure, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Source NATO This favors the
weapons producers at the expense of social programs . Mass movements against
neoliberal economic policy and social inequality (Yellow Vests) cannot, therefore,
be divorced from the anti-war movement. Globalization and the Corporate Power Structures Global
warfare sustains the Neoliberal Agenda and vice versa. Neoliberalism broadly
defined is not limited to a set of economic paradigms and structural reforms.
What we are dealing with is an imperial project broadly serving powerful global
overlapping interests: Wall Street and the Global Banking Apparatus The Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil,the
Biotech conglomerates, Bayer-Monsanto et al Big Pharma, The Global Narcotics Economy and Organized Crime, the Media
Conglomerates and the Information and Communication Technology Giants. The military agenda is geared towards
supporting and endorsing these powerful interests groups. There is, of course, within these sectors, mounting conflict between
global conglomerates, each of which have their lobby groups. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) NATO and the De
Facto US Military Occupation of Western Europe 70 years ago NATO was born. In April 1949, The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) established what was designated as the doctrine of “Collective Security” under Art. 5 of the Washington
Treaty.
NATO has a sordid history of aggression and war crimes: Ever since its founding in April 1949, NATO has served as the vehicle to
spur the arms race in the name of ‘peace through strength’. In that very same year, the Truman Administration in the United States
secretly developed “Operation Dropshot’ to launch a devastating ‘first-strike’ against the former Soviet Union to completely
obliterate that country. Throughout the ‘cold war’ years, the U.S. and its NATO allies always maintained an overwhelming military
superiority over the USSR and the Warsaw Pact – a fact that they cynically concealed from public view at the time, but now readily
admit. (Canadian Peace Congress) The unspoken objective of NATO –which is of significance to our debate in Florence–, was to
sustain under a different label, the de facto “military occupation” of Western Europe. The US not only continues to “occupy” World
War II “axis countries” (Italy, Germany), it has used the NATO emblem to install US military bases throughout Western Europe, as
well as in Eastern Europe in the wake of the Cold War, extending into the Balkans in the wake of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia. Today,
NATO consists of 29 member states, most of which have US military facilities on their territory, with the largest deployments of US
forces in Germany and Italy. Bear in mind these are not NATO bases. The latter are limited to command and logistics: e.g. SHAPE
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Casteau, Belgium, NATO Allied Command Transformation, Norfolk, Virginia 12
founding member states in 1949 Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway,
Portugal, Greece and Turkey (1952), Germany (1955), Spain (1982) Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017) A number of other countries have
established partnership agreements with NATO. Israel is a de facto member of NATO, based on an agreement reached in 2003. In
turn, the US has established a host of military alliances on a regional basis. Source: NATO Under the semblance of a multi-national
military alliance, the Pentagon dominates NATO decision-making. The US controls NATO command structures, which are
embedded into those of the US. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) as well as the Supreme Allied Commander
Atlantic(SACLANT) are Americans appointed by Washington. NATO current Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is essentially a
bureaucrat. He does not call the shots. Two other key command structures Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and Allied
Command Operations (ACO), “responsible for the planning and execution of all NATO military operations” were added in 2002.
Under the terms of the military alliance, NATO member states are harnessed into endorsing Washington’s imperial design of World
conquest under the doctrine of collective security. In 1949, NATO became a Cold War instrument which prevented and undermined
the development of trade, political, social and cultural relations between Western Europe and the Soviet block including Eastern
Europe. For Washington, with the Pentagon pulling the strings, NATO has become a convenient military “multi-state proxy”. The
strategic objectives of the US with regard to NATO are: The de facto US Military Occupation of Western, Eastern Europe and Canada
through the establishment of US military bases in most NATO member states
The imposition of US Foreign Policy, requiring the acceptance (under the doctrine of collective security) of all US war plans by NATO member states
(including military deployments on Russia’s doorstep) A mechanism whereby the Pentagon finances its wars and military operations through
contributions by each NATO member state, at tax-payers expense; The
conduct of US-led wars under the emblem of the
NATO military alliance, thereby obliging NATO member states to deploy their military
capabilities as well as “do the dirty work for us”, i.e. killing and destruction on behalf of
Washington. The extension of US influence in the post war period into the former colonies of Western European countries (France, Belgium,
Italy, Britain) Military Occupation is tagged as “Protection” and the governments of NATO member
states are actually “Paying the U.S. to Occupy their countries”. It is all for a good cause. “Make
the World Safer”: “The biggest indignity yet was the ludicrous demand that NATO allies pay to host the American troops permanently
garrisoned there – to essentially bankroll their own occupations. Last week, it was reported the US would begin asking some of its most hospitable
allies – those nations home to hundreds of thousands of soldiers – to foot the bill for the cost of keeping them “safe.”(H. Busyinsi, I should mention that
in addition to recommending NATO for the Nobel Peace Prize, the media relentlessly presents NATO as an instrument of peace-making. US Military
Bases and Global Military Alliances The
Pentagon’s grip extends well beyond the 29 NATO member states. It also includes
partner countries as well as a broad system of military alliances in all major regions of the
World including Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia (Japan, South
Korea) and Oceania. Israel is a de facto NATO member state. Military alliances and military occupation go hand in hand. More generally the creation of
military alliances has become a means to install US military bases in a large number of countries, including countries which were the victims of US led
wars and military interventions. (eg Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq) With the exception of NATO Strategic Command and its
Logistics bases, there are no NATO military bases. There are US bases located in host countries (including NATO member states) as well as national
military bases under the jurisdiction of the NATO member states, often in a joint arrangement with the US. Today there are approximately 39 US
military bases in Germany (based on official sources), many of which are under a system of joint command with Germany and NATO. In Italy, the
major military bases are: Aviano Air Base, Pordenone Caserma Ederle, Vicenza San Vito Dei Normanni Air Station, near Brindisi Naval Air Station
Sigonella, near Catania, Sicily Camp Darby, near Pisa and Livorno According to an unconfirmed source, In Italy, there are about 100 US military bases
and facilities Cross-Cutting Coalitions: Sleeping with the Enemy Of significance, beyond the scope of this article, are the broad structures of military
alliances of Russia and China under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Turkey (a member of NATO) is now collaborating with Russia as
well as Iran. America’s staunchest ally Pakistan is now a full member of the SCO and is actively collaborating with China. Geographic Combat
Commands. US Military Bases Worldwide America’s System of Geographic Combat Commands was established in the wake of World War II. It
constitutes the foundations of global warfare, leading to the deployment of US Air, Navy and Land forces Worldwide, including the militarization of
outer space and the deployment of nuclear weapons. In turn, all major theater wars are coordinated by US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) at
Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, The United States currently has more than 800 formal military bases in 80 countries. In turn, US-led military and
economic alliances have played a key role in extending America’s sphere of influence.Once these military bases are established in countries, they
remain. The host country becomes a de facto ally of the US. From a strategic point of view with modern day warfare, the geographic combat commands
are in some regards obsolete. They are largely geared towards controlling countries which host US military bases. They do not constitute an effective
structure for waging strategic military operations against Russia or China. 800+ US Military Bases. Where are they Located Joint Forces command
agreements are signed between the US and its allies. The host countries must not only endorse US military doctrine, they also contribute sizeable
financial resources which are used to fund US military operations. In this regard, NATO member states contribute financially to sustaining the US-led
military apparatus. The map below is incomplete. It does not include US bases under Joint Command America’s allies are also caught in the nexus of
sustaining the US weapons industry (“defense contractors”) through multibillion dollar purchase. Nuclear War and Nuclear Weapons “The
Privatization of Nuclear War” US Military Contractors Set the Stage US-NATO interventionsare presented as peacemaking
endeavors. A new generation of “more usable” “low yield” nuclear weapons are categorized as
“harmless to civilians”. This initiative was first formulated during the George W. Bush administration. The concepts are contained in the
2001 Nuclear Posture Review, adopted by the Senate in 2002. Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters On August 6,
2003, on Hiroshima Day, commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind
closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military
industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate
Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear
weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.
In a cruel irony, the participants to this secret meeting, which excluded members of Congress, arrived on the anniversary of the
Hiroshima bombing and departed on the anniversary of the attack on Nagasaki. More than 150 military contractors, scientists from
the weapons labs, and other government officials gathered at the headquarters of the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska to
plot and plan for the possibility of “full-scale nuclear war”, calling for the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons – more
“usable” so-called “mini-nukes” and earth penetrating “bunker busters” armed with atomic warheads. According to a leaked draft of
the agenda, the secret meeting included discussions on “mini-nukes” and “bunker-buster” bombs with nuclear war heads “for
possible use against rogue states”: Participants intimated: “We need to change our nuclear strategy from the Cold War to one that
can deal with emerging threats… The meeting will give some thought to how we guarantee the efficacy of the (nuclear) stockpile.”
The post 9/11 nuclear weapons doctrine was in the making, with America’s major defense contractors directly involved in the
decision-making process. The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had set the stage for the “privatization of nuclear war”.
Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs,
they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear
weapons. The nuclear weapons industry, which includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile
delivery systems, etc., is controlled by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics,
Northrop Grunman, Raytheon and Boeing in the lead. It is worth noting that barely a week prior to the historic August 6, 2003
meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disbanded its advisory committee which provided an “independent
oversight” on the US nuclear arsenal, including the testing and/or use of new nuclear devices. (The above text is an excerpt from
Michel Chossudovsky’s Towards a World War Three Scenario, The Dangers of Nuclear War. Global Research, Montreal, 2011)
Dangerous Crossroads: The Future of Humanity is Threatened Needless to say, the World is at a dangerous
crossroads. The future of humanity is threatened. Lies and fabrications permeate US-
NATO military doctrine . Those who decide believe in their own propaganda. Not only do they believe that tactical nuclear
weapons are peace-making bombs, they are now putting forth the concept of a “Winnable Third World War”. Taking out China and
We are at the juncture of the most serious crisis in
Russia is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.
World history. A Third World War using nuclear weapons is terminal. This is not
an understatement. Military interventions are not limited to conventional warfare. What is at stake is a
process of global warfare using advanced weapons systems. The safeguards of the Cold War era have been
scrapped. The concept of “Mutually Assured Destruction” pertaining to the use of nuclear weapons has been replaced by the doctrine
of preemptive nuclear war. The INF Treaty is defunct. Nuclear weapons are portrayed by the media as peace-making bombs. They
are no longer tagged as Weapons of Mass Destruction. They are to be used in what the Pentagon calls “bloody nose” operations. In
the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) under the Bush administration, the Pentagon introduced the notion of pre-emptive nuclear
war, namely the use of nuclear weapons on a first strike basis as a means of “self defense”. The new generation of so-called tactical
nuclear weapons (mininukes) has been been categorized as “low yield” and “more usable. The US Senate in 2002 approved their use
in the conventional war theater. They are contemplated for use against North Korea and Iran. They are tagged as “safe to the
surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground.” These “low yield” tactical nuclear bombs have an explosive
capacity between one third and twelve times a Hiroshima bomb. “More Usable” “Low Yield Nuclear Weapons Deployed in Five Non-
Nuclear Weapons States: Germany, Italy, Belgium,The Netherlands, Turkey The “Official” Nuclear Weapons States Five countries,
the US, UK, France, China and Russia are considered to be “nuclear weapons states” (NWS), “an internationally recognized status
conferred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)”. Three other “Non NPT countries” (i.e. non-signatory states of the NPT)
including India, Pakistan and North Korea, have recognized possessing nuclear weapons. It is worth noting that North Korea was the
only declared nuclear weapons state which voted YES at the UN General Assembly, in favor of the prohibition of nuclear weapons
under Resolution L.41. Nobody knows about this. WHY: Because the mainstream media has not mentioned it (“Fake News” through
Omission) or as in the case of The Guardian and Bloomberg, the DPRK was casually lumped together with the other nuclear
weapons states which voted NO (against the resolution).
“Oops News”. “We made a mistake”. We did not really check the UN General Assembly documents. Israel: “Undeclared Nuclear State” Israel is identified as an “undeclared
nuclear state”. It produces and deploys nuclear warheads directed against military and civilian targets in the Middle East including Tehran. Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands,
Italy and Turkey: erroneously categorised as Non-Nuclear Weapons States” The nuclear weapons capabilities of these five countries including delivery procedures are formally
acknowledged. The US has supplied some 480 B61. thermonuclear bombs to five so-called “non-nuclear states”, including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.
In recent developments the B61.11 mini-nukes are to replaced by the recently developed B61.12. Based on 2014 data Italy possesses 50 B61 tactical nuclear weapons at its Aviano
base. It is unclear whether these bombs are under US or National Command. Casually disregarded by the Vienna based UN Nuclear Watchdog (IAEA), the US has actively
contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Western Europe. As part of this European stockpiling, Turkey, which is a partner of the US-led coalition against Iran along
with Israel, possesses some 90 thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs at the Incirlik nuclear air base. (National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe ,
February 2005) By the recognised definition, these five countries are “undeclared nuclear weapons states”. The stockpiling and deployment of tactical B61 in these five “non-
nuclear states” are intended for targets in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with “NATO strike plans”, these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the
“non-nuclear States”) could be launched “against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran” ( quoted in National Resources Defense Council,
Nuclear Weapons in Europe, February 2005) Click to See Details and Map of Nuclear Facilities located in 5 European “Non-Nuclear States” The stockpiled weapons are B61
thermonuclear bombs. All the weapons are gravity bombs of the B61-3, -4, and -10 types.2 . Those estimates were based on private and public statements by a number of
government sources and assumptions about the weapon storage capacity at each base .(National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe , February 2005)
Germany: Nuclear Weapons Producer Among the five “undeclared nuclear states”, “Germany remains the most heavily nuclearized country with three nuclear bases (two of
which are fully operational) and may store as many as 150 [B61 bunker buster ] bombs” (Ibid). In accordance with “NATO strike plans” (mentioned above) these tactical nuclear
weapons are also targeted at the Middle East. While Germany is not categorized officially as a nuclear power, it produces nuclear warheads for the French Navy. It stockpiles
nuclear warheads (made in America) and it has the capabilities of delivering nuclear weapons.
Moreover, The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company – EADS , a Franco-German-Spanish joint venture, controlled by
Deutsche Aerospace and the powerful Daimler Group is Europe’s second largest military producer, supplying .France’s M51 nuclear
missile. Germany imports and deploys nuclear weapons from the US. It also produces nuclear warheads which are exported to
France. Yet it is classified as a non-nuclear state. Fidel’s Message on the Dangers of Nuclear War In 2010, October 12 to 15, 2010, I
had extensive and detailed discussions with Fidel Castro in Havana, pertaining to the dangers of nuclear war, the global economic
crisis and the nature of the New World Order. Fidel Castro and Michel Chossudovsky, Havana, October 2010 These meetings
resulted in a wide-ranging and fruitful interview which was subsequently published by Global Research. Recorded on the last day of
the Conversations, October 15, 2010, Fidel Castro made the following statement: In a nuclear war the “collateral
damage” would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all
nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must
disappear! “The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was
candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of
heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this
weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime. Each and every government in the world
has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the
peoples on the planet. Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the
least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would
inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict. The World’s peoples have an obligation
to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your
most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent ; not one minute can be lost in
demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late. Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what
weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he
wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make
use of those sticks and stones. There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military
leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people . In a nuclear war the “collateral
damage” would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything
that is used to make war, must disappear!” Fidel Castro Ruz, October 15, 2010

Vote negative for a grassroots disarmament movement, the telos of which is an

abolition of the military-industrial complex and the complete reformation of
modern capital
Chossudovsky 19 (Michel, award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the
University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG),
Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe,
Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to
governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international
organizations, Centre of Research for Globalization, “NATO-Exit: Dismantle NATO, Close Down
800 US Military Bases, Prosecute the War Criminals” https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-exit-
dismantle-nato-close-down-800-us-military-bases-prosecute-the-war-
criminals/5670610)NFleming **images and graphs omitted**
Unconventional Warfare (UW)
Included in the Pentagon’s arsenal is the use of various instruments of subversion including the
support of terrorist insurgencies as outlined the Army Special Operations Forces
Unconventional Warfare manual (leaked by Wikileaks). The emphasis is on using “surrogates”, namely
irregular forces, non-state and paramilitary terrorist entities which will do the dirty work for us:
UW [Unconventional Warfare] must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces.
Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted
in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power,
such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan. UW has also been conducted in support of pending or ongoing conventional military
operations (p. 1-2) The stated purpose outlined in Army Field Manual is to use UW to support “insurgencies” and “resistance
movements”. The “War on Terrorism” (WAT) is also defined as part of the UW arsenal: “UW remains an
enduring and effective means of warfighting and is recognized as a central effort in the WOT… ARSOF namely Army Special Forces
“support the WOT by providing forces trained and equipped”. The report focusses on the use of special forces which are integrated
into the fabric of the War on Terrorism (WOT). What this means in practice is the processing of embedding of US-NATO forces in Al
Qaeda affiliated terrorist insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. Unconventional Warfare (UW) also
extends into the realm of financial manipulation, acts of sabotage, cyberwarfare
etc. The Army Field Manual on UW also details and condones the instruments of Irregular Warfare (IW)
which may resort to illegal activities such as the Iran-Contra: “ Transnational criminal
activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial
transactions, that support or sustain IW .” The Anti-war Movement: How to Reverse the Tide Pursuant to
the Florence April 7, 2019 Stop NATO Conference, concrete actions would consist in: demanding the
withdrawal from NATO by the 29 member states leading to the abolition of NATO.
closing down of US bases and military facilities in all NATO member states the
withdrawal of all US military personnel from NATO member countries the repeal
of payments of NATO member countries for the financing of US military bases and
facilities freezing of military budgets, reallocating resources to civilian social
programs . The mass movement would integrate anti-war protest with the
campaign against the gamut of neoliberal economic reforms.
To achieve these objectives, what is required is the development of a broad based grassroots
network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making
pertaining to war and the economy . This is by no means an easy and straightforward undertaking. The NGOs
funded by Wall Street control a variety of “protest movements”. Since the Iraq war(2003) the anti-war movement is virtually non
existent. This
network would be established nationally and internationally at all levels
of society, towns and villages, work places, parishes . Trade unions, farmers
organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans
associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational
structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a
means to breaking the legitimacy of war both within the command structure as
well as among service men and women. A related task (as a priority) would be to disable
incapacitate war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation.
(including support of the online independent and alternative media). This is no easy task given the wave of censorship against
freedom of speech as well as the online manipulation of search engines and social media referrals. What has to be achieved as
a
first priority is to dismantle the propaganda apparatus which sustains the legitimacy of war and
neoliberalism. In that regard, the independent media has failed. The power structures behind the mainstream media, social
media, etc, must be confronted. Without this network of media disinformation, the war criminals in
high office wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Beware however of the flow of ideas emanating from several alleged
progressive NGOs and “Left intellectuals” who are often financed by the establishment foundations. These are the entities which
organize the so-called protest movements, generously funded by corporate foundations. Intellectuals should not be the driving force
of a Worldwide anti-war movement. What is required is a democratization of research and analysis, which
serves to support a mass grass roots movement. The complexity of the global system (its
military,economic, political dimensions) must be understood by the grassroots of the
movement. Changes within the Armed Forces, Security, Intelligence Law
Enforcement apparatus are required with a view to eventually democratizing the
command structures. Democratizing the decision-making apparatus of police and
law enforcement is also something to be contemplated. It is worth mentioning that while millions
of people across the World have gathered under the banner of “Global Warming” and Climate Change, todays wars including Syria,
The issue of poverty
Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela are not mentioned. Nor are the dangers of a Third World War.
and Worldwide unemployment resulting from the imposition of neoliberal
reforms is also sidetracked.
And the police apparatus is repressing the Yellow Vest movement. There is also the unspoken issue pertaining to “Left intellectuals”
who are often coopted into playing lip service in favor of US-NATO humanitarian wars including Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan
(2001), not to mention Syria (2011) and Libya (2011). While climate change is a legitimate concern, why are these protest
movements limited to global warming. The answer is that many of the key organizations involved are generously funded by Wall
Street foundations, including the Rockefellers, Tides, Soros., et al. The Wall Street protagonists of war and neoliberalism are funding
The
dissent against Wall Street. It’s what I would describe as “manufactured dissent”. Challenging the Corporate Media
corporate media would be directly challenged including major news outlets, which are
responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain. This endeavor would require a
parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature
of the war and the global crisis, as well as effectively “spreading the word” through advanced networking, through
alternative media outlets on the internet, etc. It would also require a broad based campaign against the
search engines involved in media censorship on behalf of the Pentagon. The creation of
such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political
authority , requires a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would
require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It
would also require eventually unseating the war criminals in high office, and indicting them for war
crimes. Abandon the Battlefield: Refuse to Fight The military oath taken at the time of induction demands unbending support and
allegiance to the US Constitution, while also demanding that US troops obey orders from their President and Commander in Chief:
“I,____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear
true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the
regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God”
The President and Commander in Chief Donal Trump has blatantly violated all tenets of domestic and international law. So that making an oath to “obey orders from the
President” is tantamount to violating rather than defending the US Constitution.
“The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 809.ART.90 (20), makes it clear that military personnel need to obey the “lawful command of his superior officer,” 891.ART.91
(2), the “lawful order of a warrant officer”, 892.ART.92 (1) the “lawful general order”, 892.ART.92 (2) “lawful order”. In each case, military personnel have an obligation and a
duty to only obey Lawful orders and indeed have an obligation to disobey Unlawful orders, including orders by the president that do not comply with the UCMJ. The moral and
legal obligation is to the U.S. Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders, especially if those orders are in direct violation of the Constitution and the UCMJ.”
(Lawrence Mosqueda, An Advisory to US Troops A Duty to Disobey All Unlawful Orders,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOS303A.html,
See also Michel Chossudovsky, “We the People Refuse to Fight”: Abandon the Battlefield! March 18, 2006 )
The Commander in Chief is a war criminal. According to Principle 6 of the Nuremberg Charter:
“The fact that a person [e.g. Coalition troops] acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law,
provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
Let us make that “moral choice” possible, to enlisted American, and US-NATO Coalition servicemen and women.
Disobey unlawful orders! Abandon the battlefield! … Refuse to fight in a war which
blatantly violates international law. But this is not a choice which enlisted men and women can make
individually. It is a collective and societal choice, which requires an organizational
structure . Across the land in North America, Western and Eastern Europe and in all NATO coalition countries, the new
anti-war movement must assist enlisted men and women to make that moral choice possible, to
abandon military service at US military bases around the World, as well as in the battlefield in occupied Iraq
and Afghanistan, as well as in Syria and Yemen. This will not be an easy task. Committees at local levels must be set
up across the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan among other countries, which have troops
engaged in US led military operations. We call upon veterans’ associations and local communities to support this
process. US-NATO coalition servicemen and women including senior military officers are victims of internal propaganda. This
movement needs to dismantle the internal disinformation campaign. It must effectively reverse the indoctrination of coalition
troops, who are led to believe that they are fighting “a just war”: “a war against terrorists”, a war against the Russians, who are
The
threatening the security of America. It must also, as mentioned earlier, “democratize” the command structures.
legitimacy of the US military authority must be broken. What has to be achieved: Reveal the
criminal nature of this military project , Break once and for all the lies and
falsehoods which sustain the “political consensus” in favor of a pre-emptive
nuclear war. Undermine war propaganda , reveal the media lies, reverse the tide of disinformation ,
wage a consistent campaign against the corporate media Break the legitimacy of
the war-mongers in high office. Dismantle the US sponsored military adventure and its
corporate sponsors . Bring Home the Troops Repeal the illusion that the State is committed to protecting
its citizens. Uphold 9/11 Truth. Reveal the falsehoods behind 9/11 which are used to justify the Middle East Central Asian war under
Expose how a profit driven war serves the
the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT)
vested interests of the banks, the defense contractors, the oil giants, the media
giants and the biotech conglomerates Challenge the corporate media which deliberately obfuscates the causes
and consequences of this war, Reveal and take cognizance of the unspoken and tragic outcome of a war waged with nuclear weapons.
Call for the Dismantling of NATO Implement the prosecution of war criminals in high office
Close down the weapons assembly plants and implement the foreclosure of major weapons producers Close down all US military
bases in the US and around the World Develop an antiwar movement within the Armed Forces and establish bridges between the
Armed Forces and the civilian antiwar movement Forcefully pressure governments of both NATO and non-NATO countries to
withdraw from the US led global military agenda. Develop a consistent antiwar movement in Israel. Inform
the citizens of Israel of the likely consequences of a US-NATO-Israeli attack on Iran. Confront
the pro-war lobby groups including the pro-Israeli groups in the US Dismantle the homeland security state,
call for the repeal of the PATRIOT legislation Call for the removal of the military from civilian law
enforcement. In the US, call for the enforcement of the Posse Comitatus Act Call for the demilitarization of outer
space and the repeal of Star Wars Call for the freezing of military budgets as well as a reallocation of
resources in favor of the civilian economy People across the land , nationally and internationally,
must mobilize against this diabolical military agenda , the authority of the State and its officials must
be forcefully challenged. War can be prevented if people forcefully confront their
governments , pressure their elected representatives, organize at the local level in
towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens
on the implications of a nuclear war, initiate debate and discussion within the
armed forces. What is required is the development of a broad and well organized grassroots antiwar network which
challenges the structures of power and authority, the nature of the economic system, the vast amounts of money used to fund the
war, the shear size of the so-called defense industry. What is required is a mass movement of people which forcefully challenges the
legitimacy of war, a global people’s movement which criminalizes war. What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose
the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its
war agenda as well as its so-called “Homeland Security agenda” which has already defined the contours of a police State. The World
is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US and its NATO allies have embarked on a military adventure,
“a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate,
particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm
stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war. We call upon
people across the land, in North America, Western Europe, Israel, The Arab World, Turkey and around the world to rise up against
this military project, against their governments which are supportive of US-NATO led wars, against the corporate media which
serves to camouflage the devastating impacts of modern warfare. The military agenda supports a profit driven destructive global
economic system which impoverishes large sectors of the world population. This war is sheer madness. The Lie must be exposed
for what it is and what it does. It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children. It
destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow human beings. It prevents
people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and the police state as the sole
avenue. It destroys both nationalism and internationalism. Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of
global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit driven military agenda
destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies. Let us
reverse the tide. Challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.
Break the American inquisition. Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade. Close down the weapons factories and the
military bases. Bring home the troops. Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal
war.
 1NC SECURITY K – VS SOFT LEFT AFF
Contemporary politics is structured by American exceptionalism --- reducing some
arms sales reproduces the political order that maintains the ontological
foundations for global hegemony
Spanos 2K [William, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamtom,
America’s Shadow, 2000, p. 191-193]

What I have argued in this book about the relationship between philosophy and imperialism is that the euphoric
annunciation of the end of history and the advent of the New World Order by the deputies of the dominant
American culture at the end of the Cold War is symptomatic of the achievement of the global
hegemony of "America" understood not simply as a political order, but as a way of
thinking. I have claimed that this triumphant "American" way of thinking is not exceptionalist, as it
has always been claimed by Americans , especially since de Tocqueville's announcement of the advent of
democracy in America, but European, which means metaphysical: an imperial thinking, whose
provenance resides in Roman antiquity, that sees the being into which it inquires as a totalized
spatial image, a "field" or "region" or "domain" to be comprehended, mastered, and
exploited.
But this way of putting this imperial metanarrative, though necessary in the context of the
amnesiac imperatives of thinking the Enlightenment as an epochal emancipatory moment in world history, is too
general.
It does not account for the historically specific transformation of this European mode of
knowledge production accomplished in the wake of America's emergence as a global power: the
fulfillment of the Enlightenment's " developmental model " in the effacement of the visible
imperial logos informing traditional metaphysics by way of the apotheosis of the "objectivity" of
empirical science and the advent of the classificatory table. Under the aegis of a triumphant America, the narrative economy
of European metaphysics has come to its end in the form of a universal instrumentalism, a
Man-centered thinking for which everything in time and space is seen as a "problem"
that the larger comparative "picture" renders susceptible to a final and determinate
solution.
In Heidegger's proleptic terms, European metaphysical thinking in the technological age dominated by America has
become "Americanized ," a "re-presentational"/"calculative" thinking or "planning " that has
transformed the uncalculability of being at large into a planetary "world picture":
" We get the picture " concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is
represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us — in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it — as
a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped
and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirely, is juxtaposed as that for
which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and
have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself.
Hence world picture , when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world
conceived and grasped as picture . What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and
only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world
picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is
sought and found in the representedness of the latter.1
Reconstellated into the context of this Heideggerian
diagnosis of modernity, the American end-of-
history discourse undergoes a resonant estrangement. What is euphorically represented as
"good news" —the global fulfillment ("end") of the emancipatory promise of History — comes to
be seen as the Pax Metaphysica: the colonization of the errant mind of humanity at large by a
banal and banalizing thinking that has reduced everything, including human beings, to
"standing [or disposable] reserve."2
This "end of philosophy" in the form of a "triumphant" instrumentalist thinking that has reduced being to disposable commodity is
everywhere manifest in the post-Cold War era. And, I suggest, its most telling symptom is the globalization of (American) English
as the lingua franca of the "free market," which has as one of its most devastating consequences
the "Americanization" not simply of the Western nation-states but of entire Third World
cultures .
What for the purpose of my argument this global triumph of "American" thinking means is that even those who would
oppose American global hegemony are, insofar as they remain indifferent to the
ontological grounds of its sociopolitical practices, condemned to think their
opposition according to the imperatives of the discursive practices they would
oppose . They thus fulfill the expectation of the deputies of American culture who predict that
"even nondemocrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to
justify their deviation from the single universal standard ."3
That is to say, the fulfillment of the European metanarrative in the globalization of American technological thinking, that is, the
Americanization of the planet, has tacitly reduced opposition to a resonant silence. It is in this sense that, with Heidegger, the
intellectual who is attuned to the complicity between Western philosophy and imperialism is
compelled to call this "age of the world picture" presided over by America a " destitute time " or,
more suggestively, "a realm of in-between" — "the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is
coming."4
In the context of the impasse of oppositional thinking, in other words, he/she is compelled to acknowledge the time of the postCold
War occasion as an interregnum. This, for
an opposition that limits resistance to the political,
means a time of defeat . But for the oppositional thinker who is attuned to the ontological
exile to which he/she has been condemned by the global triumph of technological thinking it also means the
recognition that this exilic condition of silence constitutes an irresolvable contradiction in the
"Truth" of instrumental thinking — the "shadow" that haunts its light — that demands to be thought. In the
interregnum, the primary task of the marginalized intellectual is the rethinking of
thinking itself . And, as I have suggested, it is the event of the Vietnam War — and the dominant
American culture's inordinate will to forget it — that provides the directives for this most difficult
of tasks not impossible.
This geographic ordering of the world renders the globe a permanent battlespace,
in which military neoliberalism simply colludes with great powers to continue the
violent exploitation of the global periphery
Gregory 11. Derek Gregory, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British
Columbia, “The everywhere war,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 177, No. 3, September 2011,
pg. 238

War time For many, particularly in the United States, 9/11 was a moment when the world
turned; for others, particularly outside the United States, it was a climactic summation of a
longer history of American imperialism in general and its meddling in the Middle East
in particular. Either way, it is not surprising that many commentators should have
emphasised the temporality of the military violence that followed in the wake of the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that bright September
morning: the ‘war on terror’ that became ‘the long war’. For the RETORT collective, the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq marked ‘the elevation – into a state of permanent war –
of a long and consistent pattern of military expansionism in the service of empire’ (RETORT
2005, 80). Keen (2006) wrote of ‘endless war’, Duffield (2007) of ‘unending war’ and
Filkins (2008) of ‘the forever war’. The sense of permanence endures, and yet Engelhardt
(2010, 2–3) ruefully notes that it remains difficult for Americans to understand ‘that
Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons
much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any
moment’. Bacevich (2010, 225) traces this state of affairs to what he calls the ‘Washington
rules’ that long pre-date 9/11. These are ‘the conviction that the obligations of leadership require
the United States to maintain a global military presence, configure its armed forces for power
projection, and employ them to impose changes abroad’, which he argues have formed ‘the
enduring leitmotif of US national security policy’ for the last 60 years and ‘propelled the
United States into a condition approximating perpetual war’. Each of these temporal
formulations implies spatial formations. For RETORT (2005, 103) ‘military
neoliberalism’ is ‘the true globalization of our time’. The planetary garrison that
projects US military power is divided into six geographically defined unified combatant
commands – like US Central Command, CENTCOM – whose Areas of Responsibility cover every
region on earth and which operate through a global network of bases. If you think this
unremark- able, ask yourself Bacevich’s question: how would the United States react if
China were to mirror these moves? Think, too, of the zones in which the shadow of US
military violence still falls: not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but also Iran, Libya,
Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. Then think of the zones where the rhetoric of the ‘war on
terror’ has been used by other states to legitimise repression: Chechnya, Libya, Palestine,
the Philippines, Sri Lanka. And then think of the cities that have become displacements of
the space of war, punctuation points in what Sassen (2010, 37) calls ‘a new kind of multi-
sited war’: Casablanca, Lahore, London, Madrid, Moscow, Mumbai. All these lists
are incomplete, but even in this truncated form they suggest the need to analyse not only
‘the forever war’ but also what we might call ‘the everywhere war’. This is at once a
conceptual and a material project whose scope can be indexed by three geographs that trace a
movement from the abstract to the concrete: Foucault’s (1975–6) prescient suggestion that war
has become the pervasive matrix within which social life is constituted; the
replacement of the concept of the battlefield in US military doctrine by the multi-
scalar, multi-dimensional ‘battlespace’ with ‘no front or back’ and where ‘everything
becomes a site of permanent war’ (Graham 2009, 389; 2010, 31); and the assault on the
global borderlands where the United States and its allies now conduct their military
operations. The first two are never far from the surface of this essay, but it is the third that is my
primary focus. Borderlands and blurred boundaries Duffield (2001, 309) once described the
borderlands as ‘an imagined geographical space where, in the eyes of metropolitan actors
and agencies, the characteristics of brutality, excess and breakdown predominate’.
There, in the ‘wild zones’ of the global South, wars are supposed to occur ‘through greed
and sectarian gain, social fabric is destroyed and developmental gains reversed,
non-combatants killed, humanitarian assistance abused and all civility
abandoned’. This imaginative geography folds in and out of the rhetorical distinction
between ‘our’ wars – wars conducted by advanced militaries that are supposed to be
surgical, sensitive and scrupulous – and ‘their’ wars. In reality, however, the boundaries
are blurred and each bleeds into its other (Gregory 2010). Thus the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in
October 2001 combined a long- distance, high-altitude war from the air with a ground war spearheaded by the warlords and militias
of the Northern Alliance operating with US infantry and Special Forces; counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq has involved the
co-option of ragtag militias to supplement US military operations; and in Afghani- stan the US Army pays off warlords and
ultimately perhaps even the Taliban to ensure that its overland supply chain is protected from attack (Report of the Majority Staff
2010).In mapping these borderlands – which are also shadowlands, spaces that enter
European and American imaginaries in phantasmatic form, barely known but vividly
imagined – we jibe against the limits of cartographic and so of geopolitical reason.
From Rat- zel’s view of der Krieg als Schule des Raumes to Lacoste’s stinging denunciation – ‘la
géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre’ – the deadly liaison between modern war and
modern geography has been conducted in resolutely territorial terms. To be sure, the
genealogy of territory has multiple valences, and Ratzel’s Raum is not Lacoste’s espace, but a
critical analysis of the everywhere war requires cartographic reason to be supplemented by
other, more abile spatialities. This is not only a matter of transcending the geopolitical,
connecting it to the biopolitical and the geo-economic, but also of tracking space as a
‘doing’, precarious, partially open and never complete. It is in something of this spirit
that Bauman (2002, 83) identifies the ‘planetary frontierlands’ as staging grounds of
today’s wars, where efforts to ‘pin the divisions and mutual enmities to the ground
seldom bring results’. In the course of ‘inter- minable frontierland warfare’, so he argues,
‘trenches are seldom dug’, adversaries are ‘constantly on the move’ and have become for all
intents and purposes ‘extraterritorial’. I am not sure about the last (Bauman is evidently
thinking of al Qaeda, which is scarcely the summation of late modern war), but this is an
arresting if impressionistic canvas and the fluidity con- veyed by Bauman’s broad brush-strokes
needs to be fleshed out. After the US-led invasion of Iraq it was commonplace to distinguish the
Green Zone and its satellites (the US political-military bastion in Baghdad and its penumbra
of Forward Operating Bases) from the ‘red zone’ that was everywhere else. But this categorical
division is misleading. The colours seeped into and swirled around one another, so
that occupied Iraq became not so much a patchwork of green zones and red zones as a
thoroughly militarised landscape saturated in varying intensities of brown (khaki):
‘intensities’ because within this warscape military and paramilitary violence could
descend at any moment without warning, and within it precarious local orders were
constantly forming and re-forming. I think this is what Anderson (2011) means when he
describes insurgencies oscillating ‘between extended periods of absence as a function of their
dispersion’ and ‘moments of disruptive, punctual presence’, but these variable intensities
entrain all sides in today’s ‘wars amongst the people’ – and most of all those caught in the
middle.
Vote negative for a grassroots disarmament movement, the telos of which is an
abolition of the military-industrial complex and the complete reformation of
modern capital
Chossudovsky 19 (Michel, award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the
University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG),
Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe,
Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to
governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international
organizations, Centre of Research for Globalization, “NATO-Exit: Dismantle NATO, Close Down
800 US Military Bases, Prosecute the War Criminals” https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-exit-
dismantle-nato-close-down-800-us-military-bases-prosecute-the-war-
criminals/5670610)NFleming **images and graphs omitted**
Unconventional Warfare (UW)
Included in the Pentagon’s arsenal is the use of various instruments of subversion including the
support of terrorist insurgencies as outlined the Army Special Operations Forces
Unconventional Warfare manual (leaked by Wikileaks). The emphasis is on using “surrogates”, namely
irregular forces, non-state and paramilitary terrorist entities which will do the dirty work for us:
UW [Unconventional Warfare] must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces.
Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted
in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power,
such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan. UW has also been conducted in support of pending or ongoing conventional military
operations (p. 1-2) The stated purpose outlined in Army Field Manual is to use UW to support “insurgencies” and “resistance
movements”. The “War on Terrorism” (WAT) is also defined as part of the UW arsenal: “UW remains an
enduring and effective means of warfighting and is recognized as a central effort in the WOT… ARSOF namely Army Special Forces
“support the WOT by providing forces trained and equipped”. The report focusses on the use of special forces which are integrated
into the fabric of the War on Terrorism (WOT). What this means in practice is the processing of embedding of US-NATO forces in Al
Qaeda affiliated terrorist insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. Unconventional Warfare (UW) also
extends into the realm of financial manipulation, acts of sabotage, cyberwarfare
etc.
The Army Field Manual on UW also details and condones the instruments of Irregular Warfare (IW)
which may resort to illegal activities such as the Iran-Contra: “ Transnational criminal
activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms dealing, and illegal financial
transactions, that support or sustain IW .” The Anti-war Movement: How to Reverse the Tide Pursuant to
the Florence April 7, 2019 Stop NATO Conference, concrete actions would consist in: demanding the
withdrawal from NATO by the 29 member states leading to the abolition of NATO.
closing down of US bases and military facilities in all NATO member states the
withdrawal of all US military personnel from NATO member countries the repeal
of payments of NATO member countries for the financing of US military bases and
facilities freezing of military budgets, reallocating resources to civilian social
programs . The mass movement would integrate anti-war protest with the
campaign against the gamut of neoliberal economic reforms.
To achieve these objectives, what is required is the development of a broad based grassroots
network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making
pertaining to war and the economy . This is by no means an easy and straightforward undertaking. The NGOs
funded by Wall Street control a variety of “protest movements”. Since the Iraq war(2003) the anti-war movement is virtually non
existent. This
network would be established nationally and internationally at all levels
of society, towns and villages, work places, parishes . Trade unions, farmers
organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans
associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational
structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a
means to breaking the legitimacy of war both within the command structure as
well as among service men and women. A related task (as a priority) would be to disable
incapacitate war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation.
(including support of the online independent and alternative media). This is no easy task given the wave of censorship against
freedom of speech as well as the online manipulation of search engines and social media referrals. What has to be achieved as
a
first priority is to dismantle the propaganda apparatus which sustains the legitimacy of war and
neoliberalism. In that regard, the independent media has failed. The power structures behind the mainstream media, social
media, etc, must be confronted. Without this network of media disinformation, the war criminals in
high office wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Beware however of the flow of ideas emanating from several alleged
progressive NGOs and “Left intellectuals” who are often financed by the establishment foundations. These are the entities which
organize the so-called protest movements, generously funded by corporate foundations. Intellectuals should not be the driving force
of a Worldwide anti-war movement. What is required is a democratization of research and analysis, which
serves to support a mass grass roots movement. The complexity of the global system (its
military,economic, political dimensions) must be understood by the grassroots of the
movement. Changes within the Armed Forces, Security, Intelligence Law
Enforcement apparatus are required with a view to eventually democratizing the
command structures. Democratizing the decision-making apparatus of police and
law enforcement is also something to be contemplated. It is worth mentioning that while millions
of people across the World have gathered under the banner of “Global Warming” and Climate Change, todays wars including Syria,
The issue of poverty
Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela are not mentioned. Nor are the dangers of a Third World War.
and Worldwide unemployment resulting from the imposition of neoliberal
reforms is also sidetracked.
And the police apparatus is repressing the Yellow Vest movement. There is also the unspoken issue pertaining to “Left intellectuals”
who are often coopted into playing lip service in favor of US-NATO humanitarian wars including Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan
(2001), not to mention Syria (2011) and Libya (2011). While climate change is a legitimate concern, why are these protest
movements limited to global warming. The answer is that many of the key organizations involved are generously funded by Wall
Street foundations, including the Rockefellers, Tides, Soros., et al. The Wall Street protagonists of war and neoliberalism are funding
The
dissent against Wall Street. It’s what I would describe as “manufactured dissent”. Challenging the Corporate Media
corporate media would be directly challenged including major news outlets, which are
responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain. This endeavor would require a
parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature
of the war and the global crisis, as well as effectively “spreading the word” through advanced networking, through
alternative media outlets on the internet, etc. It
would also require a broad based campaign against the
search engines involved in media censorship on behalf of the Pentagon. The creation of
such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political
authority , requires a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would
require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It
would also require eventually unseating the war criminals in high office, and indicting them for war
crimes. Abandon the Battlefield: Refuse to Fight The military oath taken at the time of induction demands unbending support and
allegiance to the US Constitution, while also demanding that US troops obey orders from their President and Commander in Chief:
“I,____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear
true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the
regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God”
The President and Commander in Chief Donal Trump has blatantly violated all tenets of domestic and international law. So that making an oath to “obey orders from the
President” is tantamount to violating rather than defending the US Constitution.
“The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 809.ART.90 (20), makes it clear that military personnel need to obey the “lawful command of his superior officer,” 891.ART.91
(2), the “lawful order of a warrant officer”, 892.ART.92 (1) the “lawful general order”, 892.ART.92 (2) “lawful order”. In each case, military personnel have an obligation and a
duty to only obey Lawful orders and indeed have an obligation to disobey Unlawful orders, including orders by the president that do not comply with the UCMJ. The moral and
legal obligation is to the U.S. Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders, especially if those orders are in direct violation of the Constitution and the UCMJ.”
(Lawrence Mosqueda, An Advisory to US Troops A Duty to Disobey All Unlawful Orders,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOS303A.html,
See also Michel Chossudovsky, “We the People Refuse to Fight”: Abandon the Battlefield! March 18, 2006 )
The Commander in Chief is a war criminal. According to Principle 6 of the Nuremberg Charter:
“The fact that a person [e.g. Coalition troops] acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law,
provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
Let us make that “moral choice” possible, to enlisted American, and US-NATO Coalition servicemen and women.

Disobey unlawful orders! Abandon the battlefield! … Refuse to fight in a war which
blatantly violates international law. But this is not a choice which enlisted men and women can make
individually. It is a collective and societal choice, which requires an organizational
structure . Across the land in North America, Western and Eastern Europe and in all NATO coalition countries, the new
anti-war movement must assist enlisted men and women to make that moral choice possible, to
abandon military service at US military bases around the World, as well as in the battlefield in occupied Iraq
and Afghanistan, as well as in Syria and Yemen. This will not be an easy task. Committees at local levels must be set
up across the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan among other countries, which have troops
engaged in US led military operations. We call upon veterans’ associations and local communities to support this
process. US-NATO coalition servicemen and women including senior military officers are victims of internal propaganda. This
movement needs to dismantle the internal disinformation campaign. It must effectively reverse the indoctrination of coalition
troops, who are led to believe that they are fighting “a just war”: “a war against terrorists”, a war against the Russians, who are
The
threatening the security of America. It must also, as mentioned earlier, “democratize” the command structures.
legitimacy of the US military authority must be broken. What has to be achieved: Reveal the
criminal nature of this military project , Break once and for all the lies and
falsehoods which sustain the “political consensus” in favor of a pre-emptive
nuclear war. Undermine war propaganda , reveal the media lies, reverse the tide of disinformation ,
wage a consistent campaign against the corporate media Break the legitimacy of
the war-mongers in high office. Dismantle the US sponsored military adventure and its
corporate sponsors . Bring Home the Troops Repeal the illusion that the State is committed to protecting
its citizens. Uphold 9/11 Truth. Reveal the falsehoods behind 9/11 which are used to justify the Middle East Central Asian war under
Expose how a profit driven war serves the
the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT)
vested interests of the banks, the defense contractors, the oil giants, the media
giants and the biotech conglomerates Challenge the corporate media which deliberately obfuscates the causes
and consequences of this war, Reveal and take cognizance of the unspoken and tragic outcome of a war waged with nuclear weapons.
Call for the Dismantling of NATO Implement the prosecution of war criminals in high office
Close down the weapons assembly plants and implement the foreclosure of major weapons producers Close down all US military
bases in the US and around the World Develop an antiwar movement within the Armed Forces and establish bridges between the
Armed Forces and the civilian antiwar movement Forcefully pressure governments of both NATO and non-NATO countries to
withdraw from the US led global military agenda. Develop a consistent antiwar movement in Israel. Inform
the citizens of Israel of the likely consequences of a US-NATO-Israeli attack on Iran. Confront
the pro-war lobby groups including the pro-Israeli groups in the US Dismantle the homeland security state,
call for the repeal of the PATRIOT legislation Call for the removal of the military from civilian law
enforcement. In the US, call for the enforcement of the Posse Comitatus Act Call for the demilitarization of outer
space and the repeal of Star Wars Call for the freezing of military budgets as well as a reallocation of
resources in favor of the civilian economy People across the land , nationally and internationally,
must mobilize against this diabolical military agenda , the authority of the State and its officials must
be forcefully challenged. War can be prevented if people forcefully confront their
governments , pressure their elected representatives, organize at the local level in
towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens
on the implications of a nuclear war, initiate debate and discussion within the
armed forces. What is required is the development of a broad and well organized grassroots antiwar network which
challenges the structures of power and authority, the nature of the economic system, the vast amounts of money used to fund the
war, the shear size of the so-called defense industry. What is required is a mass movement of people which forcefully challenges the
legitimacy of war, a global people’s movement which criminalizes war. What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose
the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its
war agenda as well as its so-called “Homeland Security agenda” which has already defined the contours of a police State. The World
is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US and its NATO allies have embarked on a military adventure,
“a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate,
particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm
stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war. We call upon
people across the land, in North America, Western Europe, Israel, The Arab World, Turkey and around the world to rise up against
this military project, against their governments which are supportive of US-NATO led wars, against the corporate media which
serves to camouflage the devastating impacts of modern warfare. The military agenda supports a profit driven destructive global
economic system which impoverishes large sectors of the world population. This war is sheer madness. The Lie must be exposed
for what it is and what it does. It sanctions the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children. It
destroys families and people. It destroys the commitment of people towards their fellow human beings. It prevents
people from expressing their solidarity for those who suffer. It upholds war and the police state as the sole
avenue. It destroys both nationalism and internationalism. Breaking the lie means breaking a criminal project of
global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit driven military agenda
destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies. Let us
reverse the tide. Challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.
Break the American inquisition. Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade. Close down the weapons factories and the
military bases. Bring home the troops. Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal
war.
FRAMEWORK
 2NC FRAMEWORK / PERM THEORY
Our framework is to arbitrate between the alternative, which accelerates the scale
and scope of anti-militarist activity, and the plan. If we win links to the aff’s
discourse or rhetoric, you should vote against any permutation that severs those
representations on severance grounds --- that decision structure creates
substantively more enriching debates that center questions of theoretical
structure over political tweaks --- challenging capitalism, American hegemony,
militarism, or any other geopolitical structure becomes impossible, because alts
that are a radical departure overwhelm any modest reform
That robs debate of its creative and transformative potential ---- only we unsettle
habitual modes of thought and enable creative solutions whereas they lock us into
the violence produced by the status quo’s mediocre thought
Other debates solve their impacts – they have to win that we should never have
debates that interrogate the broader systems and structures – without macro-
systems-level-thinking, we are all quite liable to get bogged down in potentially
irrelevant details and digressions
No ground loss – they literally get to weigh the case in our framework which solves
the 2ac argument as it was presented – they can win a perm if they beat the links
Winning a link to something in their 1ac demonstrates they should be prepared to
defend it
Also “heg good” and “cap good” are responsive to the K --- any team reading a plan
should be prepared to impact turn with ease
If they are too unprepared to defend the K, changing the incentive structure such
that prioritizing the theoretical underpinnings of the aff becomes a methodical
component of aff prep is necessary to maximize the educational value of the
activity
Hard debate is good --- we cause aff strategic thinking --- neg flex o/w, we need
kritiks args on a topic with massive aff-side bias where it’s impossible to be neg
Remaining within a securitizing political imaginary forecloses building an
alternative set of institutions that gets beyond security politics
Neocleous 8 [Mark Neocleous, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, Critique of Security, 185-6]

The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of
security altogether – to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real
political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly
something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by
the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain ‘this is an insecure world’ and reiteration
of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of
security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of
security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encom passing that it marginalises all
else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political
life. The con stant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end – as the political end –
constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which
differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and
negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible – that they might
transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse,
it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political
questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told – never
could be told – what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141
dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to
dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the
political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more
‘sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more
areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical
Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that’s left behind? But I’m
inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole
and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is
re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these
ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up re
affirming the state as the terrain of modern politics , the grounds of security. The real task is
not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an
alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois
security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That’s
the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we
want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the
negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of
bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep
demanding‘more security’ (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty) is to blind
ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian
tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics
would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant
securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that ‘security’ helps consolidate the power of the
existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also
allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different con ception of the good.
We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would
perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must
be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion that has
forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that
insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to
tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being human; it requires accepting that
‘securitizing’ an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and
handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift .143

Theoretical imagination has a bigger impact than you think – theory in university
humanities departments has manufactured the language and attitudes
determining how major political events have transpired as well as setting broader
cultural norms – means that you should prioritize frameworks that maximizes
debates about radical systems change
Tedesco and Brennan 12 [Francescomaria, research fellow in political philosophy at the
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, and Timothy, professor of English at the University of
Minnesota, “The Theory That Lives On—A Counterintuitive History: An Interview with Timothy
Brennan,” Minnesota Review, Number 78, 2012]

Although I agree with Noam Chomsky about almost everything else, I think he's wrong when he says that the
humanities are ineffectual . . . that they basically don't matter. In Wars of Position, I think I assembled some proof for
this proposition by looking, for example, at the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the Rushdie affair, and the North American Free Trade Agreement—all of the
commentary on which was profoundly shaped by the explicit language, imagery, and
attitudes manufactured in university humanities programs . And we also tend to discount the fact
that a great deal of corporate advertising and, above all, television scriptwriting is the work of
former literature grad students who left academia and then popularized the "cultural
theory" of the graduate seminar rooms in business settings. A lot more work needs to be done on this
sociological curiosity. It's difficult even to get started because one first has to convince the audience that the humanities have
concealed institutional clout and are part of a political logic defined by a larger division of
intellectual labor before one can even get to the point of showing the [End Page 65] stakes involved
in this or that position within the humanities. Here we come to a more important issue—and certainly a much less
clichéd one—namely, that the influence of the humanities by way of "theory" has been largely negative. Briefly put, and in a variety of
ways, the humanities are against the idea of the "human" and are eager to put humans in their
place by curtailing their claims to action, thought, and feeling. In this, they provide a
powerful buttressing mechanism for a number of recent public policies. It would be easy
to see my line of argument as being similar to that of others who have attacked theory in recent decades. And let me say in passing
the era of theory is over, as many have argued; it is vibrant and alive , as the
that it is not at all the case that
websites of so many recent graduate student conferences show. It has, however, moved into a more
overtly political register. At any rate, here one might suppose—as in fact some reviewers have—that if one criticizes identity
politics, he or she must be a conservative like Harold Bloom (who criticizes identity politics without following theory); or one
supposes that the point is to belittle theory's arcane or pretentious ways of expressing itself or to belittle its diversion from real,
practical political work. But that is not what I am saying.
 AT: AFFECT FOCUS BAD
Prioritizing the affective orientations inured by your decision maximizes our
ability to meaningfully act politically
Berlant and Aryal 12 [Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago,
interview with Yubraj Aryal, “Affect and the political,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross
Disciplinary Inquiry 7.17 (Spring 2012): p70]

L. B.: In the US the

vast majority of people have given up on a political solution to the problem of
living--there is an anemic amount of participation in political life. So I don't presume that there
is a general political desire for justice and freedom; I think there is a general desire to live the good
life in a variety of idioms traversing the economic and the intimate. The political sphere can
seem so distant and overwhelming, like a noisy nightmare from which one has not quite awakened, and so many
people don't tend to invest their imaginative or bodily agency in advancing freedom in the
register of political agency. The demands of the reproduction of life take up too much time and energy (as "Slow Death"
argues, the workday exhausts one's sovereignty). So Ranciere and the everyday life theorists like deCerteau had it right, I think, that
the work of dissensus produces a lot of aversion, and people try to steal material for their optimism
and their pleasure in secreted folds within the spheres of the instrumental and the intimate,
cheating, being unproductive, self-medicating. ... Having said that, for those who thrive in a political
idiom, it's an exciting time. This has to do with the revelation during this economic crisis that the state has made
itself (and has desired to be) just as vulnerable and powerless in relation to private wealth as ordinary
people are. So while in some years people would have demanded accountability from the state, now, three decades later than it
might have happened, people are demanding accountability from the financial system and
corporations, who have no responsibility to any public except for stockholders and a few
representative regulators. How do we talk about justice and freedom to institutions that do not
govern justice and freedom, without changing what we mean by those concepts? That's why this
moment feels like an opening, because the political addressees have changed and therefore so,
perhaps, will liberalism. Y. A.: Could we say that "intimate" activities you just mentioned
"cheating, being unproductive (serving web while at work etc.,), self-medicating (taking unnecessary drugs etc.,)"
are worthless acts, but are examples, in their own ways, of political affect? In other words, even if such acts fall
outside of the dominant political actions, can't such acts retain the political status in their
own way (Foucault regards these things very political in their ways. For him, these acts serve examples of how a nonsovereign
creates an alternative model of being political)? L. B: Absolutely! Of course it could be converted to political
resistance or revolt . But I think it's also important to point out that building a secret life under threat of
shaming or damning exposure is not necessarily an act seeking social change; people might produce
sensual developments in a radically private or idiomatic way out of desire for an otherwise not
already saturated by dominant terms of belonging. Y.A.: Is affect political or political is affective? Another way
putting this can be: how do affective aspects of the world become political and vice versa? L. B. It depends what we mean by
political! If we mean saturated with the operations of power, the
political is always invested with affect
because it is always inciting bodies to appear a certain way, to cite Foucault. Power is
biopolitical . This means that our visceral responses , our intuitions, are political. These
responses can become-political in the narrower sense--e.g. engaged in struggle --when our
modes of attention are focused on connecting powerful but often unstated affective
formations to structures of social injustice . You might be thinking that the political public
sphere, which includes administrative and juridical institutions as well as pedagogic
institutions that induce normative ideologies as routes to reliable belonging, works in
calculated and instrumental fashion too and doesn't always appeal to the affects, doesn't really
care about the affects of citizens and denizens. But here too we can say that the political is
always already affective -that is, it calls on unconscious fantasy often by soliciting
normative emotion . "What goes without saying" in the atmosphere of ideology is what's
really powerful in that sense--the threat of social negation, the promise of legitimacy or
recognition--all of this is the really sticky material that binds people to objects, ideologies,
and modes of life that don't work, for fear of having nothing, not even fantasy. Y. A--Perhaps you
might say more about the difference between political function and political affect. Are you suggesting that emotion is conscious,
whereas affect is "sticky material that binds people--" perhaps unconscious or preconscious that is "visceral response"? L. B.: It's a
standard thing to say in affect theory now that affect involves nervous system responses and modes of
sensing and knowing that do not first work through cognitive processing, whereas emotion is the
feeling state more connected to norms, personality, and performance. You can't fake affect
but you can fake emotion . There are debates about this. I am very interested in unconscious fantasy
and the training of intuition, and the ways that our visceral responses become events in the world.
To cap off this discussion: part of what I was talking about in terms of the historical present making itself available to our
senses as a moment in crisis is that crisis is a sense of the state of things, a sense of threat, of the
inadequacy of our genres of imagining and living life. That sense is affective and then people
throw names at it and it develops as a relation between the unstated and unpredictable modes of
attention to which we are always catching up and the project of organizing collective life through
shared rubrics. I've been tracking this for the last twenty-five years in Europe and the US, with
the diminution of the welfare state and debates about who belongs to the nation, and what the
evidence of that belonging is (labor, blood, identification, beliefs): those debates about what constitutes
continuity among strangers is, in many places, at an explosive conjuncture.
 AT: MILITARY EDUCATION GOOD
The military bureaucracy is incompetent and corrupt to its core – their education
just perfects a cycle of academic groupthink
Engelhardt 15 [Tom, B.A. Yale, master's degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard
University, founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a Vietnam Protest
organization, creator of The Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com, an online blog, “The Fog of
Intelligence,” published on LobeLog, initially launched by the international news wire service,
Inter Press Service (IPS News), this site is a regular stop for those seeking to examine US foreign
policy from a diverse variety of critical perspectives, with its unique roundup of expert
contributors, LobeLog receives ongoing citations from independent and mainstream
international news outlet, October 19, 2015]
Of course, in the gargantuan beast that is the American military and intelligence universe, streams
of raw intelligence beyond compare are undoubtedly flooding into CENTCOM’s headquarters,
possibly overwhelming even 1,500 analysts. There’s “human intelligence,” or HUMINT, from
sources and agents on the ground; there’s imagery and satellite intelligence, or GEOINT, by the
bushelful. Given the size and scope of American global surveillance activities, there must be untold
tons of signals intelligence , or SIGINT; and with all those drones flying over battlefields and
prospective battlefields across the Greater Middle East, there’s undoubtedly a river of full motion video, or FMV,
flowing into CENTCOM headquarters and various command posts; and don’t forget the information being shared
with the command by allied intelligence services, including those of the “five eyes“ nations, and
various Middle Eastern countries; and of course, some of the command’s analysts must be handling
humdrum, everyday open-source material, or OSINT, as well — local radio and TV broadcasts, the press,
the Internet, scholarly journals, and god knows what else.
And while you’re thinking about all this, keep in mind that those 1,500 analysts feed into, and assumedly draw on, an intelligence
system of a size surely unmatched even by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Think of it: the U.S. Intelligence
Community has — count ‘em — 17 agencies and outfits, eating close to $70 billion annually, more than $500 billion between 2001
and 2013. And if that doesn’t stagger you, think about the500,000 private contractors hooked into the system in one way or another,
the 1.4 million people (34% of them private contractors) with access to “top secret” information, and the 5.1 million — larger than
Norway’s population — with access to “confidential and secret” information.
Remember as well that, in these years, a global surveillance state of Orwellian proportions has been
ramped up. It gathers billions of emails and cell phone calls from the backlands of the
planet ; has kept tabs on at least 35 leaders of other countries and the secretary general of the U.N.
by hacking email accounts, tapping cell phones, and so on; keeps a careful eye and ear on its own citizens, including video gamers;
and even, it seems, spies on Congress. (After all, whom can you trust?)
In other words, if that 1,500 figure bowls you over, keep in mind that it just stands in for a far larger system that puts to shame, in
size and yottabytes of information collected, the wildest dreams of past science fiction writers. In these years, a mammoth, even
labyrinthine, bureaucratic“intelligence” structure has been constructed that is drowning in
“information” — and on its own, it seems, the military has been ramping up a smaller but similarly
scaled set of intelligence structures.
Surprised, Caught Off Guard, and Left Scrambling The question remains: If data almost beyond imagining flows into CENTCOM, what are those 1,500 analysts actually doing?
How are they passing their time? What exactly do they produce and does it really qualify as “intelligence,” no less prove useful? Of course, we out here have limited access to the
intelligence produced by CENTCOM, unless stories like the one about top commanders fudging assessments on the air war against the Islamic State break into the media. So you
might assume that there’s no way of measuring the effectiveness of the command’s intelligence operations. But you would be wrong. It is, in fact, possible to produce a rough
gauge of its effectiveness. Let’s call it the TomDispatch Surprise Measurement System, or TSMS. Think of it as a practical, news-based guide to the questions: What did they
know and when did they know it? Let me offer a few examples chosen almost at random from recent events in CENTCOM’s domain. Take the seizure at the end of September by
a few hundred Taliban fighters of the northern provincial Afghan capital of Kunduz, the first city the Taliban has controlled, however briefly, since it was ejected from that same
town in 2002. In the process, the Taliban fighters reportedly scattered up to 7,000 members of the Afghan security forces that the U.S. has been training, funding, and arming
for years. For anyone following news reports closely, the Taliban had for months been tightening its control over rural areas around Kunduz and testing the city’s defenses.
Nonetheless, this May, based assumedly on the best intelligence analyses available from CENTCOM, the top U.S. commander in the country, Army General John Campbell,
offered this predictive comment: “If you take a look very closely at some of the things in Kunduz and up in [neighboring] Badakhshan [Province], [the Taliban] will attack some
very small checkpoints… They will go out and hit a little bit and then they kind of go to ground… so they’re not gaining territory for the most part.’” As late as August 13th, at a
press briefing, an ABC News reporter asked Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff for communications in Afghanistan: “There has been a significant
increase in Taliban activity in northern Afghanistan, particularly around Kunduz. What is behind that? Are the Afghan troops in that part of Afghanistan at risk of falling to the
Taliban?” Shoffner responded, in part, this way: “So, again, I think there’s been a lot of generalization when it comes to reports on the north. Kunduz is — is not now, and has not
been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban, and so — with that, it’s kind of a general perspective in the north, that’s sort of how we see it.” That General Cambell at least
remained of a similar mindset even as Kunduz fell is obvious enough since, as New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg reported, he was out of the country at the time. As
Goldstein put it: “Mostly, though, American and Afghan officials appeared to be genuinely surprised at the speedy fall of Kunduz, which took place when Gen. John F. Campbell,
the commander of coalition forces, was in Germany for a defense conference… Though the Taliban have been making gains in the hinterlands around Kunduz for months,
American military planners have for years insisted that Afghan forces were capable of holding onto the country’s major cities. “‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ said a senior
American military officer who served in Afghanistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ‘The Afghans are fighting, so it’s not like we’re looking at them giving up or
collapsing right now. They’re just not fighting very well.’” It’s generally agreed that the American high command was “caught off guard” by the capture of Kunduz and
particularly shocked by the Afghan military’s inability to fight effectively. And who would have predicted such a thing of an American-trained army in the region, given that the
American-backed, -trained, and -equipped Iraqi Army on the other side of the Greater Middle East had a similar experience in June 2014 in Mosul and other cities of northern
Iraq when relatively small numbers of Islamic State militants routed its troops? At that time, U.S. military leaders and top administration officials right up to President Obama
were, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces” and the successes of the Islamic State in northern Iraq. Peter Baker and
Eric Schmitt of the Times wrote in retrospect, “Intelligence agencies were caught off guard by the speed of the extremists’… advance across northern Iraq.” And don’t forget that,
despite that CENTCOM intelligence machine, something similar happened in May 2015 when, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it, U.S. officials and American
intelligence were “blindsided again” by a very similar collapse of Iraqi forces in the city of Ramadi in al-Anbar Province. Or let’s take another example where those 1,500 analysts
must have been hard at work: the failed $500 million Pentagon program to train “moderate” Syrians into a force that could fight the Islamic State. In the Pentagon version of the
elephant that gave birth to a mouse, that vast effort of vetting, training, and arming finally produced Division 30, a single 54-man unit of armed moderates, who were inserted
into Syria near the forces of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front. That group promptly kidnapped two of its leaders and then attacked the unit. The result was a disaster as the
U.S.-trained fighters fled or were killed. Soon thereafter, the American general overseeing the war against the Islamic State testified before Congress that only “four or five”
armed combatants from the U.S. force remained in the field. Here again is how the New York Times reported the response to this incident: “In Washington, several current and
former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant
intelligence failure. While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they
did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the
Islamic State. “‘This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,’ said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments.” Now, if accurate, this is wild stuff. After all, how anyone, commander or intelligence analyst, could
imagine that the al-Nusra Front, classified as an enemy force in Washington and some of whose militants had been targeted by U.S. air power, would have welcomed U.S.-
backed troops with open arms is the mystery of all mysteries. One small footnote to this: McClatchy News later reported that the al-Nusra Front had been poised to attack the
unit because it had been tipped off in advance by Turkish intelligence, something CENTCOM’s intelligence operatives evidently knew nothing about. In the wake of that little
disaster and again, assumedly, with CENTCOM’s full stock of intelligence and analysis on hand, the military inserted the next unit of 74 trained moderates into Syria and was
shocked (shocked!) when its members, chastened perhaps by the fate of Division 30, promptly handed over at least a quarter of their U.S.-supplied equipment, including trucks,
ammunition, and rifles, to the al-Nusra Front in return for “safe passage.” Al-Nusra militants soon were posting photos of the weapons online and tweeting proudly about them.
CENTCOM officials initially denied that any of this had happened (and were clearly in the dark about it) before reversing course and reluctantly admitting that it was so. (“‘If
accurate, the report of NSF [New Syrian Forces] members providing equipment to al-Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train-and-equip program
guidelines,’ U.S. Central Command spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder said.”) To turn to even more recent events in CENTCOM’s bailiwick, American officials were reportedly
similarly stunned as September ended when Russia reached a surprise agreement with U.S. ally Iraq on an anti-ISIS intelligence-sharing arrangement that would also include
Syria and Iran. Washington was once again “caught off guard” and, in the words of Michael Gordon of the Times, “left… scrambling,” even though its officials had known “that a
group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad.” Similarly, the Russian build-up of weaponry, planes, and personnel in Syria initially “surprised” and — yes — caught the
Obama administration “off guard.” Again, despite those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts and the rest of the vast U.S. intelligence community, American officials, according to every
news report available, were “caught flat-footed” and, of course, “by surprise” (again, right up to the president) when the Russians began their full-scale bombing campaign in
Syria against various al-Qaeda-allied outfits and CIA-backed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They were even caught off guard and taken aback by the way the
Russians delivered the news that their bombing campaign was about to start: a three-star Russian general arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to offer an hour’s notice.
(Congressional lawmakers are now considering “the extent to which the spy community overlooked or misjudged critical warning signs” about the Russian intervention in Syria.)
The Fog Machine of American Intelligence
You get the point. Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast
intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the
official American reaction, military and political, will be “surprise” and that policymakers will be
left “scrambling” in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected. In
other words, somehow , with what passes for the best, or at least most extensive and expensive
intelligence operation on the planet , with all those satellites and drones and surveillance
sweeps and sources, with crowds of analysts, hordes of private contractors, and tens of billions
of dollars, with, in short, “intelligence” galore, American officials in the area of their wars are evidently going to continue to find
themselves eternally caught “off guard.”
The phrase “the fog of war” stands in for the inability of commanders to truly grasp what’s
happening in the chaos that is any battlefield. Perhaps it’s time to introduce a companion
phrase: the fog of intelligence. It hardly matters whether those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts (and
all those at other commands or at the 17 major intelligence outfits) produce superlative “intelligence” that then
descends into the fog of leadership, or whether any bureaucratic conglomeration of “analysts,”
drowning in secret information and the protocols that go with it, is going to add up to a giant
fog machine.
It’s difficult enough, of course, to peer into the future, to imagine what’s coming, especially
in distant, alien lands. Cobble that basic problem together with an overwhelming data
stream and groupthink , then fit it all inside the constrained mindsets of Washington and the Pentagon, and you
have a formula for producing the fog of intelligence and so for seldom being “on guard” when it
comes to much of anything .
 AT: PLAN FOCUS KEY TO SKILLS
The aff’s plan is a double turn with their impact evidence – the scholarship
produced by the 1ac justifies neoconservative redeployment even if the plan’s
hypothetically a good idea. This impasse is precisely why liberal anti-war activists
fail, and they can’t access ANY of their “war conversations good” cards because
they don’t assume the scholarship introduced by the aff. Put another way, even if
you generate skills, those skills suck.
Spanos 4 [(William V., prof. at Binghamton, available online cross-x.com url:
http://www.crossx.com/vb/showthread.php?t=945110&highlight=Spanos+Email, Nov. 18]

Dear Joe MIller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I
strongly believed then --and still do, even though a certain uneasiness about "objectivity" has crept into the "philosophy of debate" --
that debate in both the high schools and colleges in this country is assumed to take place nowhere, even though
the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which means that positions are always
represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I find it grotesque that in the
debate world, it doesn't matter which position you take on an issue -- say, the United States'
unilateral wars of preemption -- as long as you "score points". The world we live in is a world
entirely dominated by an "exceptionalist" America which has perennially claimed that it has been chosen by God
or History to fulfill his/its "errand in the wilderness." That claim is powerful because American economic and
military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world is virtually powerless.
Given this inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are
equal is to efface the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of
history and to annul the Moral authority inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have said that the
appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my
intentions. My scholarship is not "disinterested." It is militant and intended to ameliorate as much
as possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the "democratic"
institutions that have power precisely by way of showing that their language of "truth," far from
being "disinterested" or "objective" as it is always claimed, is informed by the will to power over all manner of "others."
This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate world who felt like him should call into
question the traditional "objective" debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they
privilege in favor of a concept of debate and of language in which life and death mattered. I am
very much aware that the arrogant neocons who now saturate the government of the Bush
administration -- judges, pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their "disinterested"
argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly,
they have become masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed . This kind
leadership will reproduce itself (along with the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training
ground and the debate protocols from which it emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate
world must occur. It must force that unworldly world down into the historical arena where
positions make a difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a revolution will be capable of
"deterring democracy" (in Noam Chomsky's ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical consciousness that is, in my mind, the
sine qua non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards which the blind arrogance of Bush
Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.
 AT: POLICY RELEVANCE BAD
Debating their specifics of policy is useless. Their arguments are based in
blinkered intelligence- imperial enclosures nurture war and disinformation,
distorting their picture of the world and nullifying the truth-value of their claims.
The aff isn’t true and their pessimism of the alt is unfounded
Shor, 10 - Wayne State history professor
[Francis, Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance, p32-34, net library, accessed 1-
31-10]
In order to excavate and explode the mental landscapes created by imperial enclosures, we will need to confront and transcend the blinkered
intelligence, impeded wills, and hectored hearts that are integral to the imperial and civic enclosures that
surround us in the
United States. These enclosures are enerated by ideological mechanisms, media constructions, and
daily social practices that are deeply embedded in the political culture of an imperial U.S. From
uncritical patriotism, induced by ruling elites and ritualized by the corporate media, to cultural
provincialism, U.S. citizens are ensconced in an imperial matrix that distorts reality and nurtures
"aggressive militarism" and 'escalating authoritarianism." "As the militarization of American society proceeds,"
contends Carl Boggs, "the confluence of the domestic war economy and global Empire generates
popular attitudes inconsistent with a vibrant, democratic public sphere: fear hatred, jingoism,
racism, and aggression. We have arrived at a bizarre mixture of imperial arrogance and collective
paranoia, violent impulses and a retreat from the norms of civic engagement and obligation that
patriotic energies furnish only falsely and ephemerally." Recognizing how falsely and ephemerally patriotism attempts
to assuage the assaults of militarism and imperialism, a number of feminist dissenters have promoted "matriotism" as a key component of critical
opposition. Among the more prominent proponents of matriotism was Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war advocate who became a lightning rod for
opponents of the Iraq War after her son, Casey, was killed in Iraq. Writing in January 2006, Sheehan argued that a "true Matriot would never drop an
atomic bomb or bombs filled with white phosphorous, carpet bomb cities, and villages, or control drones from thousands of miles away to kill innocent
men, women and children." Beyond this critique of war-making, Sheehan urged those among her readers who would join other matriots "to stand up
and say: "No, I’m not giving my child to the fake patriotism of the war machine which chews up my flesh and blood to spit out obscene profits." While
flag-wavering patriotism may provide ideological cover for the mendacity of ruling elites and compensatory status for the powerless, it
also reinforces the self-enclosure of imperialism. The desperate need to display the flag, from the
phalanxes of those that now accompany the public appearances of U.S. presidents to the periodic fluttering outside the homes of average citizens,
provides a symbolic ritual for imperial legitimacy. In effect, the more uncritical the kind of patriotism
that rules popular imagination and public discourse, the more alone, insulated, special and different the American ethos makes people
feel. The more it holds up a distorting mirror to itself and the rest of the world, the more
incomprehensible the rest of the world becomes, full of inarticulate, hostile elements. That distorting
mirror is not only part of the imperial narrative that represents the United States as the repository of good in the world, but is also a function of the role
of corporate media's presentation of the world. Throughthe use of framing and filtering devices, U.S. corporate
media, especially television, manage to narrow and exclude critical perspectives, leading to significant
misperceptions . In fact, according to a University of Massachusetts study of television viewers during Operation Desert Storm in 1991: "the
more TV people watched, the less they knew....Despite months of coverage, most people do not know basic facts about the political situation in the
Middle East, or about the recent history of U.S. policy towards Iraq" Added to media distortions, misrepresentations, and complicity, the Bush
Administration's deliberate policy of disinformation in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 further eroded the public's critical understanding of the
situation in the Middle East and Iraq. Erroneously insisting on ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and the presence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, the Bush Administration and complicit corporate media helped to frame the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Such misperceptions
persisted into 2006 when a Harris Poll found that 64 percent still believed that Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda and 50 percent were convinced
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. The
kind of disinformation spread by politicians and
pundits and reinforced by the media follows from our national and imperial myths which, in
turn, bother literally and figuratively separate us from the rest of the world. While not a new phenomenon,
such imperial self-enclosure does seem even more striking in the globalized and interconnected world we now inhabit. "As the American media has
acquired a global reach," argue cultural critics Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, "it has simultaneously, and paradoxically, become even more
parochial and banal." According to Sardar and Davies, the
media reinforce what they call "knowledgeable ignorance" by
acting as "the gatekeeper of what is relevant and necessary to know about Third World
civilizations." Often, most evident in those mediage images are ones of random violence or poverty and disease unrelated to U.S. policies.
However, it is not just those countries caught up in conflict, whether initiated by the United States or endemic to a particular region, that suffer from
media frames that diminish or denigrate the reality of others' lives. " As
a function of American narcissism," notes another critic,
"American media tend to problematize all countries except the United States....The absence of self-reflexivity or a
sense of humor and irony in viewing America's place in the world seems to be part of the collective habitus." Even when U.S. citizens are
aware of some vague relationship between their government and conditions elsewhere, there
remains a kind of phenomenological disconnection, inherent in life in an imperial culture, which
impedes understanding of the causal connections. Commenting on the violations perpetrated against peasants in central
America by U.S. sponsored militaries and para-militaries and the resultant gross violations of human rights, Christian Smith observes: "Most
Americans probably were, in fact, concerned about these problems. But for most U.S.citizens, these injustices and atrocities
remained essentially abstract and remote, detached from the immediate affairs that shaped their
lives. It is not that most Americans were necessarily callous. They simply lacked the cultural and social positioning
that would have infused these violations with a sense of personal immediacy and urgency. The lack
of a cultural and social positioning is evident in the way some U.S. citizens continue to see the world through the same
blinkered filters that inform the dynamics of knowledgeable ignorance. A good example of the misperception of
the U.S. role in the world is how the vast majority of U.S. citizens continue to overestimate the largesse of their government's foreign aid. Although
most citizens believe the U.S. gives close to 10 percent of its GDP for foreign aid, the U.S. actually gives closer to 0.1 percent. Moreover, much of that aid
is military material sent to Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. A fictional example, albeit representative, of such knowledgeable ignorance or imperial
arrogance while abroad is the evangelical Baptist father in Barbara Kingsolver's 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible. Nathan Price stubbornly insists that
every last bit of U.S. culture and horticulture can be easily transplanted in the Congo in the midst of the Cold War. With such imperial blinders and
blinkered intelligence he manages to endanger his whole family, resulting in the death of one child and his own demise.
 AT: PREDICTIONS GOOD
Neoliberal risk frameworks are self-collapsing, make global catastrophe inevitable
and result in the erasure of all human value. The attempt to rationally map out
insecurity merely exacerbates it.
Featherstone 17. Mark, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University. “Planet Utopia: Utopia,
Dystopia, and Globalisation.” Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought. February 17, 2017.
This is exactly what Baudrillard (2012) means when he writes of ecstatic communication, which communicates nothing but the fact of
communication itself, and Serres (1983) reflects upon when he explains that all technical
systems point towards entropy,
noise, and the black depths of the universe. What this means is that the absolute security of the market, the
realisation of Platonic form in the financial utopia that led Ben Bernanke and others to speak of the great
moderation, is also Badiou’s (2006) void, the black screen, the moment the numbers no longer seem to add up or
make sense. For mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (2004) the connection between these two moments, the point of total securitisation
and the black screen of nonsense, runs through the accumulation of an endless number of small events that come together to create a systemic
tipping point. In his view these small deviations occur because the logic of financial securitisation is
fundamentally flawed. In his work on the unpredictability of markets he asks, for example, what happens when the trade
in derivatives and options starts to feed back into the valuation of stocks and shares to such an extent
that price becomes absolutely distorted? What happens when it becomes clear that probability is
incapable of predicting the future because it is based on calculations premised on the fantasy that
what has happened in the past will continue to happen in the future? Thus Mandelbrot’s (2004) point is that
probability theory is ineffective in a highly complex system because there are too many variables and
too many interactions to be able to base prediction about the future in an assessment of the past. In this
way his fractal theory, which he names in reference to the Greek fractus that means ‘to break’, presents a picture of systemic
uncertainty, unpredictability, and potential collapse that contradicts the standard picture of cybernetic
economy where calculation and the ability to hedge against fluctuation enables the maintenance of
stability and order. By contrast to this utopian image of the stable economy that makes money and never breaks down, Mandelbrot
(2004) argues that the global financial system is like any other complex system—it is organised around roughness that it
is not possible to smooth out in the long run simply because it is rough in itself. What this means is that in contrast to the utopian
capitalists, from Smith (1982, 1999) through Hayek (2012) to Friedman (2002), who take instability in microscopic cases
because they believe this turbulence will eventually smooth out in the expansion of economic activity across space and
time, Mandelbrot (2004) suggests that this never happens because roughness is a systemic property that
stretches from the micro through to the macroscopic and cosmological view. In other words, the economy is,
like every other complex system, rough and turbulent, and the idea of stability in the long run is a
fantasy premised on a belief in the future that will eventually see instability even out towards some
kind of equilibrium. In order to illustrate his thesis, Mandelbrot (2004) explains the condition of the global economy through the
metaphor of the three states of matter—solids, liquids, and gases—and says that the complexity of the contemporary economy means that its
properties are comparable to those of gases, where molecular organisation is highly unpredictable. Beyond Bauman’s (2000) vision of liquid
modernity, then, Mandelbrot’s (2004) global economy is gaseous in the sense that its movements are
uncertain and resistant to management over the long term. This is why, for Mandelbrot, the foundations of
financial theory are fantastical. For example, he explains that Fama’s EMH cannot rely on the idea of the
absolute transparency and universality of information to structure price, because it is impossible for
information to possess the clarity the efficient market theory requires when there are so many
variables on the table and these expand through endless global interactions across space and over the
course of time . Given the speed of global processes, which is, of course, driven by cybernetic innovation and the expansion of
computational power, it is clear that it is more or less impossible to imagine transparent and universal
information and that the very technologies that made the late capitalist utopia possible have now begun
to undermine its integrity . At this point we enter the space of what the late Ulrich Beck (1992) writes about in
terms of global risk , Paul Virilio (2007) explores through the idea of the integral accident, and Ian Goldin and Mike
Mariathasan (2014) examine in their work on the butterfly defect, which plays on Edward Lorenz’ chaos
theory and the madness
of hyper-connected, complex, nonlinear systems. What Beck (1992) and Virilio (2007) show in their
respective works is that the management of the inherent instability of the complex global machine has
led to a kind of arms race organised around the need to defend the integrity of the system in the face
of the endless threats that it seems to produce. Given this situation, where the inevitability of the
accident, risk, and instability lead to an obsession with security, insurance, and immunity, the war on
threats to systemic integrity becomes generic and applies to economic instability, terror attacks,
global pandemics, the computer virus, and a range of other risks that interact in order to represent
interdependent global bads . Since the system is global, and stretches out across space and through
time, these threats are, as both Baudrillard (1993) and Derrida (2014) point out, problems of auto-immunity, and
therefore cannot be destroyed without threatening the integrity of the system itself . The reason for this is
that where the cybernetic machine relies on communication and control, the problem of the intra-systemic other introduces the threat of
progressive uncontrollability through viral contagion. There is no easy way to oppose the translation of communication into contagion, but the
systemic fix recommends the acceleration of information transmission in order to resolve the problem
of complex unpredictability, which, of course, leads to further mechanisation in the form of black box,
algorithmic exchange in economics and the rise of the drone in the execution of war that never ends .
But where is the human, and the body in the world , in this situation, which only seems to generate ever
more risk in the form of automatic fire sales and more suicidal terror ? The answer is that the human, bound
to the body that cannot escape its reliance on the world, is nowhere in particular, because humans are
simply part of the global, cybernetic machine that makes money and wages war for no particular reason .
Perhaps the post-human horror of this situation, which collapses economics into war into social life in a
post-political world where culture becomes little more than a blizzard of zeros and ones, has been
coming since Smith (1982, 1999) wrote about the invisible hand that could somehow bring men together who
were already in the process of making themselves machines impervious to the pain and misery of the other. Although the Stoics made a case
for reserve in the face of misery, we must recognise that in the instance of Seneca (Romm, 2014), this was the result of his situation in the court
of the tyrannical Nero. In
much the same way that he thought we must bravely endure pain because we have
no choice, he also imagined that escape from the horrors of life could be found in the open vein of
suicide. Given this history, it is possible to shine a very different light on Smith’s support for individualism, which clearly
came from the necessity of the acceptance of misery and starvation , and imagine the monstrosity of the invisible
hand that, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman (2015) note, may have inspired Horace Walpole’s original gothic horror, complete with a giant
armoured hand that comes to earth in the name of the imposition of order upon chaos. But if Walpole’s (2008) hand may be seen to represent
the gothic other side of Smith’s (1982, 1999) vision of the capitalist utopia, the
truth of the contemporary system would be
the cybernetic arm from the future that enables the invention of the supercomputer that eventually
destroys humanity from the classic sci-fi film Terminator II (Cameron, 2001). The wrinkle in this story is, of course, that the
arm—which the scientist who eventually invents the AI that terminates humanity keeps in a glass case—comes from the original terminator
sent back to the past in order to assassinate the leader of the human resistance that defeats the machine to end the cybernetic war sometime
in the future. What this means is that the supercomputer somehow gives birth to itself, that it is truly godlike because it has no other, and no
real sense of purpose other than to work and expand its reach—we learn early in the film that when the machine becomes self-aware it decides
that it has no need of the humans who imagine they are its masters and decides to wipe them out. What we never discover, of
course, is precisely how the machine would choose to spend its time in the wake of human extinction.
We encounter this same issue in the Marvel Avengers film The Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015), where Ultron turns on humanity. But how
would Ultron live without humanity? There is no answer to this question, beyond the meaningless
conclusion that he would simply continue to work, which captures the dystopic truth of the
contemporary cybernetic order—that is, that it has no significance beyond its post-human functionality
and utility, because it is difficult to sustain the view that the global machine that prohibits trans-
individual sympathy in the name of economic stability is effective from the perspective of humanity . In
light of this, we must ask Lenin’s question: What is to be done?
 AT: REPS FOCUS BAD
Representations directly shape the political psyche – that means if we win a link,
the permutation is incoherent because it remains fidelitous to a neocolonial world-
view
Khalid 16 (Maryam, Maryam Khalid is the director of the Bachelor of International Studies
program and Senior Lecturer, “Gender, Race, and the Insecurity of ‘Security’” in The Routledge
Handbook of Gender and Security p. 43-45)NFleming
Dominant discourses of security focused on states in the Middle East through the 1990s and particularly after the 11 September 2001
Al-Qaeda attacks on the US. In this context, mainstream discourses of security, and the activities carried out
within this discursive framework, were closely linked to discourses of development which
themselves have led to activities (such as economic restructuring) in many parts of the world. In particular,
they have operated in the Middle East to render the region as being in need of economic
and military intervention in the name of global ‘security’ and ‘order’. As Meghana Nayak points out,
this is reflected in US security prescriptions that have focused on ‘appropriate’ economic and political
development policies that encourage the ‘Eastern Other’ to subscribe to ‘Western’ political and
economic models in order to make “the world safe for capitalism”; this is inextricably linked to the assertion
of ‘Western’ identity in the racialized and gendered hierarchy of global politics (Nayak 2006: 56). Of
particular importance here is ‘democratization’ as a ‘security concern’ as it intersects with development, both in terms of dominant
global politics and in US policy toward the Downloaded By: 10.3.98.93 At: 17:59 29 Jun 2019; For: 9781315525099, chapter3,
10.4324/9781315525099-3 Maryam Khalid 44 Middle East specifically. The ways in which ‘security threats’ are identified
and acted upon is mediated by traditional understandings of gender and expectations of the
behaviours of particular ethnic groups, which shape discourses that posit the Middle East as a
‘threat’ to those outside the region (and, at times, to those constructed as vulnerable within the region). Of interest here
is the ways in which acceptable performances of masculinity and femininity are deployed in relation to both ‘them’ and ‘us’. An
example that highlights this well is the operation of US neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions, which
have purported that democratization and broader economic ‘development’ are necessary to
avoid leaving the US “‘weak’, ‘helpless’, and ‘dependent’” on its European allies in the face of security threats emerging
from the Middle East (Takacs 2005: 298). For example, in dominant discourses of threat after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and
representations of identity within these discourses) ‘security’ (as practice and field of research) was configured by racialized and
gendered logics in the form of the trope of ‘oriental despotism’ in relation to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. The trope, as
deployed in dominant narratives of ‘security’ in relation to the Middle East in service of the 2003 US-led war in Iraq,
simultaneously posited the Ba’ath regime as embodying a barbarism specific to the Middle East
(expressed through violence inflicted upon the Iraqi population as well as through deviant sexual behaviour), and cast
‘ordinary’ Iraqis wholly as victims unable to secure their own liberation from despotism (Khalid 2014).
‘Security’ in this narrative reflected a common concern in dominant discourses of global politics, of (re)affirming ‘our’ masculine
self-image in the face of the uncontrolled masculinity of the ‘Other’. In the contemporary context, in relation to the Middle East
specifically, orientalism operates as a particular type of racialization that intersects with gender in relation to ‘security’. Much like
gendered logics, orientalist logics deploy binaries in order to make sense of the world and, in doing
so, create dichotomies between a ‘civilized West’ and a ‘backward East’. Organized into a series of
hierarchical categories, these logics function to delineate ‘Arab/ Muslim’ ‘Other’ and ‘Western’ ‘Self’
through racialized and gendered characteristics. In contemporary discourses of ‘development’ and
‘security’, ‘civilization’ and ‘backwardness’ are often identified through particular
understandings of ‘appropriate’ economic strategy and ‘development’. Contemporary gendered
orientalist representations of the Middle East, both inside and outside academia, draw an explicit link between
economic and political development and (in) security in doing this (Tuastad 2003). In relation to this, in both the
practice and study of ‘security’ (and global politics more broadly), a particular definition of ‘progress’ is privileged
(Saurin 2006: 27). This is captured in the assertion that “‘the rest of the world’ has benefited and continues to benefit from the
spread of the West’s civilizing values and institutions” (Jones 2006: 55). These ideas have a long history, and can be identified in
various permutations in specific historical and geographical contexts. However, they are
made intelligible through
continually recognizable (and naturalized) understandings of gender and race. Retaining the basic binary
logics shaping ‘East’–‘West’ interactions during the colonial era and earlier, contemporary expressions are seen in the hierarchical
categories of ‘us’/‘them’, ‘civilized’/‘barbaric’ that are understood and constructed by reference to lack of ‘appropriate’ political and
economic structures in terms of contemporary ‘security’ discourse relating to the Middle East and ‘the West’. In predicating ‘Arab
culture’ and/or ‘Islam’ (or the Islamic world) as backward, orientalist discourses simultaneously construct the
‘West’ as rational and progressive by contrast (Sardar 1999: 55). For example, the limited flourishing of state
capitalism in the Middle East after decolonization has been explained as the outcome of cultural peculiarities emerging from the
influence of Islam in the region (Sadowski 1993: 15–19). Indeed, the discourse of ‘Islam’ Downloaded By: 10.3.98.93 At: 17:59 29
Jun 2019; For: 9781315525099, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315525099-3 Gender, race, and the insecurity of ‘security’ 45 (in
mainstream media, academic, and political representations) has found a ‘security’ problem in the (male) Middle Eastern ‘Other’.
This ‘Other’ is identifiable through ‘his’ lack of economic and political ‘progress’, reflected in the rejection of (Western-but-
universalized) values that are purported to ensure ‘progress’ (Said 1997; Sardar 1999; Samiei 2010). In these ways, gendered and
orientalist discourses construct ‘the East’ as a site of insecurity (for ‘us’ as much as for the feminized ‘ordinary’ Middle Easterners in
these narratives) precisely because of its failure to adopt ‘appropriate’ modes and paths of political and economic development.

Your disembodied, militaristic discourse infects the alternative with a neocolonial

mindset
Vaittinen 18 (Tiina, PhD Candidate, Researcher, Managing Editor of the Nordic Journal of
Migration Research. “Embodied In/Security As Care Needs” in Routledge Handbook in Gender
and Security p. 5-8)NFleming
In her contribution to a Symposium honouring Sara Ruddick’s life work (see Robinson and Confortini 2014), Cohn (2014) reads
Ruddick’s Maternal thinking as “a heuristic device” through which to rethink vulnerability in international security discourses. She
points out that vulnerability is “one of the core concepts” in both politics of care as well as security,
yet a “foundational contrast” is found 6 in conceptions of “who or what is seen as vulnerable and
in need of preservation” (Cohn 2014, 51, original emphasis). This question, she maintains, is of fundamental importance,
since perceptions of vulnerability are highly consequential for the policies and
practices of security . For Cohn (2014, 53) “the most important piece of the puzzle” is “the ways in which vulnerability is
intensely gendered at the symbolic level”. This is particularly so in the predominant international security
theory and practice, where human vulnerability is perceived as a matter of “vulnerable groups”
only and thus “displaced onto a subset of humans”. Drawing on her empirical work at the UN Security Council
(SC) as an observer of discussions on the SC Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security, Cohn demonstrates that
vulnerability is frequently discussed at the SC, yet always with a reference to some Others. In these
discussions, vulnerability is never attached to those responsible for gendered security practices. The same, of course, applies
to much of liberal politics today, where decision makers and state officials are presumed to be
invulnerable, rational minds. In security practices, however, the implications of such othering are far-
reaching, since they fundamentally shape our gendered understandings of whose in/security
is recognised and recognisable . First, not only is the concept of ‘vulnerable groups’ deeply gendered in practices of
security, but it is also heteronormatively gendered to apply to (cis)women, who are inherently connected to the infantilised mass of
womenandchildren-and-thedisabledrest. This shows in the framework of UNSCR 1325 (Cohn 2014, 61), but also in the
racialised development agendas in the Global South, where campaigns to invest in a girl for
women’s financial empowerment are promoted as projects of global justice, even if they may in
fact commodify women’s (re)productive bodies for the expansion of neoliberal capitalism
(Wilson 2011; Roberts 2015). Such limited conceptions of gendered vulnerability also direct research and
activism, as politically motivated funding instruments often 7 require that researchers and NGOs
focus their activities on ‘vulnerable groups’ that are explicitly defined as womenandchildren (and the disabled rest).
Furthermore, when vulnerability is allowed for some but not others, only certain kinds of bodies’ vulnerability
makes sense. Consequently, those who cannot because of their sexed and racialised bodies for instance appear
as vulnerable in the predominant security discourses, seem suspicious and emerge as a threat .
The wrong kind of vulnerable bodies appear as incomprehensible, and the ethical responsibility to secure needs of
these “other others” becomes blurred and denied (Ahmed 2010; see also Ahmed 2004). Here, the recent European
political representations of young refugee men make a conspicuous example. Especially in the social media, but often also in the
yellow press, male refugees are recurrently portrayed as terrorists’ and lazy aliens, who forge asylum claims and come after a better
social security instead of staying in the conflict-zones to defend ‘their’ womenandchildren at home. Simultaneously, they are
represented as sexual predators and pathological rapists, and hence a threat to ‘our’ womenandgirls (Rettberg and Gajjala 2015). In
security politics throughout Europe, such portrayals have been indirectly and post-factually used as justifications
to curb migration and increase security measures at the borders and in public spaces which
further adds to the embodied insecurity of those identified as racial Others. Another example of such
racialised embodied in/security is the recurrent police violence against black men and women in the US (see:
http://blacklivesmatter.com/). Here, too the racially differentiated and gendered body itself
becomes a site
of insecurity: potentially killable (rather than vulnerable) because marked by a difference associated
with a threat to the public security (cf. Weheliye 2014). These examples show not only how “constructions of
vulnerability have security effects” (Cohn 2014, 62), but also how security effects are constructed in relation to
differentially sexuali(sed), gendered, and racialised bodies of the Other. Some bodies, such as
womenandchildren-and-thedisabledrest, 8 become othered in the liberal discourse through their hyper-
vulnerability, whereas the vulnerabilities of other others are obscured by their threatening
embodied appearance. Yet, as feminists have emphasised, all bodies are existentially vulnerable to life itself, and thus in
need of care. I will return to this argument below, after a brief review of feminist security studies discussions of the body.
 AT: SCENARIO PLANNING GOOD
Scenario planning is a biopolitical technology of management which functions to
homogenize existence into a universal technical frame
Coleman & Rosenow 16 (Lara Montesinos, read Philosophy and Theology at the University
of Oxford (BA Hons, 2000). She holds master’s degrees in International Relations (2003) and
Research Methods (2005), from the University of Bristol, where she also completed her PhD
(2011) and taught in the Politics Department. She left a position at Durham University to join
the Department of International Relations at Sussex in 2012. and Doertha, Senior Lecturer in
International Relations. She received her PhD and MA from the Department of War
Studies/King's College London, and her first degree (Mag.Art.) from the University of
Muenster/Germany. “Struggles Over Nature: Beyond Biopolitics” in The Ashgate Companion to
Biopolitics, p. 4-6)NFleming
Much of the ‘politics of catastrophe’ literature is linked to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. Inspired by
Foucault’s exposition of a biopolitical governance of populations, reliant upon knowledge taken from the human sciences, several
scholars have argued that the invocation of looming environmental catastrophe buys into the objectives of
(neo)liberal biopolitical regimes, which foster and contain the life of populations at the expense
of more radical politics. In this spirit, Julian Reid (2012, 69), for example, argues that a majority of environmentalists fail to
recognise that contemporary biopolitical rationalities are based on ‘ecological reasoning’, which accordingly can no longer be
considered a straightforward means of contestation. Indeed, he points out that environmental activists are profoundly mistaken
when thinking that our contemporary governmental regimes do not show sufficient concern for the natural world, and that they
ignore human vulnerability. On the contrary, Reid (2012, 69) suggests that governance today is all about our vulnerability to nature
and other external forces (such as terrorism), which, we are told, can neither be predicted nor controlled, and to which adaptation
and becoming resilient is conceived as the only viable response (cf. Chandler 2012; Evans and Reid 2013, 2014). Instead of not
recognising how ecological systems work, Reid (2012, 68-9, 77) maintains that contemporary governmental systems have
understood this far too well: they have made it part and parcel of the neoliberal logic of self-reliance and responsibility. Among other
things, Reid (2013) pertinently elucidates the consequences of such an understanding for the global poor in relation to development
politics: sustainable development has given up the objective of ‘securing’ populations by
preventing disasters and closing the gaps between North and South. Instead, development
discourse promotes a notion of self-reliance that abandons the poor to ‘natural’ forces in the
name of resilience. Many biopolitics scholars trace this neoliberal logic back to new
developments in science, particularly complexity and network science (Dillon and Reid 2009; Dillon and Lobo-
Guerrero 2009; Duffield 2011a, 2011b). Those scholars who locate their work within ‘security studies’ argue, for example, that these
scientific developments have fundamentally transformed governmental understandings of what ‘national security’ is about and how
it should be achieved. While previously security was all about the predictability and consequent
prevention of threats, complexity science has, it is maintained, introduced security regimes to a
notion of life characterised by uncertainty and unpredictability. This means that the (biopolitical) aim
of these regimes is nowadays to enhance the capacity of a population to ‘bounce back’ from
catastrophic events (e.g. a terrorist attack, a hurricane, or a famine), accepting the fact that some, or even many, will be left to
die. The implied focus on the survival of the population instead of the individual seems to represent biopolitical governance par
excellence. Moreover, as Melinda Cooper (2010, 184) points out, it also serves and consolidates imperialist
strategies: ‘what matters [now] is whether the accidental event of turbulence can be harnessed
to the strategic ends of sustaining the US-dollar denominated world’. This is an important argument, and
Cooper’s (2010) meticulous report of how the reality of climate change ‘turbulences’ have been slowly becoming accepted knowledge
in US ‘grand strategy’ scenario planning is as devastating as it is convincing. The problem, however,
emerges in relation to Cooper’s overall conclusion when she maintains that this new way of strategising now represents US
global neoliberal
neoliberal imperialism per se. A similar tendency underlies Mark Duffield’s (2011b) suggestion that
domination as such now rests on the (complexity, science-based) imaginary that the world is ‘a
purposefully interconnected system’ . This kind of thinking, which is again to be found in much of
environmental activism, should be, according to Duffield, the principal enemy for critical theory. Like Cooper,
Duffield frames one particular imaginary as representative of world hegemony as such. Resistance thus has to take the
form of binary opposition to this imaginary. But what kind of political struggles are rendered invisible if Duffield
(2011b) maintains that the greatest problem that the globe faces today is the ‘imaginary’ of a complex world threatened by
‘dangerous climate change’? His argument testifies to the great amount of certainty that we can find in some of the biopolitics
literature when it comes to identifying the (absolute, singular) problem that needs to be challenged by critical theorists. This
certainty and conviction occludes how theorists themselves contribute to setting up particular problematics, a move that renders
certain elements visible while it (necessarily) elides others. Lara Montesinos Coleman and Hannah Hughes (2015) have explored the
implications of how the framing of problems is influenced by the taken for granted objects of study
offered up to us by academic fields of study (Coleman and Hughes 2015, 143; Coleman 2015b). The ‘field’ of
security studies, for example, exercises a ‘force on our thinking’ (Coleman and Hughes 2015, 143), resulting in
a privileging of the concept of ‘security’ against which all governmental and resisting practices
are read. Moreover, in the ‘biopolitics of security’ approaches, ‘biopolitics’ has been transformed into a sort of
sociology or theory of society that is used to characterise contemporary global (neo)liberal order and
domination as such (Coleman and Hughes 2015, 147; Coleman and Rosenow 2016). The tendency to ‘sociologise’ Foucault runs
very much counter to Foucault’s own philosophical project and the way in which Foucault developed his concepts in the context of
very specific problems (Coleman and Hughes 2015, 147-9; Debrix 2010; Veyne 1997). ‘Biopolitics’, for Foucault (e.g. 2003, 239;
2007, 30-32; 2008, 65), is not the cornerstone of a theory of liberal rule but developed, in slightly different directions at different
moments, to make sense of certain family resemblances between nonetheless heterogeneous approaches to the population as an
aggregate entity in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards – in the context of diverse problems such as war, food scarcity,
public health concerns, or the need for a politically docile labour supply. Foucault’s work has increasingly been used to theorise
‘global’ power in such an exhaustive manner that the complex and diverse interplay between strategies of world-ordering and
expressions of political struggle has been made less visible (cf. Coleman and Hughes 2015, 144). Instead, resistance to biopolitics
becomes visible at an equally all-encompassing level – it is supposedly found in the ‘excess of being’ that cannot
be scientifically comprehended and classified (Dillon and LoboGuerrero 2009, 5), in a notion of ‘the
human’ that understands it as ‘singular’ rather than as part of a ‘species’, or in the incorporeal
political subject (Reid 2012, 78; cf. Evans and Reid 2014). For the biopolitics of resilience literature, any political struggle that
make use of a ‘corporeal’, science-based discourse – as much of environmental activism does – is dismissed wholesale, while other
practices of resistance, which do not fit within this binary logic, are simply invisible. Many of the aforementioned scholars of
biopolitics claim to be doing ‘genealogical’ analyses of political practices. Yet, for Foucault (1977, 139), the objective of
genealogy is precisely to contest monolithic readings of history. It aims to cut history into
‘events’ that pay tribute to their ‘singularity…outside of any monotonous finality’. In other words, it is
important to recognise that the development of history can never be grasped with all-
encompassing, homogeneous, finite theorems.2 Moreover, in Society Must Be Defended Foucault (2003, 7) is keen
to emphasise that the development of historical truth regimes is subject to constant struggles;
characterised by the ‘insurrection’ and elimination of other types of knowledge , which
should become the object of genealogical rediscovery. As William Walters (2012, 132, 134) notes, this understanding of ‘genealogy as
struggle’ is still ‘somewhat rare’.3 Instead of focusing on actually-existing struggles of knowledge, the literature referred to
above has rendered (global) power and politics theoretically saturated and monolithic, and has thereby
contributed to rendering invisible the battles for ‘truth’ that do not fit into the pre-fixed
theoretical schemas mapped out (Coleman and Rosenow forthcoming).
Empathy fails --- easily coopted by the right wing – your author
Recuber 15 [Timothy, Princeton Writing Program, Princeton University, “Occupy empathy?
Online politics and micro-narratives of suffering,” New Media & Society January 2015 vol. 17 no.
1 62-77]

Instead, amuch more likely scenario is that the normative demand to empathize with others may
be circumvented by the mere performance of this sort of empathy. The term superficial empathy
employed here has been used in previous scholarship to describe a style in which nursing home
caregivers are encouraged to respond to patients (JOMO, 2013), or as a way that psychotherapists who have not
interrogated their own class biases might relate to clients (Guilfoyle, 2009), or as a factor contributing to ethnocentrism (Berkowitz,
1997). And studies have shown that empathy generally only motivates one to offer the most superficial
forms of assistance available to those in need (see for instance Neuberg et al., 1997). Thus it makes sense that,
as the present work has found, contemporary norms concerning empathy are actually quite
compatible with conservative political agendas that are hostile to policies aimed at
alleviating suffering and inequality.
This speaks ultimately to the flaw of any progressive or radical politics of empathy —
though it may be good for many things, empathy does not provide us with a concrete way of
prioritizing pain or hierarchizing hardships . Moreover, it allows us to convince ourselves
that we understand what someone else has gone through simply by virtue of the fact that we felt
something, though the accuracy of such feeling is fairly impossible to determine. Paul Bloom (2013) has argued similar points in
a recent New Yorker essay. He claims that although ‘empathy is what makes us human,’ it ‘betrays us… when we take it as a moral
guide’ (2013: 27), and suggests that ‘empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future’ (2013: 29). But perhaps a
return to older moral standards associated with sympathy offers a better alternative, since reason alone, as its modern and
postmodern critics have long established, is capable of exacerbating misery and inequality as well.
If the micro-narratives of suffering shared by users of both We Are The 99 Percent and We Are The 53% can be recast as potential
objects of sympathy, rather than empathy, then the questions one asks oneself upon viewing them are not about what one would do
in similar circumstances, and whether that suffering is surmountable or self-inflicted, but simply how such suffering might be
alleviated. And if that is the question, then individualistic answers about hard work and perseverance will quickly reveal their
inadequacy, as the sheer number of suffering contributors at both sites speaks clearly to the presence
of larger social, political, and economic forces at play, and the need for broader efforts at
confronting those . What those efforts consist of is still likely to be the subject of much
political debate, but the rhetoric of sympathy allows that debate to get closer to some notion of
justice, or the greater good, that depends only on knowing that others are suffering , rather
than knowing how they suffer . In this somewhat counter-intuitive sense, recognizing that we don’t
know what someone else has gone through may be the first step towards actually helping. At the
very least, if empathy can so easily serve as an ideological cover for the maintenance of the status
quo, then progressives and radicals would do well to encourage alternative ways of relating
to the lives and misfortunes of others .
Disaster consumerism means there is zero spillover from their politics and explicit
ignorance of solutions --- causes political anesthesia --- their author
Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the
City. University of New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING
CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER"
gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pdf

The emotional component of disaster consumption is therefore an important part of these

processes. Sociologists who study disaster have long disputed the conventional wisdom that
mass panic is the defacto public response to disasters, especially on the ground in affected
communities (Quarantelli, 2001; Tierny, 2007). But while it is true that disaster-struck
communities tend to exhibit a whole host of positive, pro-social responses, it does not mean that
mass media accounts of disaster may not inspire panic in distant spectators who are less
directly affected. Divorced from the kinds of sustaining, ad-hoc, local communities that
maintain order and provide support during and in the immediate aftermath of disasters (see
Solnit, 2009), those who merely consume distressing stories and images at a distance may
be more likely to take drastic measures or respond with maudlin or hysterical emotional
displays. Of course, mass media today tend to operate in crisis mode at all times, even
over seemingly trivial matters (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995), making the shock and
immediacy of disaster-related stories an overly familiar style of communication and thus, at
times, contributing to the onset of what has come to be known as “compassion fatigue”
(Moeller, 1999). On the other hand, and at the very least, American audiences of disasters have
demonstrated over the past decade that distant or unaffected spectators are likely to feel that
they too have been vicariously traumatized, and thus enfranchised to participate in mass-
mediated rituals of commemoration, or to claim the social and political status of victim (see
Savage, 2006; Kaplan, 2005). 12
Such vicarious trauma is often the result of very genuine emotional responses by these distant
spectators. In fact, as discussed in Chapter Three, one of the most powerful norms that has
emerged regarding the role of the spectator of disaster is the obligation to show empathy
towards those directly affected. Media texts have particular ways of presenting the suffering
others designed to draw out these reactions, as I show through an analysis of two news
programs, one reality television show, and one documentary film devoted to Hurricane Katrina
and the Virginia Tech shootings. This empathy for the suffering of distant others is rehearsed
today even in non-disaster related media programming, but it is particularly prevalent when
large-scale tragedies result in not only live television news broadcasts, but also the many
commemorative events and products whose proceeds are supposed to benefit those distant
others. Consuming such experiences and products marks one as an ethical, moral person with
the capacity to understand the pain of others. Unlike classical forms of Enlightenment
sympathy, however, in which detached spectators sought to actually alleviate the suffering of
unfortunate others whose causes they found worthy, the empathy on display when one buys a
Virginia Tech t-shirt or a record benefitting New Orleans musicians, or when one watches
television programs devoted to these disasters, seems to be as much about self-improvement as
the improvement of the conditions of those less fortunate. This is not to say that such
consumption is not driven by sincere concern for disaster victims, but simply that mass culture
tends to direct such concern towards viewing habits and consumption practices that help the
self-image of the viewer or purchaser at least as much as they help any disaster-stricken
communities.
The consumption of disaster thus encourages a kind of “political anesthesia” that reduces
one’s ability to recognize the collective solutions to problems, as well as one’s
willingness to work towards them (Szasz, 2007). Instead, the authentically threatening
quality of disasters often nurtures a paradoxically fantastic desire to secure the safety of oneself
and one’s family through private acts of consumerism. But these fantasies are often
backwards looking; they envision the next disaster as a similar chain of
catastrophic events that, having recently happened, is actually unlikely to happen
again due either to officialdom’s new awareness of this problem or simply to the remote odds of
two similar disasters happening in such close succession. Of course, in the current American
political moment of ascendant neo-liberal governance, such individualistic strategies of
preventative consumption may constitute the only preventative measures being taken on
one’s behalf.
 AT: TACTICS
Debate on tactics is essential to mobilizing students
Williams 13 (Chris, longtime environmental activist and author of Ecology and Socialism:
Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). He is professor of physics
and chemistry at Pace University and chair of the science department at Packer Collegiate
Institute and is a regular contributor to the International Socialist Review. “The Inconvenient
Truth About Greenwashing” in Socialist Worker https://socialistworker.org/2013/09/24/the-
truth-about-greenwashing?quicktabs_sw-recent-articles=6-27)NFleming
TO RAISE these difficulties and different political outlooks within the environmental movement is not to
be "divisive" or to "weaken" the movement, as is so often the charge from those trying to close down political
discussion. Rather , it is absolutely essential if we are to move forward in these desperate times. As
such, there is a level of importance to the debate that should encourage everyone concerned with the future of our
planet to consider, analyze and discuss, because it relates directly to the future of the movement. And
as building a successful, mass, independent movement and democratic, militant organization for
social and ecological justice is the only thing that will prevent runaway climate change and mass
extinctions that call into question the future of human civilization, it is critical that activists
engage with the blossoming, much needed and very healthy debate on strategy and tactics. The
debate has erupted across environmental blogs and websites once more because, just as the environmental justice movement
originally emerged from activists and communities of color 30 years ago, a more radical wing of the movement is growing, becoming
more assertive, asking new questions and seeking to overcome previous political weaknesses and omissions. The new
questions are not just about how to marshal our forces to win individual battles, but how to
string those victories together into a campaign that has an identifiable objective and grand
vision. Strategically speaking, over the large scale and longer term, what kind of society are we fighting for? Are we seeking
merely to sand off some of the ever-expanding, rougher edges of capitalism, while keeping the
system somewhat contained and at least a few small areas sacrosanct from the profit motive? Or
are we fighting for a completely different kind of world? One free of commodities, fast food, agribusiness,
carbon markets, warfare over key resources, poverty, racism and sexism--and for a truly
objective science and technology that is no longer twisted and disfigured by the priorities of
financial accumulation. How can we both fight for meaningful change right now (tactics) that simultaneously
helps build the movement and brings us closer to our larger, more long-term goals (strategy)? How
do we differentiate between effective tactics that supplement our overall strategy, versus those that lead us up blind alleys? How one
answers these political questions determines how and with whom one organizes. In reality, this is a very old debate and surfaces
whenever a social movement reaches an impasse. The question of strategy and tactics grows out of the
concrete situation which confronts new activists drawn into the struggle. Very often, it results in the
emergence of new organizations which are more responsive to the increased demands and
broader world views of those newly radicalized participants, such as we are beginning to see with the
formation of national groups such as 350.org, Rising Tide, the left-wing coalition System Change not Climate Change and,
most importantly, the newly emerging indigenous organization Idle No More. Such was the case in the civil rights movement,
as newer, young activists, desirous of swifter and more thoroughgoing change, became disillusioned with the go-slow and legalistic
route pursued by venerable civil rights organizations such as the NAACP (despite its radical roots). They agitated and formed
organizations that were independent and open to new tactics with larger goals. Instead of an emphasis on experts, lobbying, moral
suasion and lawsuits in the courts, tactics were redirected toward mobilizing the Black population as a
whole--through mass, nonviolent, direct action, set within a strategy of escalating activism and
involvement from wider and wider layers of society. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed
in 1957 by Martin Luther King Jr. after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Three years later, as the lunch-counter sit-in
movement was taking off, students formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Having won political rights in 1964 and
1965, the movement radicalized further, and King switched his focus toward economic rights. In the North, another new
organization formed in 1966: The Black Panther Party.
LINKS
 2NC PERMUTATION / LINK WALL
Perms beg the question of framework, since our only framework argument is that
links to parts of the 1ac outside the plan text can’t be severed when you try and
permute the alternative ---- if we win that any of the rhetoric or value judgments in
the 1ac are examples of securitization and reinforce militaristic thought, reject the
perm as severance and force the aff to defend the geopolitical consequences of
their choices
Attempting to rehabilitate security remains locked within its terms---attempting to
redefine one example of a violent political order actively prevents resisting its very
foundation
Chris Rossdale 16, Teaching Fellow, International Relations, University of Warwick,
“Activism, resistance and security,” Chapter 14 of Ethical Security Studies: A new research
agenda, eds. Nyman and Burke, 2016, no page #
The previous two sections have highlighted a number of ways in which practices of resistance and activism engage the relationship
between ethics and security in different ways. In producing subjugated knowledges, revealing the exclusions and power relations of
established discourses, and engaging in security practices which seek to more directly respond to the
insecurity faced by ordinary people, they invite an ethical response to security and
insecurity. However, it limits our engagement with practices of resistance if we only see them as
exploring ‘better’ or ‘more ethical’ ways of providing security. The more radical challenge to
the politics of security comes when we see activism not simply as refusing particular orders of security,
but as resisting the very conceptual and political foundations of security . This final section
explores such an interpretation, looking at the ways in which the most substantive way to engage the relationships between ethics,
security, resistance and activism comes when we view practices of resistance as (at their best) working to deconstruct security. I
begin by outlining some of the arguments which suggest that the concept of security cannot so easily be
refashioned in a more ethical form and that thinking in terms of resistance might take us further. I then look at
how we might view such a resistance in the context of political activism, looking at some examples from anarchist activist groups.
A number of writers have argued that the concept of security is built around a series of images, codes and logics
which render it deeply problematic and a dangerous candidate for rehabilitation. They have pointed
out the ways in which our contemporary fascination with proliferating images of threat, danger and
response, grounded in desperate but impossible fantasies of control and mastery, tends towards authoritarian political
formations and the de facto legitimacy of dominant power relations (Edkins 2003; Campbell 1998: Shepherd
2008: 72–75). The pursuit of security serves to contain subjects within the existing order , promising
protection in return for some level of compliance or obedience in a manner not dissimilar to a protection racket (Spike Peterson
1992: 50–52). As Mark Neocleous notes, such dynamics serve to neutralise radical political action ,
‘encouraging us to surrender ourselves to the state in a thoroughly conservative fashion’ (2008: 4).
To understand how the pursuit of security intertwines with political authority, it is important to recognise the dependent
relationship between security and insecurity. Institutions and technologies of security can only function in a
context of insecurities, which they may identify and seek to pacify, but which they also need (and for which, of course, they
are often responsible). In Michael Dillon’s terms, ‘it is only because it is contoured by insecurity, and because in its turn it also
insecures, that security can secure’ (1996: 127). The nature and content of security depends on its particular relationship with
insecurity, with its exclusions and violences and particular (political) designations of threat. This regulative binary of
security/insecurity intersects with others that have similar effects, such as order/chaos, inside/outside and sovereignty/anarchy. All
of them regulate politics in a manner which cements the place of political authority. On the latter dichotomy, Richard Ashley’s
comments are pertinent:
On the one hand, the sign of ‘sovereignty’ betokens a rational identity: a homogeneous and continuous presence that is hierarchically
ordered, that has a unique centre of decision presiding over a coherent ‘self’, and that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an
external domain of difference and change that resists assimilation to its identical being. On the other hand, the sign of ‘anarchy’
betokens this residual external domain: an aleatory domain characterised by difference and discontinuity, contingency and
ambiguity, that can be known only for its lack of the coherent truth and meaning expressed by a sovereign presence. ‘Anarchy’
signifies a problematic domain yet to be brought under the controlling influence of a sovereign centre … whether it be an individual
actor, a group, a class, or a political community.
(1988: 230)
As he identifies the conservatising regulation at the heart of the sovereignty/anarchy dichotomy, so would I suggest that a similar
process is at work in the logic of security, privileging that which is rationally bounded, coherent and compliant, and necessitating the
pacification or pathologisation of that which is not.
Political imaginaries rooted in binary concepts limit our ethical landscape in a variety of ways. As
V. Spike Peterson argues:
[a]s long as we remain locked in dichotomies, we cannot accurately understand and are less likely to
transform social relations: not only do oppositional constructions distort the contextual complexity of social reality, they
set limits on the questions we ask and the alternatives we consider. True to their “origin” (Athenian
objectivist metaphysics), the dichotomies most naturalized in Western world views (abstract-concrete, reason-emotion, mind-body,
culture-nature, public-private) are both medium and outcome of objectification practices. Retaining them keeps us locked in to their
objectifying-reifying-lens on our world(s) and who we are.
(1992: 54)
In such a context, rather than seeking to rehabilitate security (and remain within this
security/insecurity dichotomy), it might be more productive to resist, displace or
deconstruct it .
This is not a simple prospect; refusing the social fantasy of security would, in Jenny Edkins’ terms, involve ‘facing,
on a day-to-day basis, questions many of us prefer to forget, if we can’, and ‘would involve a shift away from the notion of sovereign
state and sovereign individual … would entail the development of a new vision of political community, one
that was not based on the coming together of discrete participles to produce closed systems’ (2003: 368–369). While the
violent
politics of security is enacted through social institutions, it is also (as the discussion above shows) embedded in
categories of thought. The binaries of security/insecurity, order/chaos, sovereignty/anarchy and more impose a theoretical
domination which conditions political possibility in particular authoritarian ways. As such, the task of resistance might be to break
down such binaries. This may take place through mocking, subverting or outwardly refusing the closures such binaries
enact (Rossdale forthcoming-a; Rossdale forthcoming-b), or through embracing
the proliferation of definitions of
security as an aporetic space in which ‘to think and create new social, ethical and economic
relationships outside the oppressive structures of political and epistemological order’ (Burke 2007: 30–
31).
What I want to suggest here is that we can interpret many practices of activism and resistance as engaging in precisely this kind of
resistance to security/insecurity; that is, not just as affirming ‘more ethical’ securities (though they may also do this), but as
mounting a challenge to the conceptual and political order of security more generally. In a sense, this is not surprising, so often is
resistance framed as that insecurity, chaos and anarchy which necessitates securing, ordering and sovereign gestures. It is also an
unstable series of interventions, liable to recuperation within a set of security discourses which swiftly reposition challenge as threat.
Nonetheless, these resistances hold open
spaces for an ethical critique not only of particular orders
of security, but more generally of the ways in which security orders .
Only confronting issues of sovereignty allows us to break free of the circular
political practices that entrench militarism – their reformism guarantees
reification of the system
Wadiwel 02 (Dinesh Joesph, completing a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, 2K2,
“Cows and Sovereignty: Biopower and Animal Life” Borderlands E-Journal Vol. 1 # 2
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/wadiwel_cows.html)

Such a political program has far reaching consequences, both for Western sovereignty, and the
way that the business of politics is conducted. The living population of the earth has inherited a
vision of sovereign power, which has spread cancerously into even the most seemingly
inaccessible aspects of everyday life. This vision commands all, claims legitimacy for all, and
determines the conduct of living for all within its domain. Politics ‘as we know it’ is caught
inextricably in the web of sovereign power, in such a way that it seems that modern political
debate cannot help but circulate around the same, routine issues: "What is the appropriate
legislative response?"; "Is it within the State’s powers to intervene in this particular conflict?" ;
"How can we ensure the citizen’s rights are maintained in the face of the state?". To challenge such an encompassing
and peremptory political discourse — where every question implies the sovereign absolutely,
and every decision made refers to life itself — would require the most intensive rethinking of the
way in which territory, governance and economy are imagined. In this sense, whilst Agamben’s analysis of
bare life, and Foucault’s theory of bio-power, provide a means by which to assess the condition of non-human life with respect to
sovereign power, the political project must reach beyond these terms, and embrace an intertwining of
the human and the non-human: an intersection which may be found in the animal life shared by both
entities.
Calling on the state to reduce arms sales is fundamentally incompatible with the
abolitionist approach required to produce alternative institutional arrangements
Graeber 11 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street who coined the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and associate
professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, teaches anthropology at the London School
of Economics, activist whose direct action campaigns before OWS includes protests against the
3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in
New York City, interview with ReadySteadyBook, Sept 16, 2011,
https://libcom.org/library/david-graeber-interview-readysteadybook]

I guess your real question was much simpler: are

we really at a point where we could just make the state
disappear. Would alternative institutions simply arise immediately and spontaneously or
would we have to slowly build them first. There's a lively debate about that as you might imagine. I don't know. But
anarchists are certainly trying to help build alternatives. Our only proviso is that we don't
want to do it through the state, because we think the state is a form of violence and you
can't build freedom at the point of a gun. MT: How can anarchism stop itself from simply being a reformist
movement for just a bit more democracy? Something that sounds radical, but practically simply posits the small against the large
and little more than that? DG: Funny, in the US, we never get that question. We're the ones accusing others of
reformism usually. I think the answer is: we don't engage with institutions that , as I mentioned, we
consider forms of violence . We won't be coopted . We directly challenge institutions
like the IMF and WTO, for example, but we won't sit down with them and negotiate
compromises -- we want them abolished. We don't ask for immigration reform, we ask for the abolition of borders.
We believe in direct action: that is, insofar as possible, we act as if those institutions, those borders, state
authority itself, does not exist. Ultimately that opens on a dual power strategy: wherever and whenever
possible, we try to establish autonomous enclaves that operate outside the state and
capitalism entirely, and we throw all our support to people in other places who are doing the
same thing.
 XT – REFORMISM LINK
The permutation’s reformist impulse rehabilitates American image, fomenting
neoliberal violence and continued military violence across the global periphery ---
they are nothing more than failed Vietnam protests
Spanos 2K [William, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamtom,
America’s Shadow, 2000, p. 184-]

Undertaken in the name of the "promise" of "America," these

reforms were intended to reestablish the
ontological, cultural, and political authority of the enlightened, American "vital center" and its
circumference and thus to recontain the dark force of the insurgent differential constituencies that had emerged
at the margins in the wake of the disclosures of the Vietnam War. At the domestic site, these included the coalescence of capital (the
Republican Party) and the religious and political Right into a powerful dominant neoconservative culture (a new "Holy Alliance," as
it were) committed to an indissolubly linked militantly racist, antifeminist, antigay, and anti-working-class agenda; the dominant
liberal humanist culture's massive indictment of deconstructive and destructive theory as complicitous with fascist totalitarianism;
the nationwide legislative assault on the post-Vietnam public university by way of programs of economic retrenchment affiliated
with the representation of its multicultural initiative as a political correctness of the Left;30 the increasing subsumption of the
various agencies of cultural production and dissemination (most significantly, the electronic information highways) under fewer and
fewer parent, mostly American, corporations; the dismantling of the welfare program; and, symptomatically, the rehabilitation of
the criminal president, Richard Nixon. At the international site, this "reformist" initiative has manifested itself as
the rehabilitation of the American errand in the world, a rehabilitation exemplified by the
United States's virtually uncontested moral/military interventions in Panama, Somalia, Haiti,
Bosnia, the Middle East, and Kosovo; its interference in the political processes of Russia by way of
providing massive economic support for Boris Yeltsin's democratic/capitalist agenda against the communist opposition; its
unilateral assumption of the lead in demanding economic/political reforms in Southeast Asian countries following the collapse of
their economies in 1998; its internationalization of the "free market"; and, not least, its globalization of
the instrumentalist version of the English language. What needs to be foregrounded is that these global
post-Cold War "reformist" initiatives are not discontinuous practices, a matter of
historical accident . Largely enabled by the "forgetting" of Vietnam — and of the repression or
accommodation or self-immolation of the emergent decentered modes of thinking the Vietnam
War precipitated — they are, rather, indissolubly, however unevenly, related. Indeed, they are the multisituated
practical consequences of the planetary triumph (the "end") of the logical economy of the
imperial ontological discourse that has its origins in the founding of the idea of the
Occident and its fulfilled end in the banal instrumental/technological reasoning in the
discourse of "America." In thus totally colonizing thinking, that is, this imperial "Americanism" has come to
determine the comportment toward being of human beings, in all their individual and collective
differences, at large — even of those postcolonials who would resist its imperial order. This state of thinking, which
has come to be called the New World Order (though to render its rise to ascendancy visible requires reconstellating the Vietnam War
into this history), subsumes the representative, but by no means complete, list of post-Cold War practices to
which I have referred above. And
it is synecdochically represented by the massive mediatization of the
amnesiac end-of-history discourse and the affiliated polyvalent rhetoric of the Pax Americana.
Protest and reformism is convenient and comfortable for the state. It will never
resolve violence or conflict, so the only ethical choice is to vote neg.
Antiphon, ‘9 [Antiphon; CLT is a plat-form for crit-ical legal schol-ars and allied thinkers to
pub-lish the-or-et-ic-ally informed com­ment and ana­lysis; “Power, Violence, Law”; April 5,
2009; http://criticallegalthinking.com/2009/04/05/power-violence-law/]

Protests mostly challenge the conserving violence of law, breaking minor public order regulations in order to
highlight greater injustices. As long as protesters ask for this or that reform, this or that concession
however important, the state can accommodate it. What it is afraid of is the “fundamental,
founding violence, that is, violence able to justify … or to transform the relations of law and so to
present itself as having a right to law.” The characteristic insecurity the law feels in the face of its
own foundation makes it portray radical protests and desperate attempts to bring about reform
by unconventional means onto challenges to its founding authority, acts of revolutionary
upheaval. The American civil rights marchers were often painted as communists, the striking
miners were called the “enemy within” and the protesters of Eastern Europe agents of the CIA.
This exaggerated response shows however that an interpretative and meaningful evaluation of violence — a
critique of violence — is possible only if we recognize meaning in a violence that is not an
accident arriving from outside law or a contingency of a sociological nature. And certainly the
violence of insurrection and rebellion is not ‘mindless’. Talking to the rebelling youth of Athens last December,
you sensed a thoughtful, inquiring, philosophical attitude to the ravishes of neo-liberal capitalism and police brutality. These
rebels and ‘hoodies’ were people who in the vicinity of the ancient monuments were doing exactly what Socrates inaugurated
in his symposia. They were challenging the doxa (common sense) of our times steeped into serious thinking
and deep commitment. You could not find any of this in the media commentators and
politicians. Law-preserving force next. “Every juridical contract … is founded on violence” says Jacques
Derrida and the legal academic Robert Cover agrees: “Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and
death.” The intricate relationship of law and force pervades all aspects of legal operations. There
is no law, if it cannot be potentially enforced, if there is no police, army and prisons to punish
and deter possible violations. In this sense, force and enforcement are part of the very essence of
legality. Modern law coming out of the endless feuds of princes and local chiefs claimed a
monopoly of violence in the territory of its jurisdiction and used it to protect the ends and
functions it declares legal, but also to protect the empire of the law itself. This violence that
follows the law routinely and forms the background against which interpretation can work. It
guarantees the permanence and enforceability of law. There are two aspects to the violence that conserves the
law.

Their reform is not “non reformist”

Kaba, founder-Project NIA, 17
(Mariame, I am the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to
starting NIA, I worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused
on grantmaking and program evaluation I have co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago
Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa
Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. I have also served on numerous nonprofit
boards. . https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba 11-9-17)
John Duda: I think that kind of long term clarity about what it is that this work is ultimately about is really important. I
think about the history here: Scholars like Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton have built off of the work of Angela Davis,
tracing out the history of how people who thought they were making the prisons more fair or
making sentencing less biased, really just super-charged the apparatus of mass
incarceration . As more and more people become aware that there is a problem with prisons, are
you worried about a similar kind of effect in the long term? Mariame Kaba: Absolutely. It contributes
to my insomnia. It is my constant preoccupation. Davis helps us to understand that the PIC itself is a
product of various reforms over time , that [even] the prison itself was a reform . I
reinforce to people all the time: We cannot reform police. We cannot reform
prisons. We cannot . Telling people this can foster to a sense of despair ; it can demobilize
people in real ways. It can make people feel like everything is inevitably [going to remain this way]: this is where we’re at, this
is where things are going to be. There’s that angle to this. There’s also the angle that when you say things can’t
be reformed, the question becomes how do you handle people who are in immediate need for
relief, right? How are you going to make life livable for people living in unlivable circumstances? Somehow
what people think is that either you’re interested in reform or you’re an abolitionist —that you have to
choose to be in one camp or the other. I don’t think that way. For some people, reform is the main focus and end goal and for
some people, abolition is the horizon. But I don’t know anybody who is an abolitionist—who I know personally, and
I don’t know every abolitionist, obviously, because there are so many people in the world who practice and think and who use
abolition in various ways— I don’t know a single a one who doesn’t support some reforms. Mainly if those
reforms are, to use the term coined by Andre Gorz & popularized by Ruthie Gilmore here in the U.S., non-reformist-reforms. How do
we think about reforms that don’t make it harder for us to dismantle the systems we are trying to abolish? That don’t make it harder
to create new things? What are the reforms that are “non-reformist” that will help us keep moving towards the horizon of abolition?
Sometimes people who you love dearly want you to fight for their reformist reform—they want you to fight for something they think
will benefit a small tiny sliver of the people [harmed by] this behemoth monster without consideration for how it would then
entrench other things that would make life harder for other types of people. That’s the case when you think about
the
conversation around non-violent, non-sexual-offending prisoners, and that our attention needs
to be focused there. We focus a bunch of attention on getting those people out—but [in doing so]
we make it impossible for people who have used violence—the majority of the state prison
population by the way—to ever get out. What are the reforms that are “non-reformist” that will help us keep moving
towards the horizon of abolition? Or there’s this fight that’s been ongoing over life without parole sentencing; that the way to abolish
the death penalty is to commute everybody to life without parole. And I just can’t get behind that. That’s still physical, social and
civic death, right? “But at least they’re alive…” That to me is an absolute perfect example of a reformist reform, which actually makes
it less likely that we’re going to get people out of jail and prisons. Some reforms end up reproducing the system in
another form. I was listening to a talk that Robin D.G. Kelley gave a couple weeks ago, and he
mentioned that you put out some kind of a reform, and then that reform becomes
institutionalized, but worse than the institutionalization of the reform usually is that it actually
creates a new form of consciousness and a new form of common sense. That reform itself
becomes the new common sense and that’s so dangerous on so many levels. That’s a hard thing
for people to navigate and for you to organize around because then it feels like we can’t do
anything until we overthrow the state … [but] come on. No. That’s not the answer. That’s not the
answer either. I don’t think any abolitionist will say that.
 LINK – ARMS SALES
The arms trade is integral to contemporary understandings of sovereignty as
defined by a fear-driven desire for security. The affirmative’s smooth perfection of
arms sales is made possible by a legacy of colonial violence which makes the
liberal world order intrinsically violent and terminally unstable
Kinsella 13 (David, professor of political science at Portland University, “The Global Arms
Trade and the Diffusion of Militarism” in “Militarism and International Relations: Political
Economy, Security, and Theory”)NFleming
Militarization can be viewed as an instrumentally rational response to insecurity
in an anarchic setting . But we are also interested in the forms that militarization takes, and the forces emanating from
international society that shape those forms. Early efforts to theorize about the role of the arms trade on patterns of militarization
took as a point of departure the notion of a global or world military order. The existence of a global military order
can be linked to one or both of two structural features of international society. One is an emergent isomorphism in
military force structures, military doctrines, and/or military–industrial capacities among states – if not globally, then
within tiers of comparably situated states. The other is the dependency that marks military
relations between states occupying different positions in the global hierarchy. The arms trade
has served as a mechanism for development and maintenance of both these
structural elements of the global military order (Albrecht et al., 1975; Øberg, 1977; Eide, 1980; Secăres,
1981). States procure weapons for some fairly obvious reasons. It is reasonable to hypothesize that the nature of the threats and
opportunities states perceive will determine the volume and type of weaponry they acquire, either from foreign or domestic
producers. Fighter aircraft, main battle tanks, air defence systems, reconnaissance ships, nuclear missiles, etc., all have their
functions in force postures built around states’ threat assessments and national objectives requiring the
deployment of military power. A ‘strategic-functional’ account, as Suchman and Eyre (1992) call
it, does not tell the whole story, though. Procurement decisions are also partly the outcome of
domestic competition among those with political and economic stakes in weapons production and its support infrastructure.
These ‘factional’ explanations infuse the literature on military–industrial complexes, whether from a radical or more mainstream
interest-group politics perspective, and essentially disaggregate the unitary rational state into a collection of substate actors each
pursuing their factional interests (e.g. Allison and Morris, 1975; Melman, 1985; Buzan and Herring, 1998). Against these rationalist
accounts of military procurement are constructivist explanations, which focus on social structures as conditioning state preferences
The maintenance of modern, well equipped militaries derives in
and shaping identities.
part from a ritualistic belief that they are emblematic of statehood in the
contemporary era. According to Sagan (1996/97: 74), ‘military organizations and their weapons can
therefore be envisioned as serving functions similar to those of flags, airlines, and Olympic
teams: they are part of what modern states believe they have to possess to be
legitimate, modern states .’ This is especially true of emerging regional powers pursuing indigenous arms production
capacities. In India, for example, major advances in both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons
development have been accompanied by allusions in the public discourse to India’s coming of
age as a modern state and a player on the world stage (Kinsella and Chima, 2001). Such explanations emphasize:
not the autonomous decision-making activity of independent nation-states, but rather the metonymical iconography of the global
the symbolic qualities of advanced weapons overshadow their
cultural order. In this light,
functional capabilities [.. .]. From an institutionalist perspective, the proliferation of high-technology
weaponry is not a unique and especially problematic occurrence (aside from its possible consequences), but is merely one
additional facet of the larger, worldwide trend toward isomorphism among nation-states.
(Suchman and Eyre, 1992: 149–150) For developing countries, the particular forms that militarization takes by virtue of their
embeddedness in the global military order may well be suboptimal. Wendt and Barnett (1993), for example, pose two interrelated
questions about the procurement choices that these governments and their militaries so often make (see also Barnett and Wendt,
1992). First, why is the development of an effective military force equated with capital-intensive militarization? Second, given that
advanced weapons procurement is almost always a dependent form of militarization, can this dependency be understood in terms
other than the simple lack of military–industrial capacity in developing states? There is little disputing the fact that the preference
for armed forces well equipped with the most advanced military technology available pervades defence acquisition policies in less
developed states, as it does in more developed ones. The main impediments preventing the former from fully realizing their
aspirations is their own limited military production capacities, financial constraints on the purchase of weaponry from foreign
The
producers, and the restrictive arms-supply policies of foreign governments concerned about proliferation.
international political economy of militarization in the developing world can be
understood, in part, as an outgrowth of the history of colonialism and post--
colonial strategies of economic modernization (Øberg, 1975; Senghaas, 1977; Luckham, 1978). The
colonial experience typically empowered a relatively small local elite, which served the political and economic interests of foreign
rulers and fostered a pattern of dependent economic development after national independence. New governments that, along with
foreign benefactors, promoted industrialization by directing resources toward export-oriented manufacturing continued to rely on
elites in a small number of modernized sectors of the national economy at the expense of larger, more traditional sectors. Such
economic development strategies, where a minority of the population constitute the main stakeholders, leave much
larger numbers as potential threats to the security of the state and economic order to the extent
that they become dissatisfied with political-economic status quo. Given this definition of threat,
building the state’s military capabilities upon a mass-mobilized army carries substantial
risks. Capital-intensive militarization invests coercive power in a smaller, more
controllable portion of the population whose allegiance is easier to secure with
strategically chosen weapons procurement and other policies (Wendt and Barnett, 1993). A
preference for a capital-intensive military posture is nearly impossible to realize unless the government of a developing state can
turn to foreign suppliers of advanced weaponry; few states outside the industrialized world count even as ‘third tier’ arms producers
(Anthony, 1993; Kinsella, 2000). During the Cold War, great power patrons tried to walk a fine line. Supplying clients with the
quality and quantity of weaponry they demanded risked destabilizing already volatile regional rivalries – in the Middle East, South
Asia, Horn of Africa, and elsewhere – and complicity in widespread human rights violations at the hands of a well equipped security
apparatus if and when the government turned on its own population. Not supplying clients with the weapons they wanted prompted
them to look to other potential providers, including members of the opposing Cold War bloc. The consequence of the Cold War
balancing act on the part of the superpowers and their arms-exporting allies was the capital-intensive but dependent militarization
undertaken by many developing states. This is not to suggest that the Cold War competition for clients resulted in a uniform
diffusion of advanced weaponry throughout the developing world. In fact, the global military order remained
hierarchical, in terms of both the arms trade and the development of arms production capacity
(Krause, 1992). The point is that capital-intensive militarization, over space and time, was
conditioned by the integration of several developing states into an international social structure
defined predominantly by the global competition between US- and Soviet-led blocs (Thee, 1977;
Kinsella, 1994, 1995; Kanet, 2006). Although dependent on foreign arms suppliers, states deemed by the superpowers to be strategic
dependent
clients were able to exercise considerable leverage over their patrons’ military assistance policies. But
militarization also needs to be understood in the context of a prevailing global
military culture , perhaps shaped by the experience of the Cold War, but analytically distinct from it. As emphasized above,
capital-intensive military postures have become emblematic of modern statehood.
This observation moves us from questions of preference formation – driven by
threat perception and systems of patronage – to questions of state identity
formation . Constructivists suggest that ‘security environments in which states are embedded are in
important part cultural and institutional . .. [and] affect not only the incentives for different
kinds of state behavior but also the basic character of states’ (Jepperson et al., 1996: 33; Alderson, 2001).
Thus, states not only acquire military capability in accordance with cues received from the
structure of shared knowledge of which they are part, they are also defined or constituted
by that structure . If capital-intensive militarization is a socially constructed symbol
of modern statehood , then the agents of socialization can be found in the training of
developing state militaries, including the officer corps, often by former colonial authorities and then by the principal
players in the Cold War competition. The process also operated, and continues to operate, through the
arms trade itself because ‘the joint possession of weapons systems and
appropriate organization creates agreement about what constitutes military
power’ (Kaldor, 1981: 144). Developing states internalize a particular conception of military
capability and modern statehood by virtue of being embedded in a prevalent global military
culture through which, according to Luckham (1984: 32), ‘ symbols of meaning prevalent in
advanced capitalist societies are imposed on other societies.’ Evidence links the movement
toward isomorphism in military procurement patterns to the extent of a state’s immersion in this global culture. Eyre and
Suchman (1996), for example, observe a correlation between the possession of symbolically significant
weaponry, like supersonic aircraft, and newly independent states’ membership in
intergovernmental organizations. Rarely have analysts taken the position that capital-intensive militarization in
developing states is driven solely by sociocultural forces operating at the international level. Attention to the symbolic importance of
technologically advanced military postures, internalized through states’ integration into the global military order, does not
necessarily imply that the capability afforded by capital-intensive militarization does not have functional utility. That governments
have not limited the deployment of advanced weaponry to military parades and other non-coercive displays of force is quite obvious.
At the same time, given the resource constraints confronted by many developing states, a preference for capital- over labour--
intensive militarization does not seem predetermined by the insecurities associated with international anarchy. To summarize, the
global diffusion of militarization of a particular form has been explained in terms of states’
embeddedness in a global military order. Political-economic and sociocultural forces operating at the international
level shape state preferences for capital-intensive militarization, and the arms trade and adjunct military relationships – licensed
arms production, officer training programmes, joint military exercises, etc. – are means by which a socialization occurs and
Perceived threats to governments in some developing states,
preferences are reinforced.
which drives their demand for militarization via advanced weapons imports, are a
function not only of inter-state rivalry but also their integration into the world
economy. Development strategies that concentrated capital within a limited number of economic sectors created a narrow
echelon of stakeholders and left a much larger portion of the population as an unreliable base upon which to build the state’s
military capability; hence the turn to capital-intensive militarization. On the supply side, strategically positioned developing states
were the recipients of a steady flow of weaponry by virtue of their integration into Cold War competition. Some scholars have alleged
that this form of militarization, both capital-intensive and dependent, has been dysfunctional for developing states (e.g. Väyrynen,
1979; Rosh, 1988), but this is hard to establish with much confidence given the paucity of alternative forms available for empirical
scrutiny.

Restricting arms sales becomes a justification for broader militarism- ATT proves
Stavrianakis 16 (Anna Stavrianakis, lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Sussex, “Legitimizing liberal militarism: politics, law and war in the Arms Trade Treaty”, Third
World Quarterly, 37 (5), pp.840-65)//vl
In this article I argue, contrary to the predominantly optimistic emerging assessment of the
treaty, that a key effect of the ATT is the legitimation of liberal forms of militarism exercised by
major western states. It is not simply that these states have long been amongst the world􏰀s
largest military spenders, arms producers and arms exporters, and claim the ATT will bring no
new responsibilities for them. The same applies to major non-western suppliers and non-
signatories such as Russia and, increasingly, China. There is something more at stake: the liberal
form that war-making and war preparation take when exercised by major western, liberal states.
There is a distinct political economy, strategic orientation and – crucially – form of justification
based on human rights, humanitarianism and morality that frame their arms transfers as part of
broader war-making and war preparation practices. Arms transfers by liberal states that
contribute to violations of human rights and IHL are hidden from view by the existence of
regulatory regimes that include consideration of human rights and IHL. This legitimating
function of regulatory regimes has been uploaded into the ATT in the way it introduces a
balancing act in which states can weigh the risk of human rights violations against the interests
of peace and security and justify exports in the name of the latter. With the effect of naturalising
liberal states􏰀 practices and allowing them to evade scrutiny, create the impression of
responsibility and morality, and effect leadership of a liberal international order that is
nonetheless reliant on coercion and violence, the ATT takes on a rather different hue as a means
for the reworking and relegitimation of liberal forms of militarism. In what follows, I first situate
the treaty empirically, set out the emerging scholarly assessment of it based on human security
norms, and advance as an alternative the concept of liberal militarism. Second, I analyse the
similarities and differences in forms of justification by the USA and the UK. As an ambivalent
sceptic- turned-supporter of the treaty, the US engaged in more unilateralist forms of
justification than the UK, which was a major champion of the treaty. However, both states􏰀
engagements with the treaty share a framing based on a universalising moral responsibility. Two
cases – arms transfers to Egypt during the Arab Spring, and intra- western transfers – are then
used to illustrate the ways in which the US and UK governments justify their arms transfers by
reference to regulatory regimes that include explicit reference to IHRL and IHL: regimes that
are deemed to already exceed the standards of the ATT. Whilst transfers to the Middle East
during the Arab Spring were used by proponent non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as an
illustration of why an ATT is needed, intra-western transfers are generally not on the arms
transfer control agenda. More broadly, claims around the need for tighter arms trade regulation
revolve around an armed violence agenda, primarily in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Analysing a Middle Eastern and an intra-western case helps us think harder about the broader
purposes of arms transfer regulation. The existence of transfer regimes that already exceed the
standards of the ATT creates a paradox in which contemporary risk transfer militarism is
justified by reference to arms export licensing processes that are themselves based on risk
assessment. Rather than signalling the success of human security norms then, the effort to use
criteria- and risk-based assessments of arms transfers – the core of the ATT – is better
understood as having been mobilised as part of the legitimation of contemporary liberal forms
of militarism. There is, as yet, no negotiating history of the ATT. This article combines analysis
of states􏰀 official statements and expert commentary from observers of the process with off-
the-record discussions with US-UK state and civil society participants in the treaty negotiations
as a contribution to understanding the dynamics of the treaty negotiation process and early
implementation phase.
Arms trade regulation serves to obscure the state’s complicity in militarism
Stavrianakis 18 (Anna Stavrianakis, lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Sussex, “Controlling weapons circulation in a postcolonial militarized world”, Review of
International Studies (2019) 45:1, pp. 57-76)//vl
Others have been less sympathetically critical. For Neil Cooper, initiatives like the ATT ‘do not
represent a novel post-Cold War development that symbolizes progress on an emancipatory
human security agenda’.14 Post-Cold War arms trade regulation has been based on a
‘discourse around humanitarianism, human security and weapons precision’ that
has served to legitimise high-tech military technologies.15 Cooper and others
emphasise the deep historical roots of the way humanitarian impulses intersect with economic
and security ones, including in late nineteenth-century efforts to regulate the supply and
circulation of weapons in the imperial peripheries that are remarkably resonant with
contemporary efforts.16 Historically minded scholars remind us that surplus and obsolete
weapons have long circulated in the peripheries of empire, and new weapons tested there; and
political authorities were licensing weapons exports as early as the sixteenth century – in part to
avoid blowback.17 Arms trade regulation, then, has a ‘historically contingent’ character, marked
by the ongoing importance of ‘power, interest, economy, security’.18 Militarism emerges as a
core concern out of such critiques and provides the jumping-off point for this analysis. In
particular, there are long traditions of historical sociological and feminist scholarship on
militarism,19 defined here as ‘the social and international relations of the pre- paration for, and
conduct of, organized political violence’.20 In relation to arms control, I have argued elsewhere
that the ATT has been mobilised by liberal democratic states primarily to legitimise their arms
transfer practices.21 And Cooper concludes that ‘campaigners need to return to a strategic
contestation of global militarism rather than searching for tactical campaign vic- tories
dependent on accommodation with the language and economic and security paradigms
of contemporary military humanism’.22 This is part of a political economy critique of the
way ‘the regulation of pariah weapons might alternatively be described as “arms control from
below within the logic of militarism from above”’,23 in line with a wider critique of human
security as having been ‘institutionalised and co-opted to work in the interests of
global capitalism, militarism and neoliberal governance’.24 Neil Cooper and David
Mutimer, surveying the history of and prospects for con- trolling the means of violence, argue
that ‘the longer term, indirect effect should be to reduce militarism and promote cultures of
peace’ or ‘at the very least, avoid further embedding cultures of militarism’.25 How, then, should
we think about the impact of the human security agenda on militarism, and vice versa; and what
are the ramifications for weapons control? The 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, which
formalised the human security agenda, was explicit about the role of ‘excessive militarization
and the international arms trade’ as a ‘critical source of insecurity’.26 Arising from ‘the world’s
previous preoccupation with deterrence and territorial security’, arms transfers, military
assistance, proxy wars, excessive military spending, politicised militaries in developing
countries, and the military-industrial complex, were all identified as impediments to the
realisation of human security.27 The report identified con- crete policy recommendations,
including an international agreement to phase out military assistance; a list of prohibited items
for transfer; a strengthened UN Register reporting system; the regulation and elimination of
subsidies; and a tax on arms sales to finance peacekeeping.28 Such moves, alongside increased
spending on demilitarisation efforts, were envisaged as ‘an important step towards achieving
human security’.29 While there was an emphasis on ‘Third World disarmament’, the report was
clear that this must be one component of a ‘blueprint for global disarmament’.30 So here we
have an agenda for practical action on the weapons trade, challenging militarism to improve
human security. The UNDP report identified the nation-statist ideologies of deterrence and
territorial security, as well as the transnational practices of military assistance and proxy wars,
as key causes of insecurity. Simultaneously, it reopened the debate about the link between
security and development ‘that had been closed since the somewhat sterile polemic around the
link between disarmament and development’ of the 1970s and 1980s.31 This earlier, now
ostensibly out-dated debate surmised that ‘the North (that is, both sides of the East–West
conflict) should disarm, and devote the resources freed up by arms reduction to development in
the South’.32 As part of this shift in debate, the move away from state-centred definitions of
security was accompanied by an acknowledgment of the legitimate and crucial role of the state
in providing security – especially as security was emphasised as a precondition for development.
So the anti-militarist call that identified the state as a creator of insecurity was
balanced against recognition of the legitimate role of the state in providing
security. There was also a downgrading of military threats as a particular type of threat to
human security: military threats do not appear as one of the seven main categories articulated in
the report (economic, food, health, environ- mental, personal, community, political). Rather,
threats from war (defined as ‘threats from other states’) are listed under the category of
‘personal security’, alongside threats of physical torture and ethnic tension, as well as crime,
rape, domestic violence, and suicide.33 The analytical and political move made in the 1994
UNDP Report was to equate war with the state and move away from a concern with territorially
based definitions of security and inter-state war, which it equates with militarism. There is a
shift in focus to the spectrum of armed violence and non-conflict violence, which are to be
remedied in the name of human security, in part through the (re)construction of legitimate
coercive apparatuses. The shift away from militarism and towards human security claims to
acknowledge the changing character of conflict and the role of the state in monopolising
legitimate violence, without privileging it unthinkingly. Research in this vein has flourished in
the years since the 1994 report, and brings significant advantages to bear over traditional state-
centric analyses, such as the ability to account for the geographical diversity of rates of armed
violence within as well as between states; sustained and distinct attention to gendered patterns
of violence, including the specific character of femicide as a distinct form of violence; and the
incorporation of questions of public health and socio- economic inequality into discussion about
weapons transfers.34 For all these developments, the human security agenda’s take on war,
conflict, and armed violence has not been without its critics. It has been described as the ‘new
orthodoxy’ that is ‘unable to provide the basis for a substantive change of the system of
international security’, despite finding ‘the old language of interstate war and conflict ...
lacking’.35 Similarly, its emphasis on ‘progressive’ initiatives such as ‘eliminat[ing] certain types
of weapons’ stands accused of failing to adequately examine ‘the pathologies inherent in the
structure of the international system’ that generate such challenges.36 And when the ‘human’ in
human security is naturalised as masculine, the inclusion of novel threats and new actors leaves
the parameters of security untouched, meaning that ‘state-based, militarised security
remains unchallenged’.37 Feminist scholars have critiqued the gendered concepts and
practices of war, peace, militarisa- tion, peacekeeping and soldiering, going well beyond the
human security framework in the process.38
 LINK – ARMS TRADE TREATY / I-LAW
The notion that one can use existing regulatory bodies to solve human rights issues
legitimizes war and blurs the distinction between militarism and human rights
protection
*Human rights link, ATT link
Stavrianakis 16 (Anna, PhD and lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Sussex, Third World Quarterly, “Legitimising liberal militarism: politics, law and war in the
Arms Trade Treaty,” published 8/1/19, https://www-tandfonline-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1080/01436597.2015.1113867?needAccess=true, pages
853-855, accessed 6/28/19, JME.)
The ATT is very much a product of its time: the fusing of human rights and IHL by a North– South coalition of state and non-state
actors in pursuit of improved human security. This project occurs in the context of an international system marked by Western
military predominance: the post-9/11 period is the ‘longest period of continuous warfare in American
history’, according to Michael Mann, in which we see ‘a highly militaristic power in a peaceful
international system’, an expansive imperial appetite ‘accompanying it of course with fine-
sounding rhetoric about improving the world’.139 This article has sought to examine the significance of the liberal
claim to improving the world via the claim to the mantle of legitimacy, responsibility and morality in arms trade regulation. The
mobilisation of risk assessment in ways that mute criticism of ongoing arms supply despite human rights violations, as seen in the
Egypt case, and the de-politicisation of war preparation that includes potential violations of IHL, as seen in the case of intra-Western
transfers and the prosecution of liberal wars, are key ways in which liberal forms of militarism are legitimated. Understanding
regulatory regimes as performing such a function helps us explore the role they play in what Anna
Leander calls ‘militarizing by distraction’ (here, distracting away from the harm and violence caused
by legitimate as well as illegitimate transfers) and ‘militarizing by distinction’ (the distinction between legitimate
interests and the illicit market, between responsible actors and irresponsible ones).140 Proponent NGOs are critical of liberal state
practices that violate human rights, but their arguments are usually based on the assumption that their policies and practices are
fundamentally sound, and that liberal states’ own use of force and transfers between them are not relevant to the arms transfer
control agenda. Liberal states themselves disavow any impact that the ATT will have on their regulatory regimes, precisely by
reference to their existing systems. So liberal states’ regulatory regimes and justifications cannot be dismissed as purely strategic or
rhetorical – they have a strong effect, even if that effect is not towards more restrictive arms transfer practices. Further, ‘if hi-tech
violence is shielded from prosecution, this may sap the moral force of the law and allow low-end offenders to paint themselves as
victims of politicized proceedings’.141 This is precisely what happened in the ATT negotiations, and is a reason for thinking in terms
of legitimation.142 With attempts at legitimation come resistance and contestation, as seen in the
justifications from non-liberal states along the way. Yet the very conditions of the ATT’s success
are the basis of its political effects. Part of the success of post-cold war arms transfer control has
been the way it has coalesced with mainstream security discourse.143 Control Arms and other proponent
NGOs want a universal system in which human rights are not politicised: while they recognise that states will engage in politicking,
they hold to the idea of a fundamentally apolitical core of the protection of human rights and IHL. For them the ATT is an
attempt to engage in technical, non-political discussions with non-liberal states about issues
such as the diversion of weapons, in order to raise the bar of control standards around the
world.144 One of the ironies of the ATT process is that consensus that the treaty should only deal with the ‘illicit’ and unregulated
trade was fundamental to the degree of traction it eventually garnered; yet the productive slippage between the concepts of ‘illicit’
and ‘irresponsible’ transfers means the ATT cannot adequately be understood as an apolitical, human security oriented agenda with
which some states played politics. The very formulation is itself deeply political. Sounding a sceptical note about the
ambiguities of regulation and the way it can create both accountability and militarisation poses
‘an intractable dilemma; having to side either against regulation or in favour of militarism is
singularly unattractive’.145 It is also still quite a marginal activity: even Martin Shaw, who has done so much to analyse risk-
transfer militarism, ends on an optimistic note that this analysis of the ATT cannot share. He argues that ‘the door has been
fundamentally opened to new kinds of delegitimation of war’: risk-transfer war is ‘vulnerable to new criticisms that will, sooner or
later, challenge even its newly refined justifications’.146 And the development of legal frameworks combined with civil society
monitoring ‘means that military events are likely to be legally monitored in new ways. Thus excesses (of course, a normal product of
war) are increasingly, if still very variably, capable of being legally actioned’.147 Similarly, Smith argues that human
rights could help ‘develop alternatives to war itself’ and can bring ‘long-term and cumulative
impacts of war into focus in a way that IHL cannot’, including by ‘raising basic questions about
the militarization of societies and economies’.148 The analysis of the ATT advanced here suggests
instead, however, that it is precisely the turn to law, the supposed compatibility
between military preponderance and human rights protection, and the failure to
move beyond direct use of weapons, that helps legitimise (particular forms of) war. Critical legal
studies scholars advocate ‘a form of law-politics to develop humanitarian principles into a concrete, normative agenda’:149 and yet
this is exactly what humanitarian disarmers have been trying to do with the ATT and previous arms transfer control regimes. It is
important to recognise ‘that some degree of complicity in previous social structures is inherent
in social change’.150 Price argues that scholars should not underplay the morally progressive
significance of ‘practices that at once contain elements of progressive change…yet at the same
time are predicated on or produce the conditions of possibility for other forms of exclusion,
hierarchy, inequality, repression or violence’.151 However, the widespread emphasis on the progressive, if imperfect
character of the ATT in scholarship and policy has failed to interrogate the justificatory claims around moral responsibility that so
pervaded its negotiation. These claims contribute to obscuring a significant scale of human rights violations and the wider systems of
war preparation that arms transfers are a part of. Further, such claims are part of what sceptical Southern states are responding to
and resisting, thus making wider normative change more difficult. The ATT negotiation process shored up liberal states’ actions,
while invoking their benevolence and assuming them to be distinct from illicit or irresponsible actors. The supposed effectiveness of
normative change is muted by the existence of regimes that claim already to exceed the standards of the ATT. This may not be the
ideological glorification of war that we tend to equate with the concept of militarism, but the ATT signals the contemporary
mobilisation of legitimacy for liberal war making and war preparation nonetheless.
 LINK – CHINA THREAT DISCOURSE
The affirmative’s discourse surrounding China constitutes China as a foreign other
to protect American identity
Turner 13—Oliver Turner is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the
University of Manchester. He is the author of American Images of China: Identity, Power,
Policy (Routledge, forthcoming) [“‘Threatening’ China and US security: the international
politics of identity,” Review of International Studies, FirstView Articles, pp 1-22, Cambridge
University Press 2013]

In his analysis of the China Threat Theory Chengxin Pan

argues that the ‘threat’ is an imagined construction
of American observers.15 Pan does not deny the importance of the PRC's capabilities but asserts that they appear
threatening from understandings about the United States itself. ‘[T]here is no such thing as
“Chinese reality” that can automatically speak for itself’, Pan argues. ‘[T]o fully understand the US
“China threat” argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature’.16 The geographical
territory of China, then, is not separate from or external to, American representations of it. Rather, it is actively constitutive of those
representations.17 The analysis which follows demonstrates that China ‘threats’ to the United States have to some extent
always been established and perpetuated through representation and discourse. Michel Foucault
described discourse as ‘the general domain of all statements’, constituting either a group of
individual statements or a regulated practice which accounts for a number of statements.18
American discourse of China can therefore be manifest as disparate and single statements about that country or as collectives of
related statements such as the China Threat Theory. Ultimately, American representations of China are discursive
constructions of truths or realities about its existence. The article draws in part from the work of David
Campbell who suggests that dangers in the international realm are invariably threats to
understandings about the self. ‘The mere existence of an alternative mode of being’, argues
Campbell, ‘the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are possible … is sometimes
enough to produce the understanding of a threat.’19 As a result, interpretations of global
danger can be traced to the processes by which states are made foreign from one another
through discourses of separation and difference.20 In this analysis it is demonstrated that particular
American discourses have historically made the US foreign from China. Case study one for example
demonstrates that nineteenth-century racial discourses of non-white immigrant Chinese separated
China from a United States largely defined by its presumed Caucasian foundations. In case study two we see
that Cold War ideological discourses of communism distanced the PRC from the democratic-
capitalist US. These types of discourses are shown to have constituted a ‘specific sort of
boundary producing political performance’.21 Across the history of Sino-US relations then when ‘dangers’
from China have emerged, they have always been perceived through the lens of American
identity. In consequence, they have always existed as dangers to that identity. In this analysis it is argued that
a key purpose of depicting China as a threat has been to protect components of American
identity (primarily racial and ideological) deemed most fundamental to its being. As such, representations
of a threatening China have most commonly been advanced by, and served the interests of,
those who support actions to defend that identity. The case study analyses which follow reveal that this has
included politicians and policymaking circles, such as those within the administration of President Harry
Truman which implemented the Cold War containment of the PRC. It also exposes the
complicity of other societal individuals and institutions including elements of the late
nineteenth-century American media which supported restrictions against Chinese immigration
to the western United States. It is demonstrated that, twice before, this discursive process of separating
China from the United States has resulted in a crisis of American identity. Crises of identity
occur when the existing order is considered in danger of rupture. The prevailing authority is
seen to be weakened and rhetoric over how to reassert the ‘natural’ identity intensifies .22 Case
studies one and two expose how such crises have previously emerged. These moments were characterised by
perceived attacks upon core assumptions about what the United States was understood to be:
fundamentally white in the late nineteenth century and democratic-capitalist in the early Cold
War. Case study three shows that while today's China ‘threat’ to US security is yet to generate such a
crisis, we must learn from those of the past to help avoid the types of consequences they have
previously facilitated. As Director Clapper unwittingly confirmed then the capabilities and intentions of a
‘rising’ China are only part of the story. International relations are driven by forces both material
and ideational and the processes by which China is made foreign from, and potentially
dangerous to, the United States are inseparable from the enactment of US China policy.
This is because, to reaffirm, American discourses of China have never been produced objectively or
in the absence of purpose or intent. Their dissemination is a performance of power, however
seemingly innocent or benign.23 This is not to claim causal linkages between representation and foreign policy.
Rather, it is to reveal the specific historical conditions within which policies have occurred, through
an analysis of the political history of the production of truth.24 Accordingly, this analysis shifts from
a concern with ‘why’ to ‘how’ questions. ‘Why’ questions assume that particular practices can
happen by taking for granted the identities of the actors involved.25 They assume, for instance, the
availability of a range of policy options in Washington from the self-evident existence of a China
threat. ‘How’ questions investigate the production of identity and the processes which ensure that
particular practices can be enacted while others are precluded.26 In this analysis they are concerned with
how and why China ‘threats’ have come to exist, who has been responsible for their production and how those socially constructed
dangers have established the necessary realities within which particular US foreign policies could legitimately be advanced. US
China policy, however, must not be narrowly conceived as a ‘bridge’ between two states.27 In fact, it
works on behalf of societal discourses about China to reassert the understandings of difference
upon which it relies.28 Rather than a final manifestation of representational processes, then, US
China policy itself works to construct China's identity as well as that of the United States. As the case
study analyses show, it perpetuates discursive difference through the rhetoric and actions (governmental
acts, speeches, etc.) by which it is advanced and the reproduction of a China ‘threat’ continues. In
such a way it constitutes the international ‘inscription of foreignness’, protecting American
values and identity when seemingly threatened by that of China.29 As Hixson asserts, ‘[f]oreign policy plays
a profoundly significant role in the process of creating, affirming and disciplining conceptions of national identity’, and the United
States has always been especially dependent upon representational practices for understandings
about its identity.30 In sum, this article advances three principal arguments. First, throughout history ‘threats’
from China towards the United States have never been explicable in terms of material forces alone.
They have in part been fantasised, socially constructed products of American discourse. The
physical contours of Sino-American relations have been given meaning by processes of
representation so that China has repeatedly been made threatening no matter its intentions.
Second, representations of China ‘threats’ have always been key to the enactment and justification
of US foreign policies formulated in response. Specifically, they have framed the boundaries
of political possibility so that certain policies could be enabled while potential alternatives
could be discarded. Third, US China policies themselves have reaffirmed discourses of foreignness
and the identities of both China and the United States, functioning to protect the American identity
from which the ‘threats’ have been produced.
 LINK – DEMOCRACY
Narrative constructions of democracy produce an investment in enemy creation
that paradoxically strengthens oppressive political rule
Montaño and Bloom 14 [Emilio Allier, post-doctorate fellow at the Latino American
Postgraduate Studies College at the Autonomous University of Mexico, Peter Bloom, PhD, is a
lecturer in the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University, “The Closed
Promise: The Authoritarian “Grip” of Democracy,” Theory & Event 17:3, 2014]

Introduction Democracy is perhaps the most cherished and celebrated ideal of the modern age. However,
these celebrations commonly ignore the role of democratic discourses for reinforcing
oppressive ideologies and regimes. This is especially meaningful given the increasing
deployment of democratic narratives to justify a wide range of polices from the War on
Terror to economic globalization . Dominant scholarly perspectives commonly fail to address these concerns.
Despite differences, these perspectives largely equally embrace a positive vision of democracy rather than adopt a
more critical lens. At stake in this paper is to examine how democracy can work paradoxically toward political closure and exclusion
as opposed to its espoused principles of openness and plurality. The psychological and emotional aspects of this phenomenon are
particularly relevant to this investigation. Exploring
how affective desires for democracy affectively
“grip” subjects illuminates the ways these narratives support dominant ideologies and practices.
A Lacanian inspired socio-political approach is well suited for this task. Social theorists have increasingly applied Lacan’s insights to
issues of ideology and socio-political identity. They have shown how fantasy structures subjectivity around the pursuit of emotional
fulfillment promised by dominant ideologies.1 The question therefore is how fantasmatic promises of democracy are currently
constituting identity and to what political and ideological ends? Theoretically this allows a re-thinking of diverse formulations of the
“promise” and practice of democracy, distinguishing it especially from mainstream approaches like Fukuyama’s2 and Huntington’s3
as well as more complex accounts like Derrida’s “democracy to come”4 . Derrida’s reflections on democracy are especially important
in this regard. While he strongly criticizes the “evangelical” and “messianic” character of dominant perspectives5 he nonetheless
shares with them a critical overlooking of the crucial role of democratic promises for legitimizing and reinforcing hegemonic values
and regimes. To this effect, dominant ideologies and practices can be strengthened through a continual
appeal to aspirations of democratic perfectibility. They support these structures by an always
present promise of further democratization, an aspiration whose continual appeal lies
exactly in the fact that it remains eternally unfinished and eternally subject to
improvement . In this way, democracy stands as a socio-political fantasy for strengthening
oppressive political rule , even those that have nominally achieved democratic transition. The
contemporary case of Mexican democratization illuminates this phenomenon. Beginning with its contested
1988 election for President, in 2000 the 70 years long state-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) was brought to an end. The National Action Party’s (PAN) success in the presidential elections embodied
(temporarily) a looming democratic promise. Yet, this promise proved to be strongly connected with
the PRI’s ruling maladies. The PAN’s administration has been subject to continued charges of strong
electoral irregularities (both in 2006 and 2012), dogmatic commitment to economic liberalization, widespread
corruption, increasing economic exploitation6 , human rights violation and fierce repression.7 While this may
be attributed to the growing pains of any bourgeoning democracy8 , such an explanation elides how these
democratic promises are deployed to solidify elite rule, economic liberalization and social polarization. Indeed
democratic transition and consolidation (this last one mobilized in the name of security)9 have being invoked for justifying 30 years
(1982–2012) of neo-liberal policies. By exploring their emergence and development after the 1988 Presidential campaign, this essay
reveals the political deployment of exclusionary practices and repressive fantasies centering on desires for democratization. A close
analysis of this scenario and some of its consequences shows how this affective democratic promise has helped to neutralize political
rivals, close off public debate and reproduce the neo-liberal status quo. This case also contributes to a growing literature questioning
the relation between democracy and neo-liberalism.10 A point to emphasize here is that the hegemonic function of a
democratic fantasy is not limited to traditionally right wing ideologies or political
agendas. Indeed, the particular insights of the Mexican case open the way for more general contributions to
understanding the interaction of fantasy, ideology, repression and hegemony to democratic practices. It places these political
dynamics within the matrix of a narrative caught up in an emotional and ideological torrent of
democratic fantasies. Hence, this study seeks to examine democratic desires as a potential force for structuring identity and
in turn legitimizing closed political regimes. To do so this investigation deploys a critical perspective on the commonly apologetic
studies of Mexican democratization.11 The argument is structured as follows. We first critically review Derrida’s proffering of
democracy as an unfinished “promise.” This exploration is followed by a more sustained consideration, drawing on the
psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, of how this promise can exist as a type of socio-political fantasy that reinforces prevailing
ideologies and practices. We then introduce our case of Mexican democratization, with special attention paid to the 1988 election, to
bear out these theoretical insights. This will lead onto a detailed examination of the function of democracy as a fantasmatic discourse
for shaping Mexican identity, legitimizing a closed neo-liberal ideology, and reducing political competition beginning in 1988 and
extending into the present period. Finally, in our concluding remarks we will provide a general reflection on the often paradoxical
relation between ideological and political hegemony, on the one hand, with desires for democracy on the other.

Democracy’s teleological project of value fulfillment makes its essence constitutive

with violent exclusion
Montaño and Bloom 14 [Emilio Allier, post-doctorate fellow at the Latino American
Postgraduate Studies College at the Autonomous University of Mexico, Peter Bloom, PhD, is a
lecturer in the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University, “The Closed
Promise: The Authoritarian “Grip” of Democracy,” Theory & Event 17:3, 2014]
The Closed Promise of Democracy? A crucial aspect of modern democracy is its existence not only as an empirical reality but as an
affective and imaginary promise. Democracy reflects aspirations for the future – associated with a
forthcoming horizon of possibilities linked to normative desires for political and ideological
openness. Echoing these desires, a dominant motif within political theory and political science is the
constant promise of democratic improvement despite present imperfections. This motif constitutes a
tension among empirical studies and normative theories of democracy, one revealed in their rather shared constant use of phrases
like “transitional phase,” “consolidation state,” “persistent unconsolidation,” “partial democracy,” “pseudodemocracy,” “disguised
dictatorship” and “competitive authoritarianism” among others. These empirical and normative categories
structure a teleological academic and social narrative that takes the form of a reiterated promise
of democratic solidification and perfectibility.12 It is based on a belief that while existing democracies may not be
perfect, their underlying ideals are unimpeachable and it is thereby inherently and constantly
perfectible . This democratic teleology has not surprisingly been subject to numerous
critiques.13 Derrida’s “democracy to come” is by far one of the strongest and most important of these. For Derrida, these
accounts constitute a new “gospel” underpinning a hard core messianic eschatology which
ironically runs counter to values of justice, hospitality and democracy itself.14 Thus, for
Derrida democracy should never be filled up by a substantive content and promise. Instead it
should constitute a formal and empty structure symbolizing “the opening of this gap between an
infinite promise [...] and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against
this promise”15 Derrida’s ideas are explicit in this sense: “democracy to come” is a teleology without
thelos, messianism without messiah, promise without content. Indeed, for Derrida democracy is by its very
nature always incomplete and to an extent indefinable.16 In this regard, the very institution of democracy or
its linking to concrete values is both representative and constitutive of an act of violence
and oppression . This means that democracies in practice also reflect the violent and
exclusionary foundations of any political regime . Attempts at any definitive
instantiation therefore can be considered undemocratic since it contradicts the democratic force
for the “degeneration of the law, of the violence, the authority, and the power of the law.”17 Derrida
proclaims that the “very motif of democracy,” its exact “possibility,” is found in “the duty of democracy itself to de-limit itself.”18
Hence, Derrida places “democracy to come” as a principle declaring both theoretically and
practically that “there is not yet any democracy worthy of this name.”19 It stands eternally as a
promise of a future which has yet to be determined and remains potentially different than the
present. In this spirit “democracy to come” is not only an inviting vision of what could be but a
continuous and never ending radical critique of what is . Consequently for Derrida, democracy
stands as a promise worthy of political investment while simultaneously eschewing any
commitment to, at least theoretically, concrete substantive norms. “Democracy to come,” in this sense,
articulates an empty and formal promise which can be neither deconstructed nor criticized.
According to Derrida, the promise itself (a structurally empty messianism) is the limit of any deconstruction: … what remains
irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is [...] perhaps even
the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, [...] an idea of
democracy which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.20 Derrida, to this end,
promotes the constant “perfectibility” of democracy, one which celebrates its successes while
seeking to improve upon its failures.21 Derrida himself declares accordingly … the inherited concept of democracy is
the only one that welcomes the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself. If it
were still the name of a regime, it would be the name of the only regime that presupposes its own perfectibility and thus its own
historicity.22

Democratic peace is wrong --- democracies more likely to engage in war

Baliga 11—prof of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellog School of Business,
NU. PhD from Harvard—AND—Tomas Sjöström—chaired prof of economics at Rutgers—AND—
David O. Lucca—economist with the Federal Reserve Board (Sandeep, Domestic Political
Survival and International Conflict: Is Democracy Good for Peace?, The Review of Economic
Studies, July 2011, 78;3)
The idea that democracy promotes peace has a long history. Thomas Paine argued that monarchs go to war to enrich themselves, but a more democratic system of
government would lead to lasting peace: “What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of
another country?” (Paine, 1985 p. 169). Immanuel Kant agreed that if “the consent of the subjects is required to determine whether there shall be war or not, nothing is
more natural than that they should weigh the matter well, before undertaking such a bad business” (Kant, 1795, 1903, p. 122). More recently, the democratic peace
hypothesis has influenced the “neoconservative” view of international relations (Kaplan and Kristol, 2003). U.S. policy makers of different political persuasions have
invoked it in support of a policy to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.”1 But some anecdotal
observations seem to support a more “realist” viewpoint. For example, after the breakup of Yugoslavia,
democratic reforms were followed by war, not peace. When given a chance in the legislative elections of
2006, the Palestinians voted for Hamas, which did not have a particularly peaceful platform. Such anecdotes

suggest that democratization does not always promote peace. Even fully democratic countries such as the U.S.

sometimes turn aggressive: under perceived threats to the homeland, the democratically elected President George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. We develop

a simple game-theoretic model of conflict based on Baliga and Sjöström (2004). Each leader can behave
aggressively or peacefully. A leader's true propensity to be aggressive, his “type”, is his private information. Since actions are strategic complements,
the fear that the other leader might be an aggressive type can trigger aggression, creating a fear spiral we call “Schelling's dilemma” (see Schelling, 1960; Jervis, 1976,
Jervis, 1978; Kydd, 1997). Unlike Baliga and Sjöström (2004), we assume a leader may be removed from power. Whether a leader can stay in power depends on the
The political system interacts
preferences of his citizens, the political system, and the outcome of the interaction between the two countries.

with Schelling's dilemma to create a non-monotonic relationship between democracy and

peace. Like the leaders, citizens have different types. By hypothesis, the median type prefers to live in
peace. This imposes a “dovish bias” on a dyad of two full democracies (whose leaders can be replaced by their
median voters). Thus, a dyadic democratic peace is likely to obtain. However, when facing a country that is not fully

democratic, the median voter may support aggression out of fear and may replace a leader
who is not aggressive enough. (For example, Neville Chamberlain had to resign after appeasing Hitler.)
This gives rise to a “hawkish bias”. Thus, in a fully democratic country, a dovish bias is replaced by a

hawkish bias when the environment becomes more hostile . In contrast, a dictator is not
responsive to the preferences of his citizens, so there is neither a hawkish nor a dovish bias. Accordingly, a dyad of two dictators is less peaceful than
a fully democratic dyad, but a dictator responds less aggressively than a democratically elected leader to

increased threats from abroad. In the model, the leader of a limited democracy risks losing power if
hawks in his population turn against him. For instance, the German leaders during World War I
believed signing a peace agreement would lead to their demise (Asprey, 1991, pp. 486–487, 491).
Conversely, the support of the hawkish minority trumps the opposition of more
peaceful citizens . Thus, a limited democracy experiences a hawkish bias similar to a
full democracy under threat from abroad but never a dovish bias. On balance,
this makes limited democracies more aggressive than any other regime type . In a full
democracy, if the citizens feel safe, they want a dovish leader, but if they feel threatened, they want a hawkish leader. In dictatorships and limited democracies, the citizens
are not powerful enough to overthrow a hawkish leader, but the leader of a limited democracy risks losing power by appearing too dovish. This generates a non-monotonic
Our empirical analysis reassesses the link between democracy and
relationship between democracy and peace.

peace using a flexible semiparametric functional form, where fixed effects account for
unobserved heterogeneity across country dyads. We use Polity IV data to classify regimes as dictatorships, limited democracies or
full democracies. Following the literature on the democratic peace hypothesis, we define a conflict as a militarized dispute in the Correlates of War data set. The data,
which span over the period 1816–2000, contain many military disputes between limited democracies. In the nineteenth century, Britain had a Parliament, but even after the
Great Reform Act of 1832, only about 200,000 people were allowed to vote. Those who owned property in multiple constituencies could vote multiple times.2 Hence,
Britain is classified as a limited democracy for 58 years and becomes a full democracy only after 1879. France, Italy, Spain, and Germany are also limited democracies at
key points in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These countries, together with Russia and the Ottoman Empire, were involved in many militarized disputes in
Europe and throughout the world. For much of the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia had many skirmishes and outright wars in the “Great Game” for domination of
Central Asia (Hopkirk, 1990). France is also involved in many disputes and is a limited democracy during the Belgian War of Independence and the Franco-Prussian War.
Germany is a limited democracy at the start of the First World War. Over the full sample, the data strongly support a dyadic democratic peace hypothesis: dyads consisting
of two full democracies are more peaceful than all other pairs of regime types. This is consistent with previous empirical studies (Babst, 1972, Levy, 1988, , maozrussett,
dyads consisting of two
Russett and Oneal, 2001). Over the same period, limited democracies were the most aggressive regime type. In particular,

limited democracies are more likely to experience militarized disputes than any other dyads,
including “mixed” dyads where the two countries have different regime types. These results are robust to
changing the definitions of the three categories (using the Polity scores) and to alternative specifications of our empirical model. The effects are

quantitatively significant . Parameter estimates of a linear probability model specification,

suggest that the likelihood that a dyad engages in a militarized dispute falls roughly 35% if
the dyad changes from a pair of limited democracies to a pair of dictatorships. We also find that if some
country j faces an opponent which changes from a full democracy to another regime type, the estimated equilibrium probability of conflict increases most dramatically when
country j is a full democracy. This suggests that as the environment becomes more hostile, democracies respond more aggressively than other regime types, which is also
consistent with our theoretical model. A more nuanced picture emerges when we split the data into subsamples. Before World War II, the data strongly suggest that limited
democracies were the most conflict prone. It is harder to draw conclusions for the post World War II period, when very few countries are classified as limited democracies,
and full democracies have very stable Polity scores. The Cold War was a special period where great power wars became almost unthinkable due to the existence of large
nuclear arsenals (Gaddis, 2005). Did the weakening and demise of the Soviet Union bring a return to the pre-1945 patterns? Although the time period is arguably short, in
It is commonly argued that a process of
the post-1984 period, it does seem that dyads of limited democracies are again the most prone to conflict.

democratization, e.g. in the Middle East, will lead to peace (Bush, 2003). But both theory and data suggest that the
relationship between democracy and peace may be complex and non-monotonic. Replacing a dictatorship with a limited

democracy may actually increase the risk of militarized disputes. Even if a

dictatorship is replaced by a full democracy, this may not reduce the risk of
militarized disputes if the region is dominated by hostile non-democratic
countries . In the data, only dyads consisting of two full democracies are peaceful.
Democratic countries such as Israel and India, with hostile neighbours, do not enjoy a low
level of conflict.
 LINK – DISEASE RHETORIC
Disease security rhetoric is produced by the military-pharmaceutical complex as a
justification for population management and endless violence—the aff is just an
advertisement turns case, makes disease inevitable
Rawlinson, 17—Associate Professor in International Criminology, Western Sydney University
(Paddy, “Pharmatechnologies and the ills of medical progress,” The Routledge Handbook of
Technology, Crime and Justice, Chapter 12, pgs 221-225, dml)
In the commercially driven process of securitizing health, knowledge production plays a crucial
role , operating both as a tool and a good. Security as a commodity requires the consumer (here the public,
the state and the medical profession) to buy (literally) into a belief that the security
products offered are effective in obviating or at least weakening the risk of disease or
illness. This further involves ensuring that any risk involved in consuming the product, in this
case the vaccine, is overridden by the threat posed by the disease against which it is affording
protection. Creating a vigorous market for business in a competitive environment, as studies of
corporate crime have consistently shown, can involve a range of deviant and criminal strategies and
activities, including fraud, corruption, intimidation and bribery, activities that are
ubiquitous and, in some cases, systemic within industry. Historically ‘Big Pharma’ has a poor
track record for ethical behaviour (Braithwaite 1984; Dukes et al. 2014; Gotzsche 2013; Griffin and Miller 2011).
Healy observes that unlike other health-risk businesses such as tobacco and the chemicals industry, in which ‘the best studies
systematically point to hazards where they exist’ and where company studies tend to be a small component of evidence-production,
often viewed with suspicion as being partial, the same does not pertain to the pharmaceutical industry: with
pharmaceuticals often the only studies are those of the drug companies themselves,
and these studies, as one might expect, all seem to point to the benefits of an ongoing use of the
very chemicals that may in fact be causing the problem . (Healy 2012: 119) Alongside vested-interest
knowledge production, the pharmaceutical industry engages in other nefarious activities. These
include obstructing the publication of negative data from clinical trials in medical journals, which are often
financially dependent on industry for advertising and the sale of reprints; intimidating whistle-blowers
amongst medical researchers and doctors concerned about the safety of particular drugs; and the ubiquitous
practice of aggressively promoting products to the medical profession including providing
financial inducements to win support for a particular drug (Gotzsche 2013; Healy 2012; Moynihan 2001). Nor
are these deviant and harmful practices occasional aberrations, but instead reflect recidivist
behaviour embedded within the industry (Braithwaite 1984; Dukes et al. 2014). Despite a long
history of insalubrious behaviour in the pharmaindustry, governments and intergovernmental
organizations such as the WHO continue to focus on pharmaceuticalized solutions to what are
arguably pharmaceutically constructed health risks . While obfuscating or down-
playing the safety issues around the escalating administration of medical
interventions, the pharmaindustry’s intensified participation in research and policy-
making enables it to construct narratives of high risk around both the nature of
diseases and their prevalence, and exaggerate the efficacy of its products, thereby
creating an ever-expanding market (Healy 2012; Gotzsche 2013). This is especially the case in a
product that is administered to a population . The vaccine industry is highly profitable not only because of its
numerical reach but because, in an increasing range of jurisdictions, vaccines carry a mandatory status. These policies,
which for critics of mandatory medical intervention, are regarded as a blatant violation of human
rights, have been legitimized through the discursive modalities of securitization, in
much the same way that torture and extraordinary rendition were reconstructed as
necessary for the protection of the very phenomena they were consistently eroding (Chossudovsky
2005). In both cases, where the market operates as a crucial driver, in which defensive
mechanisms are for sale, whether vaccines or arms, there must be no limitation to
demand. Creating demand through the security narrative and ensuring supply
through mandate enables the constant proliferation of an industry which simultaneously
protects and destroys. Excessive protection can only lead to destruction (consider the
proliferation of nuclear arms during the Cold War in what was termed MAD — mutually assured destruction).
Esposito captures this in his consideration of the process of over-immunization as a political, juridical
as well as bio-political phenomenon, whereby ‘the warring potential of the immune system
is so great that at a certain point it turns against itself as a real and symbolic
catastrophe leading to the implosion of the whole organism ’ (2011: 17). Yet, as has been made clear
in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the voracious appetite of the market in its neoliberal
manifestation continues apace ignoring the social and economic cannibalism of excessive
profit—seeking. For the pharmaindustry that involves the presence, real or imaginary, of a
constant threat of disease and infection. State of infection In its 2006 action plan to ‘increase vaccine supply’ the WHO informs us that ‘Influenza
vaccine development and employment are critical elements of pandemic influenza preparedness’. In explaining how serious this risk of a pandemic actually is, and the consequent justification for spending billions
of dollars on flu vaccines globally, the WHO slips into ‘Rumsfeldian discourse’ describing the ‘the global burden of seasonal influenza’ as an ‘unknown’ (WHO 2006). We are now familiar with unknowns in their
both knowable and unknowable states as being crucial to the extension of state power with its affiliate abuses. The ‘unknown burden’ of seasonal flu has occasioned not only the mass manufacture of a vaccine that,
in its current stage of development has proven to be less than effective (Gallagher 2015), but also the introduction of mandatory policies around the influenza vaccine for health workers and other professionals
(Babcock et al. 2010). Indeed, mandating a range of vaccines has now become established practice in a number of countries including the US, Australia, France and Canada, with the UK being a notable exception.
Mandatory creep has been occurring over the past few decades, overriding the hitherto right to abstain from vaccination
programmes on the basis of religious or ‘conscientious objection’ (a term originally used for nineteenth-century vaccine objectors
and subsequently adopted by the military for those who refused compulsory conscription on similar grounds) in many cases leaving
medical exemption the only acceptable criterion for refusal. Vaccine programmes involve mass immunization or herd immunity in
which a large percentage of the population is required to be vaccinated against a disease to ensure its control and hopefully gradual
eradication, thereby protecting those who cannot be vaccinated against possible infection. Unlike other medical interventions, the
focus here lies on the protection of the population rather than an individual . For Foucault,
immunization represents a distinctive break from other medical relationships which seek to heal the individual, but operates as ‘a
way of individualizing the collective phenomenon of the disease, or of collectivizing the phenomena, integrating individual
phenomena within a collective field, but in the form of the rational and identifiable’ (2004: 60). This brings another
dimension to the philosophy of reponsibilization that dominates the neoliberal concept of
health, a paradoxical position that transforms individual accountability into sacrifice (for even the
strongest advocates of mandatory vaccination admit there is no such thing as one hundred per cent safety). It is a subtly
crafted moral sleight of hand that turns adherence to the market of and for
pharmatechnologies into an abnegation of self, where the self operates not simply as part
of the collective but as subservient to it : capitalism functioning through a ‘communist’ guise. Human
rights can thus be dismissed as ‘nonsense upon stilts’ or perhaps worse still, as the
greatest threat to human rights itself. Given that the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights emerged from inter alia some of the most horrific medical
abuses ever recorded it is even more ironic that the policy of mandatory vaccination is proliferating. It contravenes human rights contained within a number of conventions which establish individual autonomy
regarding medical intervention. This includes Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights on the respect for one’s private life, that is ‘the right not to be physically interfered with’ (Liberty 2015) and
more specifically, the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights protection against ‘torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his

The combined rhetoric of security and

free consent to medical or scientific experimentation’ (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966).

science, fundamental to the justification and waging of war, not only assuages the
retraction of human rights obligations by the state but can render these rights themselves
as presenting a threat. As the war on disease, together with that on terror, has no defined end, no
clear moment of victory, being non-territorial insofar as it has no physical jurisdiction,
the suspension or weakening of human rights will continue and further entrench the
‘paradigm of security as the normal technique of government’ (Agamben 2005: 14). In this
environment vaccine objection easily slips into criminalized activity and criticism appears as
unpatriotic. Concerns over conflict of interest, data manipulation, bribery and
intimidation are turned into politicized opposition and those who voice these concerns
become enemies of the people, a security threat, health terrorists . In this context,
punitive measures against those who refuse, both for themselves or on behalf of those under
their guardianship, are also becoming more draconian and can range from financial
penalties, the exclusion of children from day care centres, loss of jobs (within the medical profession) or
even prison (Willsher 2014). Informed consent lies at the heart of the numerous instruments for the protection of the human body; the notion of bodily integrity underpins a series of rights
that have been allocated to citizens in democratic states, including the right to abortion. When the information aspect of informed is either denied or contains negative data concerning safety it is rational to
assume that consent might not be always forthcoming. Collusion between industry and politics is a major concern, as Eisenhower warned. Mary Holland’s critique of mandatory vaccination lays out the extent of
these collusive relationships in the US, which were even admitted by politicians themselves: In 2000, a Congressional report on Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Policy Making identified notable conflicts of interests
in the FDA [Federal] and CDC [Center for Disease Control] advisory bodies that make national vaccine policy. These include ‘advisers’ financial ties to vaccine manufacturers’ as well as ‘advisers’ permitted stock
ownership in companies affected by their decisions’. (Holland 2012:77) Declaring these activities in Congress has not deterred their occurrence. In 2007, an attempt was made by the erstwhile Governor of Texas,
Rick Perry, to mandate the HPV vaccine in his state’s schools, a decision he was subsequently forced to overturn when it was revealed that Merck, the company that produced the Gardasil vaccine, had given
donations towards his nomination (Eggen 2011). Nor will this be the last cosy relationship between politics and industry as mandatory vaccination policy continues to be applied to an increasing number of

Pharmatechnologies manifesting as medical research, drug production and distribution,

vaccines. Conclusion

epistemological paradigms determining how health, disease and risk are to be

conceptualized and negotiated, have now become a mode of governance in an
increasingly authoritarian environment. This is not to detract from the benefits
accrued from medical progress through pharmaceuticals and the important role played by
vaccines in alleviating potential suffering. Yet, the benign discourses within which they
operate can often obscure harmful outcomes, harms imposed as structural violence:
opaque, unidentifiable and normalized (Zizek 2009). Victimization remains unseen or as a
necessary price to pay for the greater good . In medical terms aspects of these harms are referred to as
iatrogenesis, the unintended, often injurious, consequences of medical intervention. In this latter context it is akin to what military
circles euphemistically term ‘collateral damage’, generally applied to the killing and maiming of non- combatants. However, some
scholars who study state and corporate harms are less inclined to semantic generosity, not least when the
majority of
damage and injury inflicted falls on the same targets, the socio-economically
vulnerable, gendered, racial, ethnic or other minorities whose lot it is to comprise
the flotsam and jetsam of ruthless markets and the politics of indifference. Intention,
or lack of, as they argue, cannot disguise the power relations at play as the usual suspects
emerge as perpetrators and beneficiaries of systemic abuses. If we are to accept the argument put
forward by Tombs and Whyte that ‘The problems caused by corporations — which seriously threaten
the stability of our lives — are enduring and necessary functions of the corporation’
(2015: 4), a position supported by a plethora of cases, then all industry operating within a
capitalist framework is intrinsically pathological. It is essentially a diseased entity,
irrespective of the nature of goods and services produced or the rhetoric that
designates it as benign . Ironically, this diseased entity in combination with an increasingly
diseased political system, proclaims and even persists that it has both the authority
and ability to produce and sell health. Yet, so strong is the belief in pharmaceuticalized
health that so many literally buy into the ‘truths’ of pharmatechnologies failing miserably to
discern how the contagion-riddled commodification of health is actually the greatest
danger to health . No business thrives on the elimination of demand for its goods.
The technologies of war were justified through the eventual establishment of peace; so too
the pharmaindustry legitimizes its existence through claims to health and healing. The
existence of both is dependent on the perpetuation of the very phenomena they claim
to defend us from, and in this they must continue to be producers of war and
sickness. No longer does the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exist , as
Eisenhower warned, it has become fundamental to the industries of war and disease, to war on
disease.

Mobilizing security around health constructs a vision of the US as a global trustee--

-that enables development policy aimed at fostering neoliberal self-reliance in the
global South, along with violent security strategies to secure our community
against endless possible threats
Mark Duffield 7, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre,
University of Bristol, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of
Peoples, 2007, pp. 16-24
In distinguishing a biopolitics of development and underdevelopment, the great Asian tsunami emergency of December 2004 is
instructive. Despite the destruction being of a different order of magnitude, within twenty-four hours of the great wave, the world’s
leading reinsurance companies had estimated their losses as half the £14 billion incurred when Hurricane Charlie devastated Florida
in the summer of the same year (Harding and Wray 2004). Whereas the hurricane claimed twenty-five lives, the tsunami killed over
200,000. At the same time the great wave devastated whole communities, local industries and livelihoods around the Indian Ocean
rim. At the time of writing, many of these communities are still rebuilding their lives. For the reinsurers, the reason for
their limited financial exposure in the tsunami disaster was clear: ‘fewer people in the areas
affected by the huge sea surges are insured’ (ibid.). This distinction between life that is ‘insured’
as opposed to ‘non-insured’ provides a fertile metaphor for distinguishing the different but
connected biopolitical strategies that constitute ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’
populations respectively .
For insured life, as a general responsibility of government, an important factor in ameliorating the
contingencies of existence is a social insurance regime offering a range of compensatory
benefits supported from contributory payments and taxation (McKinnon 2004). Together with private insurance and personal
savings, as well as support from voluntary agencies, ‘developed’ life is promoted through a range of public
welfare bureaucracies, benefits and safety nets covering maternity, health, family support, education,
housing, employment injury, unemployment protection and pensions (Wood and Gough 2006). A system of public
infrastructure involving massified energy, transport, nutritional, retailing and environmental systems also underpins
these bureaucracies and safety nets. While plagued by issues of access and availability in the past, the idea of the
welfare state and what Nikolas Rose (2000) has called the ‘the social’ captured the spirit if not the extent of this
complex biopolitical architecture. At the moment, a neoliberal reworking of the social is well under way. In particular, a
shift of ethos has taken place from the collective to the individual, based on the encouragement of active and informed citizens who
take more responsibility for their own welfare choices (ibid.: 87–8, 159–60). The point being made here, however, is that the
expansion of publicly administered or regulated insurance-based welfare technologies is of great
significance. In terms of a comparative biopower, ‘underdevelopment’ is the fate of life existing beyond or
outside these insurance-based welfare systems.
Estimates suggest that within industrialized countries, on average 80 per cent of the workforce is included within a contributory
social insurance regime. In Africa or Asia, however, only a small minority are involved. Usually less than 10 per cent
of the population is covered and for a more restricted range of contingencies; globally, as little as 20 per
cent of the world’s population is regarded as having adequate social insurance (McKinnon 2004: 9–10). Conventional contributory
approaches fall far short of a universal reach ‘especially in developing countries’ (ibid.: 10). The non-insured life exposed by the
tsunami was similar to that regularly revealed in other humanitarian emergencies. That is, it existed in largely self-reliant
communities, predominantly organized around family and kinship and dependent on the smallscale ownership of land or property.
In the absence of insurance, resilience hinges on how adept and entrepreneurial such
communities are in maintaining their self-reliance and coping with the contingencies of their
exposed existence (Twigg 2004). In the global South ‘experience . . . reminds us of the central contribution of personal and
family resources to the universal need for security’ (Wood and Gough 2006: 1697). Within development policy, as will be
discussed further below, there is a longstanding, indeed, unconscious acceptance that non-Western
populations, except for basic needs and essential public goods, are essentially self-reliant in terms of their
general economic, social and welfare requirements, and, moreover, that development is essentially about improving self-reliance
through helping to meet basic needs. As a corollary, it is widely assumed that people in underdeveloped countries do not need the
sort of welfare safety-nets on which the more atomised populace of mass consumer society is dependent. In relation to this set of
developmental practices and assumptions, when self-reliance breaks down humanitarian assistance functions as a regime of
international social protection of last resort. As such, it comes complete with its own small print, inefficiencies and exclusion clauses
(Forman and Steward 2000; Marriage 2006). As a biopolitical regime, international development combines the protection of
humanitarian assistance with betterment through self-reliance.
To present development and underdevelopment biopolitically illustrates the systemic gulf in life chances that
separates insured and noninsured life. Compared with the compensated life styles of the West,
international statistics on the distribution of poverty, longevity and social exclusion (CPRC 2005),
together with the rising volume of humanitarian expenditure (Development Initiatives 2003), suggest that the developmental
assumption that a large part of humanity is capable of self-reliance makes for a cruel taskmaster.
Indeed, a state of emergency among self-reliant populations is now a permanent
condition . Rather than questioning the biopolitics involved, however, aid agencies usually infer that the emergency exists
because communities and peoples are not self-reliant enough. Consequently, each disaster initiates a fresh
developmental attempt to return the population concerned to a new and more resilient
condition of homeostatic self-reliance . This constant reproduction of the global life-
chance divide cautions against naively assuming that development is about narrowing this gulf,
for example by extending to Africa levels of social protection similar to those in Europe. The reality of development is, and always
has been, very different.
The enlightened self-interest that connects the security of mass consumer society with bringing the world’s non-insured life within
an effective developmental trusteeship is based on improving the self-reliance of those involved. Since decolonization, the dangers of
not doing this have been regularly cast as increasing the risk of international disorder. In particular, underdevelopment has the
Cumulative restrictions on
ability to foment all manner of destabilizing and illicit forms of global circulation.
international immigration , for example, have for decades been justified as resolving the problem of
the asymmetric demands made by non-insured migrants on European insurance-based welfare
systems (Duffield 2006). Rather than narrowing the life-chance gulf, development is better understood as attempting to contain
the circulatory and destabilizing effects of underdevelopment’s non-insured surplus life.
The divergence of insured and non-insured life
Regarding how the biopolitical divergence between development and underdevelopment emerged, Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that until the end of the nineteenth century, as a technology of trusteeship, development was usually regarded as a so lution to
the social problems associated with the underdevelopment of capitalism within Europe (ibid.: 5). Apart from experiments involving former slaves, it was not until the early part of the twentieth century and, especially, following decolonization, that development took
on its present geographical and human focus, that is, as means of protection and betterment associated with former protectorates and colonies (see Escobar 1995). Having origins as a remedy for the problem of surplus population within Europe, development has
now assumed a similar role in relation to an international surplus population.
During the nineteenth century development within Britain emerged from a number of abolitionist, free-market radical, liberal and socialist strands. It combined, for example, Saint-Simonian and Comtian concerns with social breakdown and trusteeship, radical
antipathy to landed interests and liberal anxieties over the negative consequences of industrial capitalism. Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that concerns over the surplus population, presented at the time as the ‘agricultural question’, were prominent
between the 1870s and the First World War. Due to the increasing use of mechanization and growing livestock production, rural migrants were swelling th e ranks of the urban unemployed, exacerbating unstable labour markets and exposing the limited amenities of
the towns. With radicals well represented in Parliament, the developmental approach to this problem took the form of an attack on landed interests and large-scale land ownership. Not only was it inefficient, it degraded the agricultural labour force. Both liberals and
radicals advocated land reform and its redistribution as a way of reabsorbing the surplus population. Land societies, for example, were formed for the purchase and redistribution of land in order to turn the surplus population into rentiers able to provide for their
own welfare independently of the state. Liberal and Chartist land societies, for example, fed into the earlytwentieth- century campaigns for smallholdings (ibid.: 258). The small-scale ownership of land and property was argued to encourage community cohesion,
local enterprise and, through the freedoms and responsibilities of self-reliance, political citizenship. At the same time, the induced labour shortage within the industrial areas would increase average wage rates, generating benefits for all workers. As Cowen and
Shenton cogently argue, it was a palliative doctrine of development that promoted rural colonization as a way of connecting surplus land with surplus population ‘and so eliminate the urban decay and destitution of British underdevelopment’ (ibid.: 260).
Such pressures exerted through Parliament eventually resulted in the 1909 Development Act. It proposed help and financial assistance to agriculture, rural industries, land reclamation, forestry, roads, inland navigation, harbours and fisheries within Britain. With a
rural bias, and not wishing to alarm industrial interests, the Act called for special attention to those sectors ‘which had little expectation of profit’ (ibid.: 285). The 1909 Act eventually petered out, being overtaken by other and more effective liberal solutions to the
problem of surplus population. As community-based development was moving overseas, in Britain it took a back seat. As argued in chapter 8, it would not come to the fore again until the 1960s. When it did so, this ‘internal’ development regime was concerned with
integrating communities of immigrant origin within British society. A number of factors help to explain development’s geographical relocation at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Mike Davis argues that the international ‘development gap’ first emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ‘when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated within the world economy’ (Davis 2001: 1) Using the electric telegraph,
railways, steamships and photography, and taking in the Americas, Africa and the East, this economy now interconnected the prairies of America with the steppes of Russia. In placing the acquired territory under the control of competing colonial powers, the New
Imperialism tended to restrict this market. At the same time, from annexation flowed the responsibility of government. This responsibility gave the liberal problematic of security a new concern. As Hobson argued, almost the whole of the regions appropriated by the
New Imperialism consisted of tropical or sub-tropical territories ‘with large populations of savages or “lower races”; little of it is likely, even in the distant future, to increase the area of sound colonial life’ (Hobson [1902]: 124). At the same time, by its acts and deeds
the British Empire had already shown itself to represent the very antithesis of the art of free government. As a consequence, imperial expansion ‘has increased the area of British despotism, far outbalancing the progress in population and in practical freedom
attained in our few democratic colonies’ (ibid.). The surplus population, initially internationalized in the scattered territories of freed slaves, and until now usually thought to be a problem of European underdevelopment, had been glimpsed as a global danger. In the
wake of two world wars, liberal opinion nurtured this global vision, first in the League of Nations and then in the United Nations.
Arising from a critique of the barbarity of the New Imperialism, Hobson’s remedy for the ‘lower races’ (which he always places within inverted commas) was that of educative trusteeship. In the years leading to the First World War, development found its way into a
complex of Fabian, liberal, idealist and radical opinion that, from different perspectives, arrived at ‘a common presumption that there was a natural African community of persons and producers, who had to be protected from the historical degradation of industrial
capital’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 292). This ‘Fabian nexus’ would grow to include liberal activists, Colonial Office officials, colonial governors and missionaries, and would eventually mature into the doctrine of Dual Mandate associated with indirect rule or, as Lord
Lugard calls it, Native Administration. In discharging the responsibilities of the ‘superior races’ to the ‘backward races’, indirect trusteeship favoured existing or natural rulers. It was based on the delegation of appropriate authority and administrative tasks to such
leaders, including the establishment of free courts, the provision of appropriate education ‘which will assist progress without creating false ideals; the institution of free labour and a just system of taxation; the protection of the peasantry from apprehension, and the
preservation of their rights to land, etc.’ (Lugard [1922] 1965: 58). Based on self-reliance, indirect rule was a developmental trusteeship (Cooke 2003). Through sympathetic and paternalistic guidance, together with local trial and error, it provided a framework
through which, in the fullness of time, the subject races could grow in social and political maturity (MacMichael 1934: 233–42). Chapter 7 returns to Native Administration when current policy on failed and fragile states is discussed.

Concerning the abandonment of development as a solution for Britain’s surplus population, it is relevant that Fabianism also
contained another strand: a remedy whereby the state acted as the trustee of capitalism as a system, taking
on ‘in the name of humanity’ the responsibility for the orderly redistribution of profit in excess
of that required for economic reproduction (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 270). Since state officials could be non-
sectarian, and their advancement ideally rested on the ability to increase social productivity in general, they had the
potential of becoming the trustees of society as a whole . Mixed with liberal and radical concerns, from
the 1880s there were growing political demands for more selective and less punitive poor law assistance and, especially, the
extension of such measures beyond relief to encompass the deserving poor: the sick, unemployed and aged, that is, those destitute
through no fault of their own. Demands were made for local and central government to improve the housing, sanitation and
nutrition of this group (Foucault [1975–6]). By the turn of the century many municipalities had begun to monopolize urban gas and
water supply. During the 1900s, for certain categories of the population, free school meals, old-age pensions, measures against child
abuse, legislation on the minimum wage, and housing and town planning acts limiting the spread of slums began to make an
appearance (Thane 1989).
In Britain the 1911 National Insurance Act introduced social insurance for the regularly employed, giving the worker entitlement
to health and unemployment benefit in exchange for compulsory weekly payments. Social insurance was intended to
build strong collaborative values within a state venture that mediated capital and
labour . The regular payments reminded workers of their obligation to save and exercise self-
help, while at the same time granting them ‘a contractual right to benefit’ (ibid.: 150). As Mitchell Dean
has argued, social insurance is not the only technology of social government, yet it is a particularly fecund one that
encounters risk at the level of population in a way that ‘both optimized solidarity and left
the individual free . To the extent to which it avoids the eugenic approach to social problems . . . it is a decisive and
exemplary illustration of the potential of liberal techniques of government’ (Dean 1999: 188). A
regulatory biopolitics continued to expand as a result of the social requirements and expectations generated by the First World War
and then, especially, by the Second World War. Britain’s 1944 Education Act provided general education, in 1945 family allowances
appeared and the National Health Service was formed in 1948. Such measures reflected a commitment to extend the benefits of
education, health and social insurance, previously reserved for the regularly employed, to the whole community. At the same time, it
reinforced the biopolitical tendency to foster the centralization of state power, in this case the growing control over local
government. This centralizing tendency is intrinsic to ‘the long-run liberal idea of equalizing opportunity’ (Thane 1989: 153). This
also serves as a reminder that the growth of the social was not always welcomed by those whose autonomy and independence were
being curtailed. While addressing the international situation President Truman of the United States announced a developmental
Point Four Programme in his 1949 inaugural address. His address signalled that the problem of surplus population was now
international in scope and, in so doing, he relaunched development and its security role in its contemporary interstate form. With
half the world’s population living in ‘conditions approaching misery’, for the first time in history ‘humanity possesses the knowledge
and skills’ to do the right thing and better this situation; moreover, the urgency of this moral obligation was underscored by their
poverty being a handicap ‘and a threat to both them and to more prosperous areas’ (quoted in Escobar 1995: 3). While today’s
politicians are still periodically rejuvenating this basic formula of enlightened self-interest in ‘new and improved’ ways, the
inauguration of interstate development concealed the contrast between the biopolitics of
developed and underdeveloped populations. The welfare state ameliorated the problem of
surplus life through social insurance and, in so doing, assisted the emergence of mass
consumer society. For populations in the former protectorates and colonies , however , as
will be seen in the following chapter, ideas of people-centred development continued to be framed in
relation to self-reliance based on small-scale land and property ownership operating at the level
of community. The continuing and widespread assumption of a self-reliant, natural economy is illustrated, for example, in the
International Monetary Fund’s post-Cold War futurology of global welfare regimes. In the former Soviet Union, where
modernization has already atomized households, it is felt that extended welfare safety nets are required. In less developed countries,
however, the extended family and community ‘operates relatively well as an informal social security scheme obviating the need for
the urgent introduction of large-scale public pensions’ (Kopits quoted by Deacon et al. 1997: 64). In other words, it avoids the need
for centralized social protection based on insurance or other guarantees.
From internal war to global instability
The biopolitics of insured and non-insured life are different but interconnected. They both act to address the
contingencies of life and so maintain population equilibrium. However, one supports the dependent consumers of mass society
through public/private technologies of insurance while the other attends to populations deemed to be self-reliant. Although
different, to borrow a phrase from Nasser Hussain, they are also temporally bracketed together. Rather than extending the
level of social protection enjoyed by insured life to its non-insured counterpart, development
is better understood as a
liberal technology of security for containing and managing the effects of underdevelopment. Since
decolonization, the security of the West has been increasingly predicated on establishing an effective
developmental trusteeship over the surplus population of the developing world. In addressing the
present conjuncture, this book offers a reflection on the significance of decolonization for the security of
the West and its relationship to the advent of unending war . While decolonization provided an
opportunity for the expansion of developmental technologies among an emergent world of peoples, it also constituted a threat in
terms of the new possibilities for global circulation that it made possible.
 LINK – ECONOMY
Administration of global economic order requires threat inflation and
subversion—results in greater overall violence
Neocleous, Prof of Gov, 8 [Mark Neocleous, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, Critique of Security, p95-]

In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection
between economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the
latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international
stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all – its economic strength – in
order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of
‘economic security’.99 Despite the fact that ‘econ omic security’ would never be formally defined beyond ‘economic
order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual con sistency between economic security and liberal order-building
also had a strategic ideological role. By playing on notions of ‘economic well-being’, economic security
seemed to emphasise economic and thus ‘human’ needs over military ones. The reshaping of
global capital, international order and the exercise of state power could thus look decidedly
liberal and ‘humanitarian’. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the
process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal freedom’
and‘social equality’.101
Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The
need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world
after its own image.102
In the second half of the twentieth century this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest
heavily on the logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security.
The whole world became a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of
security. In the space of fifteen years the concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies
for working people to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted
between these registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting
in a comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the globe. Global
order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a security
doctrine underpinned by the logic of capitalaccumulation and a bourgeois
conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security
implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any
development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only
could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only
nestled, settled and established connections, but also‘secured’ everywhere.
Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global
‘intervention’, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy
formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced
character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and
democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they
can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of
these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address
its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the
authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes
the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the
national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those
‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong side of history’.104
‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,‘there have been about 3,000 major
covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt,
destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert
operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’.105 These would include
‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam,
Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada,
Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa,
Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than
once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The
methods used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security –
‘making the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal
regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing;
subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose
mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of
terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old
fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving
the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of
fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of
the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108
Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory
‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain
under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey,
the five Central Asian republics that emerged with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole
world was to be included in the new‘secure’ global liberal order.
The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA
project in Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this:
Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the
jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a
figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one
million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia,
20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109
Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other
interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench
of history. All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which
became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush
reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and
launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it.
While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first century, the policy of
preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the
option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The
greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking
anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if
necessary, act pre emptively.110
In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on
terror’ is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of
‘economic order’. The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’
based on ‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the
benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111
 LINK – FAILED STATES
Their impacts are inevitable—fear of state failure stems from liberal anxiety over
an interconnected world—reject the dichotomy between liberal governance and
state failure
Mark DUFFIELD Global Insecurities Centre & Politics @ Bristol (UK) 10 [“Global Insecurities
Centre, Department of Politics Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide” Security Dialogue 41 p.
67-69]

With the ending of the Cold War, the steady increase in humanitarian disasters plus the
organizational imperative of a growing international rescue industry have helped justify a step-
change in humanitarian, development and peace interventionism—indeed, in all forms of liberal
interventionism. The permanent emergency of adaptive self-reliance provides a backdrop for the now well-rehearsed cartography of
breakdown and anarchy in the global borderlands (Kaplan, 1994). It includes the discovery of livelihood wars fought by non-state actors on and through
the modalities of subsistence, wars where the endemic abuse of human rights is part of the fabric of conflict itself (Le Billon, 2000). Such
wars
have generated their own narratives of state failure and state fragility (DFID, 2005), together with the
associated fears of uncontrolled refugee surges (Cabinet Office, 2008). At the same time, these ‘ungoverned
spaces’ are argued to lend themselves to capture and occupation by terrorist networks hostile to
Western interests (Development Assistance Committee, 2003). This endemic reimagining of underdevelopment as dangerous, however, also
renders self-reliance ambiguous. The liberal way of development privileges adaptive self-reliance. Importantly,
however, this is a particular form of self-reliance, namely, those modes of existence and lines of change deemed to be
safe or appropriate. Like beauty, sustainability is in the eye of the beholder. In practice, sustainability denotes internationally acceptable and
pacific forms of self-reliance. It is the self-reliance of NGO-audited microcredit projects, legal forms of economic self-
help, or the planting of commercial crops as substitutes for narcotics. These are approved forms of adaptive self-reliance. However, the reimagining of
underdevelopment as dangerous in, for example, the
literature on war economies (Kaldor, 1999) or descriptions of international
criminal networks (Castells, 1998), points
to another more challenging and edgy form of selfreliance. This is
adaptive self-reliance as radical autonomy. It signals the discovery of effective means of
existence beyond states and free of aid agencies. It includes novel forms of military self-provisioning, complete with radical
means of global circulation and evasion. This is the self-reliance of constantly mutating transnational shadow economies, changing diaspora dynamics
and complex adaptive systems that security actors worry are capable of sustaining adversary cultures (McFate, 2004). There is a tension between
internationally acceptable forms of adaptive self-reliance and, arising from the impossibility (and for many the undesirability) of this form of existence,
what could be called actually existing development (Duffield, 2002)—that is, those forms of adaptation, legitimacy and survival that exist despite, and
often in opposition to, official aid efforts. This
tension marks the point where the liberal way of development
shades into what Dillon and Reid (2009) have described as the liberal way of war . It marks a stage where actually
existing development tips from being acceptable into an unacceptable way of life. When
forms of radical autonomy and emergence are deemed to be a risk to the system as a whole—
indeed, to global-life itself—then the liberal way of war itself threatens to go global,
unrestrained and unlimited in discharging its new security responsibilities (Reid, 2009). Connecting Mass
Consumer Societies and Fragile States Given the circulatory powers of actually existing development, the struggle over acceptable
and unacceptable ways of life in the global south interconnects with the security of the global
north. Once war becomes a struggle over ways of life, and life itself is characterized by powers of emergence and radical interconnectivity (Duffield,
2002), then the old dichotomy between the national and the international, a division that still structures academic life, collapses within political
imagination (Blair, 2001). While a Fortress Europe remains an essential perimeter defence, the geopolitics of immigration control now appears
inadequate on its own. Since the end of the Cold War, the welfare bureaucracies and critical infrastructures of mass consumer society, essential for a
developed-life, have been reimagined as sources of systemic vulnerability. Non-intentional disasters like foot and mouth disease in pigs, Creutzfeldt–
Jakob disease in cattle, failures in the electricity grid, losses of computerized personal data, the fragility of just-in-time fuel deliveries and now swine flu
are constant reminders of the integrated nature of these infrastructures and their problematic resilience (Cabinet Office, 2008). Contemporary
disasters are made intelligible through enacting the possibility of catastrophic system-failure in terms of damage to one strategic node having a
radiating impact on others with which it is networked to produce a complex (cumulative and multileveled) disaster having society-wide effects.
When one factors in radical global interconnectivity—for example, refugee surges from failed
states, geopolitical threats to fuel supplies, health pandemics emerging from inadequate
infrastructure or, not least, the intentionality of terrorism (de Goede, 2008)—then mass consumer societies begin
to appear inherently vulnerable. Their integrated critical infrastructures, vital to maintaining a developed but dependent way of life,
become so many complex disasters waiting to happen. While the geopolitics of border control provides an important means of spatial ordering, new
sovereign frontiers and biopolitical campaigns have opened within mass consumer societies and the global borderlands. Having its origins in
decolonization, a global security framework has emerged that now works across the collapsed national–international, or inside–outside, dichotomy
(Bigo, 2001). Struggles against potential enemies internal to mass consumer society and operations waged against external networks or the ungoverned
spaces of the global borderland are now part of the same strategic terrain (IPPR, 2008). The overt geopolitical violence of the initial phase of the ‘War
on Terror’ (Graham, 2006) has now given way to an unending war that, rather than extermination, privileges the biopolitical management and
regulation of life within its appropriate social habitat (Gregory, 2008). Reconnecting with the turn to conflict resolution already evident in aid policy
during the 1990s, the initial neoconservative excesses in Iraq and Afghanistan have now vectored into counterinsurgency (Gonzalez, 2007). With
catastrophic violence having done its familiar job of redrawing spheres of influence and
reasserting racial hierarchies (Duffield, 2007: 191–197), it’s now business as usual as the liberal way of
development moves back to the political foreground.
 LINK – FOOD SECURITY/AGRICULTURE
Justifying food policies through catastrophic geopolitical consequences
naturalizes a liberal world order that’s the root cause of industrial agriculture and
environment collapse
Le Billon et al 14 [Melanie Sommerville, doctoral student in the Department of Geography at
the University of British Columbia, Jamey Essex, Assistant Professor of Geography at the
University of Windsor, & Philippe Le Billon, Professor at the University of British Columbia with
the Department of Geography, “The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security,”
Geopolitics 19:2, 2014]

Since 2007, rising prices and pronounced volatility in international food markets have combined to
dramatically refigure global food security and produce what many have termed a ‘global food
crisis’ . Driven by a variety of factors including demand for agrofuels, the intersection of food with oil and
financial markets, the steady erosion of agroecological systems and social safety nets, and pronounced
inequalities in global agro-food systems, these food price shifts have had profound social and
political effects. In many poorer countries, price spikes led to domestic unrest and
widespread food riots , prompting emergency market-control measures by several governments. Increased
unrest and rising food bills led many governments to reconsider their agricultural and food policies,
with exporting states shutting down food surplus shipments, and several import-dependent countries further
investing in offshore food production, a practice linked to a broader ‘global land grab’ with
severe repercussions for small-scale farmers and the rural poor. For many observers, these combined
social, economic, and political features have been read as the markers of a new ‘global food
crisis’, which has continued into 2013, and shows few signs of imminent resolution. Internationally,
concerns about a new global food crisis resulted in new funding streams, combining overseas
development assistance with philanthropic capital, and emphasising the development opportunities
associated with agriculture as the seat of rural economic growth. These new capital flows, in combination
with strengthened activism by agrarian social movements, have reshuffled the global governance
architecture around agriculture and food security, creating new political actors and allegiances and strengthening others. Yet
with almost 870 million people continuing to suffer from chronic and acute hunger, there are genuine questions
about whether the root causes of global food insecurity have been addressed, and indeed whether a
solution to the crisis is within grasp.1 Price shocks and the broader ‘food crisis’ have brought considerable
attention to the geopolitical dimensions of food security and the shifting political geographies of
agro-food systems more generally. In both popular and policy forums, food security increasingly appears as a
matter of urgent geopolitical calculation and strategy, and as an issue central to discussions of
national and human security, climate change , development and global inequality. Leveraging neo-
Malthusian predictions of an imminent descent into socio-political chaos amidst growing global food supply-
demand imbalances, such narratives call forth liberal humanitarian interventions promising
development for the hungry and security for the (privileged) rest of us in one tidy package. These doubly securitised
framings are now being used to press forward technological and market-driven solutions to food insecurity with new urgency.
Even as the global food crisis has offered a potent opportunity to challenge dominant agro-
food political paradigms, then, it has also tended to reinstall them. Political geographic
knowledges and geopolitical framings are not neutral in this process, but rather are deeply
inscribed within it. This re-prioritisation of food security within political discussions and the
geopolitical agenda appears to have gone largely unnoticed by political geographers . Indeed,
agriculture and food issues have long occupied a somewhat marginal position within the
subdiscipline, a curious situation given the growing attention they have garnered from scholars elsewhere in geography in recent
decades.2 Our aim in this paper is to begin reversing this pattern of neglect and filling the gap that has
resulted. Our paper proceeds in two main parts. In the first section, we
examine the geopolitical framings of
food security that have come to dominate popular and policy narratives in the last few years, and
demonstrate the importance of critical political geography approaches for unseating these
dominant narratives . We argue that these framings promulgate a neo-Malthusian and securitised
reading of food security that privileges technological and market-extending responses deployed
through further liberal humanitarian interventions . Rather than interrupting the structural conditions
underpinning the current food crisis, such instances of ‘neoliberal geopolitics’ obscure both the continuing
relevance of questions regarding inequality and domination within the global agro-food system,
and the role of crisis narratives in depoliticising recent interventions into this system. We call for
critical political geography perspectives to attend to the central role of geopolitical discourses in
constituting the political economy of agro-food production and consumption, and to highlight counter- and alter-
geopolitics readings of food security. In the second section, we take up this challenge by examining four key areas where such
approaches can help question the status quo, while also finding common ground with contemporary research in agro-food studies.
In so doing, we
hope to inspire political geographers to direct more attention to food and
agriculture as important areas of geopolitical inquiry.

That means the aff occludes the neoliberal and colonial development that cause
global environmental insecurity
Le Billon et al 14 [Melanie Sommerville, doctoral student in the Department of Geography at
the University of British Columbia, Jamey Essex, Assistant Professor of Geography at the
University of Windsor, & Philippe Le Billon, Professor at the University of British Columbia with
the Department of Geography, “The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security,”
Geopolitics 19:2, 2014]

Metabolic Geopolitics: Securitising Food, Hunger and Obesity Food has long been used as a ‘geopolitical weapon’,
from the burning of crops to quell insurgencies, to the deployment of famine in international
wars , to the use of food trade and aid to establish geopolitical dominance during
(supposedly) peaceful periods.51 But in the lead up to and the wake of the ‘global food crisis’ , both food and our
metabolic relationship with it have increasingly been conceptualised in terms that are at once
geopolitical and biopolitical, and that reveal the contradictions inherent to neoliberal
development models .52 Contemporary debates around food safety, hunger and obesity reveal
anxieties relating to recent changes in global agro-food systems and ongoing shifts in
political and economic ideology and power . In doing so, these debates demonstrate the
multiple ways in which both food and global appetites are being securitised. That food itself
has become a securitised commodity is perhaps most evident in the growth, especially since 9/11, of state
discourses highlighting the vulnerability of food production and distribution systems to bioterrorism. The threat of
deliberate food contamination adds a terrifying new bodily register to the politics of
agro-food system globalisation, and has resulted in the creation of new governmental
bodies , legislation , and ‘bromatovigilance’ practices.53 But the management of accidental
contamination – including that resulting from increasingly frequent food scares and
outbreaks of plant and animal diseases – raises similar geopolitical issues , including border
closures, government legitimacy crises , and new food surveillance and regulation
processes . Neoliberal responses introduce risk-based approaches relying on corporate self-
discipline and audit-based verification and emphasise the harmonisation of food safety standards, ostensibly to ensure the ‘free
flow’ of goods across borders. In doing so, they often profoundly restructure agro-food systems, favouring multi-national capital
while presenting barriers to small-scale producers, or introducing new forms of domination and vulnerability into post-colonial food
supply chains.54 These new food safety mechanisms are intimately bound up with geospatial
practices, including the reproduction of the neoliberal ‘security state’ (and its attendant population), as well
as the emergence of both intra-state and international relations as a means for managing and containing food safety hazards.55 Yet
it is not only food that is being securitised, but also global appetites, as narratives linking food
insecurity to global political and economic instability are regaining prominence following
the onset of the food crisis. Emphasising the rise of food riots and linking rising bread prices and the ‘Arab Spring’, such
accounts reproduce the neo-Malthusian ideology of earlier (and ongoing) debates about the political implications of the ‘changing
appetites’ of emerging economies, conflating hunger and demands for a ‘richer’ diet into a geopolitics of endangerment.56 By
defining ‘food scarcity’ as the future driver of ‘world politics’, such framings risk occluding or
even inverting the actual direction of a causal relationship, as outlined in seminal works on famine by
Michael Watts and Mike Davis: namely, that world politics (e.g., colonialism and the expansion of
capitalism ) determine food security , not the contrary.57 Moreover, casting food security in strongly
geostrategic terms marks an important shift in the meanings attached to the concept, and creates
tensions with humanitarian conceptualisations and practices.58 Articulations of humanitarian
institutions, spaces, and objectives with strategies that seem to favour status quo neoliberal
geopolitical approaches have heightened the ethical ambivalences of development assistance directed towards hunger
and food insecurity, and placed questions of ethics, morals, and responsibility at the centre of geographic debates over global food
security and food system governance more generally.59

The 1ac’s securitization of food crises results in a neoliberal food regime of

biodiplomacy that maintains liberal dominance
Le Billon et al 14 [Melanie Sommerville, doctoral student in the Department of Geography at
the University of British Columbia, Jamey Essex, Assistant Professor of Geography at the
University of Windsor, & Philippe Le Billon, Professor at the University of British Columbia with
the Department of Geography, “The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security,”
Geopolitics 19:2, 2014]

Food and the Geopolitics of Agro-Ecological Crises Framings of and responses to the food crisis are also tightly
interlinked to environmental issues and their geopolitical representations. Not only does agriculture
depend on ecological services, such as soil, rainwater and pollinators, but it is also a major ‘driver’ of environmental change. This
interdependence juxtaposes food production with an environmental crisis characterised by
climate change, deforestation, land degradation, widespread pollution and biodiversity loss.70 Covering about 40 percent of
the world’s landmass, agricultural activities account for 85 percent of consumptive water use, most deforestation, significant
biodiversity loss, and a third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.71 The food crisis is thus also an agro-
ecological crisis, the symptoms of which are partly found in environmental ills , and for which
proposed remedies often entail further environmental impacts . Contemporary accounts of this
agro-ecological crisis often stress the particularly negative environmental impacts of modernised or
industrial agriculture , whose massive scale, monocultures, and mechanisation are seen by many to have a uniquely
deteriorative quality. These contrast with earlier accounts, which stressed the destructive character
and underproductive outcome of small-scale or ‘traditional’ agriculture, and the need for more efficient,
intensive and larger scale agricultural sectors. Issues of scale remain significant within geopolitical
narratives of the food crisis. Options for addressing the crisis continue to be contrasted
according to their environmental impacts, often pitting supporters of ‘Sustainable Big Ag’, promising the agro-
environmental modernisation ethic of a truly Green Revolution, against the neo-Malthusian ‘Prophets of Doom’ with their concerns
of climate change and ‘peak everything’, or the supposedly ‘deluded Luddites of Small Ag’ who assert that ‘food localism’ and more
broadly food sovereignty can achieve food self-sufficiency for 7 billion people and more.72 In each case, geospatial
framings and power relations influence which model comes to dominate and through what
political processes. These dynamics play out in three major debates focused on the intersection
of agriculture, biofuels and climate change; the diffusion of the ‘Green Revolution’ and adoption
of genetically modified organisms (GMOs); and the ‘meatification’ of diets. As a key part of the hydrocarbon-
fuelled economy, the current agro-industrial model requires vast oil and gas inputs. Replacing
crude oil with agrofuels (or, to use the greener appellative, ‘biofuels’) is frequently portrayed by agro-
industry and supporting governments as part of the solution to high oil prices, the threat of ‘peak
oil’, depressed rural incomes, and concerns about climate change; domestic biofuel production is
also a supposed solution to the geopolitical quandary of reliance on ‘terrorfuel’ from the Middle East.73
Nadine Lehrer’s work on the ‘Patriotic’ rise of ‘biofuels’ in the 2008 US Farm Bill, shows how, through the discursive association of
“biofuels development with concepts of national security, energy independence, environmental conservation, and rural
revitalization, biofuels came to be seen as a ‘common good’ solution to many of the nation’s woes”.74 Yet first-generation
agrofuels, such as the corn ethanol that dominates US production, or oil palm-based fuels grown on deforested
land in tropical regions, mostly compound social and environmental problems by allocating farmland to
fuel rather than food production, while having a low Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) and heavy carbon footprint.75
Agrofuel production also further consolidates agro-industrial models with highly unequal
social relations between local farming communities and vast corporations, and ends up serving the
capital accumulation interests of agro-industries through a series of spatial and environmental fixes. These include the
diffusion of resource control to new production areas domestically and internationally, product
replacement (by shifting from fossil to biofuels), and market extension, adding cars to livestock, cheap
carbohydrates, and food aid to deal with agricultural surpluses.76 Privileging the choices and
interests of urban groups over those of rural communities, this logic entrenches a hydrocarbon
economy that aggravates climate-related concerns for agriculture, such as extreme flooding or
drought events. While fuelling the mobility entitlement of privileged populations in the global
North, agrofuels undermine the very production of food for some of the most vulnerable and least
culpable populations on the planet – namely subsistence farmers in drought-prone regions concentrated
in the Global South.77 A critical political geography perspective thus requires attention to how
agrofuel production is sustained through high fuel prices and continued agricultural subsidies in spite of these
effects. The reengineering of crops for biofuel development also adds a new dimension to the input-intensive
agro-industrial model that has come to dominate agricultural production in many countries. The geopolitical narratives of
the Green Revolution played a major role in establishing this model, through their portrayal of a
Global South in need of modernity and agro-industrial development . As critics point
out, the US instrumentalised the Green Revolution not only to feed the hungry, prevent the spread of
communism and widen the Sino-Soviet split, but also to establish a food regime in which Western agro-
industrial capital could become dominant.78 While Green Revolution narratives were deployed
less frequently following the end of the Cold War and the South’s stagnation in debt crises and
global trade liberalisation, they are now being mobilised anew in ‘South-South relations’. Examining the
deployment of Chinese Green Revolution narratives in contemporary agro-development
schemes in Mali, William Moseley argues that the region “ has been sold a set of flawed policies based
on a misreading of another region’s history and experiences .”79 The Green Revolution
gave way to a ‘Gene Revolution’ in the mid-1990s with the advent of genetically modified (GM) crops. Covering an estimated
150 million hectares (barely fifteen years after the first GM seeds were commercially planted), the expansion of these
crops is now fastest in ‘developing’ countries. Yet the adoption and regulation of GMOs pits
proponents and opponents against each other at a wide diversity of scales, from regional trading
blocs to neighbouring farmers and individual shoppers.80 The dominant geopolitical discourse
in these conflicts is one of a “new age of biodiplomacy ,” where agro-biotechnologies are used
to solidify US agro-dominance and advance the neoliberal food regime – a formulation to which the
dominance of firms like Monsanto gives credence.81 Tensions between the US and the EU and amongst food
aid recipients are further expressions of this discourse, as are suggestions that anti-GM movements that delay
domestic research and development in Europe – such as the Faucheurs Volontaires in France destroying GM field trials – are
‘unpatriotic’ and enabling of future US market dominance in agro-biotechnologies.82 At the same
time, widespread adoption of GM crops in the US and some Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, has raised
concerns about biodiversity and labour losses, especially following the impacts of GM corn on Mexican ecosystems and
farmers.83 Thatsuch adoption has come in part through companies’ use of aggressive commercial
and judicial practices to impose their patented seeds and resist product labelling is
particularly disquieting and provides opportunities for articulating the concerns of producers
and consumers in resistance movements. Some prairie farmers in Canada, for example, have used claims about the
supremacy of consumer choice and the environmental risks of GMOs to advance their own concerns about the extraction of surplus
from agriculture and the control of food systems.84 Such movements counter the grand claims of agro-
companies associating GM crops with greater food security and lower environmental
impacts , and point to the risk of GM crops locking even unwilling farmers and consumers in
‘adopting’ regions into a new, selectively profitable, phase of agro-industrial development.85
At risk is not only the diversity of crops and ecosystems nurtured by the great variety of
localised agro-ecological models , but also the many social cultures associated with food
growing and consumption, and more broadly the ethics of relating to the land and ‘nature’. As long
stressed by Arturo Escobar, the geopolitics of cultural framings here again plays an important
role.86

Their representations justify liberal interventionism and mask the structures

responsible for global famine and crisis
Le Billon et al 14 [Melanie Sommerville, doctoral student in the Department of Geography at
the University of British Columbia, Jamey Essex, Assistant Professor of Geography at the
University of Windsor, & Philippe Le Billon, Professor at the University of British Columbia with
the Department of Geography, “The ‘Global Food Crisis’ and the Geopolitics of Food Security,”
Geopolitics 19:2, 2014]

The emergence of food security as a pressing geopolitical concern is clearly demonstrated in the popular press, which has carried a
steady flow of stories about poor harvests, food shortages, famine, and rising food prices over the last six years. More in-depth
studies asking “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” and explaining “How Hunger Could Topple Regimes” have
appeared in Scientific American and Time, respectively.3 A June 2009 story in National Geographic asserted that the crisis
represents a Malthusian moment in humankind’s struggle to feed an ever-growing population, while former head of the US Agency
for International Development Andrew Natsios warned of “The Coming Food Coups” in The Washington Quarterly.4 More recently,
prominent environmental commentator and activist Lester Brown identified a “new geopolitics of food,” arguing
that the failure to resolve the underlying causes of the 2007–2008 food price increases and volatility meant that “the food crisis of
2011 is for real.” He warns that “farmers and foreign ministers alike” should get ready “for a new era in which world food scarcity
increasingly shapes global politics.” This new era of food-insecure geopolitics is driven by familiar ills (for
example, “population growth and climate change”) coupled
with deepening global inequalities and an
international system unable or unwilling to coordinate across the range of policy fronts required
to resolve the underlying roots of crisis.5 Yet it is not just the media that is heralding a new era of
food-insecure geopolitics, but also mainstream policy narratives . A report to the World Food
Program suggested that “food insecurity – especially when caused by a rise in food prices – is a threat
and impact multiplier for violent conflict”, though noting it is rarely the direct (and singular) cause of conflict.6
Participants to an FAO Forum on Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises “emphasized the circular link between food
insecurity and conflict”.7 The UN High Level Task Force on Global Food Security, the philanthropo-capitalist Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and many other development, aid, and philanthropic organisations have
suggested that there is an urgent geopolitical need for rapidly increased food production
through a so-called “new” or “second Green Revolution”, with massive new investments targeted for
agricultural production and research in the developing world.8 At a 2012 symposium in Washington on global food
security, US President Barack Obama stated that the danger of food riots and price volatility producing
global geopolitical instability “will only grow if a surging global population isn’t matched by surging food
production.” Investment in agricultural productivity that reduces the incidence of hunger and
vulnerability, argued Obama, “advances international peace and security – and that includes the
national security of the United States.”9 Although it is unsurprising that concerns about overpopulation, dwindling
resources, (under)productivity, and political turmoil are being aired amid the lingering impacts of food price shifts, we assert that
such concerns must be critically interrogated. Grounded in neo-Malthusian discourses of eco-catastrophe and the
return of environmental determinism (or, as Robert Kaplan put it, the ‘revenge of geography’), such
narratives overlook
the central role of politics in organising abundance and scarcity.10 They offer a securitised framing of
food insecurity, where hunger is seen not only as a politically revolutionary force but also as a fount of secondary problems such as
disease, terrorism, illicit drugs and refugees. In such framings, the dangers posed by hunger threaten to
reach far beyond the low-income populations and countries in which hunger resides. In doing so,
they open the way for liberal humanitarian responses rooted in the nexus of security
and development , and which rely on ‘technologies of betterment’ to resolve the threats posed by hunger and thereby
prevent their circulation.11 These efforts and discourses privilege technological solutions to complex conditions of food insecurity,
and hinge on the expansion and intensification of liberalised market relations and North-to-South technology transfers, doing little
to challenge existing inequalities or limit exposure to economic shocks that threaten livelihoods and contribute to vulnerability,
poverty, and hunger. As such they reflect not only the ‘rendering technical’ and ‘anti-politics’ aspects of aid projects, but also more
broadly the ‘post-political’ character of ‘common sense’ neoliberal policy debates.12 In this sense, a critical political geography
approach towards food crisis narratives can not only help reveal the assumptions and perspectives that frame them, but also how
this framing contributes to the reproduction of a conventional agro-food political paradigm. This paradigm is predicated on
assumptions drawn from two main realms. On the one hand, it employs the tropes of political realism to
construct a world in which combative nation-states are competing in a zero-sum contest for
global influence and power, with food security envisioned and strategised as an element of geopolitical risk and
calculation. On the other, it re-substantiates the battered but still-dominant economic
assumptions and practices of global neoliberalism , in which market openness and economic
interdependence and connectivity are enthusiastically embraced as policy platforms for
advancing food security. Both visions of world geopolitical space envision geographic
relationships between people and places in which food insecurity and resultant sociopolitical
unrest threaten, respectively, geospatial order and the security of the state and the unimpeded flow of investment
and trade upon which capitalist globalisation depends. The resulting ‘neoliberal geopolitics’ frame those people and places that are
disconnected from or that lie outside of such flows and systems of accumulation and calculation as gaps, risks, and threats.
Security-oriented responses reliant on traditional institutions of state power and geopolitical control
uneasily intertwine with coercive and unequal forms of neoliberalised economic connection,
extending and reproducing the power of dominant institutions and conventional paradigms while excluding other policy approaches
and discourses as unfeasible, too expensive, too radical, or simply illegitimate.13 Predictions of rapidly unfolding chaos sparked by
unequal access to uncertain food supplies advance a powerful geopolitical view of a world struggling with scarcity, as opposed to
inequality and domination, and on the brink of conflict, disaster, and generalised turmoil. Such chaos threatens the
vision of ever-increasing stability and growth that has guided the governance of food and
agriculture since the end of World War II, a vision of continued improvements in food security premised on the sustained
expansion of food supplies through Green Revolution technologies and methods designed to intensify and industrialise agricultural
production. The structural adjustment programmes that began in the 1980s and the liberalisation of
agricultural trade at the World Trade Organization after 1995 was supposed to stretch the benefits of this
system even further through a new supra-national governance and regulatory structure that
would bring the benefits of liberalised market dynamics to poor farmers and consumers around the
world. In the promised and hoped-for success of these initiatives, food security had little geopolitical relevance. While
significant food insecurity continued to exist, especially in many parts of the Global South, this
was seen primarily as an economic rather than a geopolitical issue, to be addressed through
injections of commodities, technology, capital, or expertise.14 In short, the increasingly hegemonic
geopolitical practices of a globalising agro-industrial model were rendered largely invisible by
universalising discourses of neoliberal development that depoliticised the model’s social and
environmental consequences. Popular framings of and responses to the current ‘global food
crisis’ could challenge these developmentalist discourses by postulating a future marked not by
steady progression toward improved food security, cohesive economic integration and international peace, but
by deteriorating food security, economic unravelling and political upheaval in the Global South
and, potentially, the North as well. The food crisis thus represents a disruption to the existing geopolitical
order of global agro-food systems, calling into question established food production and
consumption practices and neoliberal framings of food security. At the same time, however, it serves as an opportunity to
re-establish some dimensions of neoliberal hegemony, by directing new funding and investment
streams into the agro-industrial model , thereby reproducing and expanding the dominant
geopolitical order to incorporate new spaces, populations, and agro-food systems (especially but
not uniquely in the Global South), in effect turning ‘zones of chaos’ into ‘zones of potential growth’. What the food crisis
reveals is the degree to which shifting geopolitical discourses and interventions into global agro-food systems are
not just intimately interlinked with the political economy of agricultural production and food consumption, but rather
integrally constitutive of this political economy (and vice versa).15 In this context, conceptualising
recent shifts in food security as a temporally discrete and global ‘crisis’ is not a neutral framing,
but one that risks neglecting longer term and structural drivers of food insecurity, lending
legitimacy to securitised forms of intervention and creating new opportunities for
capitalist accumulation in the global agro-food system. This speaks to the need to bring a
critical eye to shifts in governance resulting from the food crisis, and to situate these amid longer term
trajectories of both agrarian change and geopolitical projects and discursive formations. Within this, it is also imperative to
examine the opportunities opened by gaps, silences, and failures in the prevailing geopolitical
order and to engage critical and radical voices that emphasise alternative geopolitical arrangements, including governance
from below and forms of de-globalisation, localisation, and translocal networking based on
peasant and consumer power.16 The extent to which these can contribute to a counter-
geopolitics of food that seeks to purposefully denounce hegemonic policies of food
security , and nurture the myriad alter-geopolitics of food embodied by communities
striving to pursue concrete alternatives to the agro-industrial model is also in need of further
elucidation.17
 LINK – HEGEMONY
The commitment to a liberal international security arrangement relies on coercive
world-ordering and violent intervention. The hegemonic agenda has failed to
prevent coercive conquest and has engendered a proclivity to continuous war-
making.
Porter 18—Patrick Porter, professor of international security and strategy at the University of
Birmingham (“A World Imagined: Nostalgia and Liberal Order,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis
No. 843, June 5th, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/world-imagined-
nostalgia-liberal-order#_idTextAnchor005)
The Hard Edge of the Liberal World Order
Lamentations for the end of the liberal order are also heard in the realm of “hard”
security. The U.S. hegemon, nostalgists warn, is losing (or has lost) the political will to
underwrite the international system through a commitment to permanent alliances and to
intervene to bring order out of chaos. Part of the current intellectual confusion flows from the
conflation of liberalism, which is supposedly peaceable, consensual, and benign, with the process of “world
ordering.” It is here that defenders of the old order present their most misleadingly anodyne
account of history . A review of the actual experience of the past 70 years suggests that the process of “world ordering”
must at times be coercive . For all the attractions of American hegemony abroad, there has also been resistance and imposition.
To understand how the superpower met that resistance and imposed itself, we must go beyond the romanticized postwar
moment of Trumanite internationalism in the late 1940s. Consider both ends of the chronology as it is usually
presented, from 1945 until the recent past. Admirers trace the restructuring of international life in that first year
to the visionary institution building that President Truman oversaw amid World War II, such as the United
Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco and its main creation, the UN Charter. In this rendering, the founders conceived
the liberal order through a collaborative process of institution building. The narrative is strikingly nonviolent .
In fact , to create the conditions for that visionary world making, the liberal order was conceived in blood . Only
months later, the same U.S. president launched two atomic strikes on Imperial Japan, immolating
and irradiating two of its cities after blockade, firebombing, and starvation had not broken its will. He did so to put down an adversary
that had been brutally pursuing a rival vision for an Asian order of its own. In order to create an order, Washington swept aside a
competitor by introducing a genocidal weapon into the world . There are powerful arguments that
this was the “least bad” choice available.52 Tellingly, though, in panegyrics for a dying liberalism, the words
“Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” hardly appear.
If there were liberal principles that underpinned the UN as it was founded in 1945, they were at first self-determination and sovereignty rather than
democracy and human rights. The world order was hardly born “liberal” in the sense implied today: recall that two of the permanent five members of
the UN Security Council were totalitarian communist states, and two of the democracies were managing colonial empires that they would not relinquish
for decades. Then and now, modern liberalism is antithetical to the grave exertion of state power still practiced in 58 countries, the death penalty. To be
sure, the birth of the post-1945 world order did advance some liberal ideas broadly. The general
norm against imperial aggression was one. This , however, was not strong enough to prevent or
dislodge China’s seizure of Tibet, the bids of Turkey and Greece to grab Cyprus, Israel’s occupation
of Gaza and the West Bank, India’s occupation of Kashmir and annexation of Goa, Indonesia’s
occupation of East Timor, or indeed the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe.
At the other end of the chronology, the present moment, consider that the U.S. hegemon has been
waging a “war on terror” against Islamist jihadi groups since the 9/11 attacks of 2001. In pursuing the
liberal cause of democratization as an antidote to terror , Washington entered the age
of “enhanced interrogation” and preventive war. Now, with new weapons (drones) at hand, Washington
conducts a sustained campaign of extrajudicial assassinations , often without the consent of host
countries and without seeking formal permission or mandates. It has conducted renditions of suspected terrorists
without trial. Reluctant to deal with live captives in indefinite detention, a more liberal president from 2009 increasingly avoided the dilemma
by killing them. Meanwhile, whatever benefits it has wrought, American unipolarity was not peaceful or
liberalizing for the unipolar power. The first two decades of the unipolar Pax Americana
after 1989, which made up less than 10 percent of America’s history, generated 25 percent of the nation’s total time at war. That period is more
bellicose by an order of magnitude than the preceding eras of bipolarity and multipolarity,
in terms of frequency if not intensity.53 Whether in Iraq and Libya, or now with U.S. assistance to Saudi
Arabia’s indiscriminate bombardment of Yemen, this proclivity to continuous war making
has not created a “liberal” condition of peaceful order. At home, there is a continuous state of
alarm and vigilance , whereby “normality” is permanently suspended by an unending state of
exception . This, combined with an encouraged state of paternalism where citizens are encouraged to be passive consumers of events, has
helped weaken the checks and balances of the republican Constitution.54 Detention without trial, secret,
warrantless surveillance, unauthorized wars, torture, covert “black sites” — these are not the obvious features of a robust liberal constitutional order. If
large parts of the world have not accepted liberalism in major areas of civic life, neither has the
United States.
Instead of a full reckoning with diplomatic history, nostalgists frame history around the positive creation of new architectures and schemes. Thus the
Marshall Plan (1948-1961) figures centrally in America’s postwar historic mission, based on, as Benn Steil puts it, “the moral primacy of democratic
government and free economic exchange.”55 This
absolute, almost platonic account of the past has little room
for other, less-celebrated events from the same era, such as the British- and U.S.-backed
overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, deposed despite his
commitment to national independence and secular democracy. In this picture, the violence
and compromises of hegemony , moral and strategic, almost vanish.
Nostalgia for the liberal order also overlooks the reality that it was enforced through coercion . In the same era, a
defining episode in the postwar assertion of American hegemony was the Suez crisis of 1956. In that
hinge event of the Anglo-American relationship, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stalked and harassed British ships in the Mediterranean, fouling their radar and
sonar, menacing them with aircraft and lighting them up at night with searchlights.56 With the British pound and oil supplies under pressure,
President Dwight Eisenhower threatened Britain with the simple formula of “no ceasefire: no loans.” Patronage
could be rapidly
withdrawn, regardless of recent history, blood ties, or shared visions of Western-enforced order.
The United States enforced its interpretation of that order by targeting its ally’s vitals.57
Between those two moments in time, the United States practiced geopolitics ruthlessly . It partly did so in the
course of its long security competition with the Soviet Union. Strikingly, the Cold War as it was actually conducted and lived — where two superpowers
did not allow rules, sovereignty, multilateralism, and institutions to constrain them when the stakes were high — does not occupy a prominent place in
the mytho-history. Hardly anywhere in nostalgic reminiscences do there appear the numerous
coups that were sponsored or supported by Washington. These interventions linked to the United States
since 1945 may or may not have been defensible. They certainly violated one of the claimed core principles of
“liberal,” “rules-based” order, that of self-determination .
The United States not only overthrew governments (sometimes democratically elected ones) — or attempted to — in
Albania, Ghana, Guatemala, Greece, Cuba, Chile, Iran, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, Argentina, and Grenada. It also
supported violently illiberal forces , from Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan-Pakistan and President Hosni Mubarak’s
oppressive state in Egypt to the Indonesian Suharto regime and its death squads. A mainstay of U.S. hegemony in the Persian
Gulf is its partnership with Saudi Arabia, an absolutist state that beheads apostates and survives
by making concessions to Wahhabi theocrats. It is currently waging a brutal campaign
against rebels in Yemen that, according to Amnesty International, includes attacks that are “indiscriminate, disproportionate or
directed against civilians and civilian objects, including funeral gatherings, schools, markets, residential areas and civilian boats.”58 NATO allies
on the European continent for decades included authoritarian Portugal and Greece . West
Germany, the poster child of the liberal order, did not have elections during its first four years, and its proud social democracy retained officials who
had been security elites in the Third Reich.59 Former Nazi mandarins stuffed the highest levels of government, including the Foreign Office and the
Interior and Justice Ministries. Several former Nazi generals would later become senior commanders in the Bundeswehr. And in the 1948 Italian
elections, the CIA helped ensure the electoral defeat of communists by funding anti-communist parties, forging documents to discredit the Communist
For the sake of
Party, and warning Italians that if they publicly supported the party they would be barred from entering the United States.
liberalism in the long term, the United States exercised its privileges. If the deliberate subversion of a
democratic election abroad with “fake news,” bribes, and coercion represents the antithesis of liberal world order, as Trump’s critics now suggest, then
Coups, partisan electoral interventions, the
Washington attacked that order in the period of its creation.
cooptation of illiberal actors, and the flouting of international law made American
hegemony unexceptional.
In dismantling the power of old European colonial empires, the United States erected a form of domination that had
an imperial quality of its own. Consider one of its more ambitious ventures in liberal ordering: the invasion and
remaking of Iraq . The occupiers of Iraq regarded themselves as liberators. After invasion, though, the United States also
projected power over Iraq’s interior governance in imperial fashion and with a liberal
program, with all the tensions this implies. Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer applied a
program of rapid liberalization not only through the well-known de-Ba’athification and disbanding of the Iraqi Army, but
through the order for “the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by
foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits … the opening of Iraq’s
banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and … the elimination of
nearly all trade barriers .”60 The United States continued to impose itself on Iraqi politics
when it wanted, demanding and receiving the resignation of elected prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in May 2007. Intended to implant
market democracy, these measures infringed the country’s sovereign democratic will. In other words, the liberators were freeing the Iraqis to conform
with the occupier’s preferences.
It remains hard to have an empire without imperialism. Yet many visions of liberal order erase the historical process
of imperialism, decentering, as Jeanne Morefield argues, “ imperial violence while simultaneously
positing the necessity of imperial action .”61 If liberalism at a basic level is an
enlightenment project committed to liberty, equality, and limitations on state power, and if
“world ordering” requires imperialist power projection, it is hard to fuse them without
friction . Some may conclude from this historical record that, in the history of American hegemonic
“world ordering,” liberalism was missing in action. On each occasion, critics have accused the United States of betraying its
own liberal traditions in the pursuit of power. But it is hard to believe that a republic whose leaders so often and so
intensely enunciate liberal principles is really driven by secret, amoral cynicism . A more
troubling possibility should be considered. Liberalism is a powerful engine of American
statecraft, but that statecraft often violates liberal principles. As a dogma of foreign policy,
liberalism is jealous, intolerant, and messianic . Applied unchecked, it leads to its own
illiberal opposite .62 The practitioners of rough geopolitics were not necessarily hypocrites. They often believed they were serving the
ultimate cause of forging a liberal peace under American oversight but that to do so they had to accommodate illiberal allies and pitilessly destroy
liberalism’s enemies. In
this way, a superpower attempting to create a liberal order permits itself to
employ unsentimental methods.
Thus in February 2017, David Petraeus could recall sincerely that “to protect freedom here at home, we adopted a foreign policy that sought to protect
and, where possible, promote freedom abroad, along with human rights and rule of law,” invoking American values such as “political pluralism” and “a
free and open society.”63 Yet as commander in Iraq, Petraeus sought to reverse that country’s implosion and salvage victory by compromising these
standards. To that fight, he brought pragmatic, byzantine divide-and-exploit methods, paying for the defection of former Iraqi insurgents and working
with Shia paramilitary units not known for their commitment to the Hague conventions. As director of the CIA, Petraeus advocated and implemented a
campaign of “signature” drone strikes, whereby the assailant knowingly targets a group gathering — at a funeral for an al Qaeda member, for instance —
because of their suspicious behavior and association, rather than through verified identification of the presence of individual persons. Such strikes,
therefore, can also threaten noncombatants and the innocent.64 To bolster the struggling rebellion in Syria, Petraeus later in 2015 advocated luring
away and recruiting “opportunistic” members of the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra, then formally affiliated with al Qaeda.65 This is not the place to arbitrate
the wisdom and legitimacy of such measures. Dealing with conflicts in such places is a choice of agonies, and no doubt Petraeus and his peers regard
themselves as guarding Americans while they sleep and trafficking with lesser evils to keep greater ones at bay. But note that a
senior
advocate of liberal order can also advocate measures that risk “crowd killing” and that involve
enlistment of members of jihadi terrorist organizations and collaboration with sectarian
governments. Champions of liberalism must somehow navigate their ideals through the
illiberal demands of warfare.
Nostalgists for the liberal order also betray a shallow conception of their central idea, liberalism. They conflate liberalism with other
desirable phenomena, like capitalism and democracy. They neglect the possibility of illiberal democracy, and illiberal capitalism.
Majority democratic rule does not equate with, or necessarily produce, a liberal protection of individual rights such as the
presumption of innocence or trial by jury, a liberal tolerance for opposition and dissent, or a constitutional order that separates
powers and constrains government through an independent judiciary or a free press. Capitalism can also be illiberal, as the Chinese
Communist Party demonstrates. One of America’s long-term allies, Singapore, evolved as a supervised market democracy that
curtailed the right to dissent. South Korea, an ally and protectorate within America’s Asian system, evolved first as a dictatorship
under authoritarian founding fathers who were also modernizers, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee. These authoritarians
nurtured the chaebol business groups, Hyundai, Daewoo, and Samsung. Free markets took root first as highly protected markets
under unfree political conditions. Such contradictions are absent from liberal-order panegyrics.
As it is recalled, the “liberal order” embodies the permanent commitment of the United States to alliances and institutions without coercion. A broader
historical perspective suggests, however, that Trump’s coercive treatment of allies is less of a break with the past than is often thought. In reality, the
United States has often coerced allies with threats of abandonment and punishment.66 In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatened
Europe with an “agonizing reappraisal” of alliances. In 1973 and 1974, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger
suspended intelligence and nuclear cooperation with Britain to punish noncooperation over a U.S.-initiated declaration of principles and the privacy of
bilateral and UK-European Economic Community discussions. The United States has used the threat of abandonment to persuade allies and clients to
cancel their nuclear programs, including West Germany, Japan, and Taiwan, while threatening adversaries with sanctions or preventive war. The
demand that European allies shoulder more of the burden of military expenditure has been a staple of U.S. diplomacy, from President Eisenhower to
former secretary of defense Robert Gates. Despite Britain spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq to support the war on terror and cement
its standing in Washington, President Obama made a blunt threat that departing from the European Union would place the UK at the “back of the
queue” when seeking a bilateral free trade agreement. Assured
commitment to institutions and allies through only
positive solidarity is a false memory. This underlines the pattern whereby Washington
underwrites a liberal world order not by adhering to its principles but by stepping outside them,
practicing punishment, threats, and bribes that it would not accept if directed at itself.
In “liberal order” litanies, another persistent claim is that the order was “rules-based.” It was
not. Rules exist, and flouting them can have costs. But at critical moments for strong states such as the permanent five
members of the UN Security Council, rules proved to be slippery ; they were invoked, stretched, arbitrarily
altered, or ignored, as interest permitted. The unreality of nostalgic legalism was
illustrated in the summer of 2016 by two adversaries who both at different times have appealed
to “rules” as the arbiter of international order. China defied the unanimous ruling of the
Permanent Court of Arbitration, which found against its territorial claims, and continued to expand into the
South China Sea and seize disputed waters, islands, and shoals. At the same time , the United States appealed to
China to respect the “legally binding” verdict yet had not even ratified the UN Convention on the
Law of the Sea that it urged China to observe. From ignoring the International Court of Justice over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors in 1986
to bombing Serbia in 1999 without a UN mandate, the United States has infringed on the letter of international law when it has found that other
interests or values were compelling. It exercised a vigilante’s privilege. So too did other major powers. For less powerful and emerging
states, the writ of liberal order was often remote, as they “routed around” rules to pursue their
interests. In this century, Africa, from the Great Lakes region to the Sudan, has seen millions butchered,
displaced, and unavenged . The era may have involved greater degrees of “rule following”
than earlier eras. But it was not “based” on the observation of rules, at least not for the major
powers. To rebrand this fraught history of power politics as an era of rule-bound civility is perverse. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in calling
for the conservation, or restoration, of an order on the basis that it represents something better. In this case, though, the nostalgia rests
on delusion — about what the world was and what it can be.
 LINK – HUMAN RIGHTS CONDITIONS
Limiting arms to HR violators acts as maintenance of militarism, creating
conditions for global regulation of lesser powers
Cooper 11 (Neil, PhD and Head of the Division of Peace Studies and International
Development at the University of Bradford, Contemporary Security Policy, “Humanitarian
Arms Control and Processes of Securitization: Moving Weapons along the Security Continuum,”
published May 24th, 2011, accessed online at Taylor and Francis, pages 149-150, JME.)
If neoliberalism has facilitated a more permissive approach to arms transfer regu-lation then
this raises the question of why any limits have been introduced at all? As already noted above, one
part of the answer is rooted in the relationship between legitimized and heroic weapons and those military technologies that lie
outside the boundaries of the heroic and the legitimized. Being the ‘other’ of legiti-mized military technology
facilitates successful problematization and indeed ‘extra-securitisation’. Additionally however, the
architecture of global arms trade regulation has been transformed in the post-Cold War era along with the transformation in the
objects of security that accompanied the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, the global architecture of
conventional arms trade regulation, like arms control more gen- erally, was principally focussed
on managing East–West tensions. One consequence was a substantial extension of the range of dual-use goods invested
with security labels in relation to trade with Eastern Europe, most manifest in debates in the early 1950s between the United States
and European states over the operation of CoCoM (Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls). 85 In contrast, the
developing world was merely an object of security competition between the superpowers and therefore a site for the supply of arms
to allies. With the dissolution of the Soviet threat the focus has turned more to the management of
North–South relations as the developing world has been reconstructed as the source of diverse
security threats 86 and as humanitarian intervention has resurrected similar concerns
with the maintenance of order in the developing world that animated the arms
restrictions in the Brussels Act. One manifestation of this has been in the reframing of small arms as instruments of
disorder rather than the means to shore up Cold War allies. A further example is the replacement of the CoCom regime with the
Wasennaar Arrangement, focussed particularly on restricting transfers to pariah regimes in the global South. This shift in focus is
also manifest in the significant rise in the use of arms embargoes in the post-Cold War era. For example, between 1945 and 1990
only two mandatory embargoes were imposed globally, on Rhodesia and Africa, respectively. Since the 1990s there have been two
voluntary and 27 mandatory cases of sanctions, the vast majority of which have been aimed at actors in Africa. 87 Sanctions,
just like the efforts to control arms to Africa in the late 19th century have not been hugely suc-
cessful in reducing the supply of weapons to combatants. Nevertheless, they can be
understood as animated by much the same desire to maintain order in the periph-
eries of the world, particularly in a context where Western powers have once again taken on a
greater responsibility for policing and managing instability in the developing world. Thus, the
post-Cold War regulation of the conventional arms trade is simul- taneously characterized by a
relatively more permissive approach to arms transfers in general but also a redirection of
controls away from the governance of East– West relations and towards the governance of North–South relations and
particularly the disciplining of those actors framed as rogue or pariah in the security
narratives of dominant actors. The campaign to promote an arms trade treaty may yet produce a more meaningful
architecture of arms transfer control – the jury is out. However the framing of the Arms Trade Treaty to the defence industry is
perhaps instructive. For example, the UK’s Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control has noted, the ATT ‘...is
about...export controls that will stop weapons ending up in the hands of terrorists, insurgents,
violent criminal gangs, or in the hands of dictators’. 88 It should also be noted that current efforts to develop a
global agreement on the arms trade echo late 19th th and early 20th th century initiatives to govern the inter- national arms trade,
most notably: the Brussels Act, the 1919 St Germain Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and the 1925
Arms Traffic Convention. Although the latter two never received the necessary ratifications to come into force both were animated
by the same imperial concern to prevent disorder in the colonies that had underpinned the Brussels Act. As Stone has noted with
regards to the St Germain convention for example, ‘there was little doubt among representatives in Paris [where the Convention was
signed] that keeping arms out of African and Asian hands was St Germain’s chief task’. 89 Accordingly, the conven- tion
imposed far stricter restrictions on sales to these areas as well as a ban on arms shipments
to ‘any country which refuses to accept the tutelage under which it has been
placed’. 90 Indeed, although the convention never came into being, European powers nevertheless agreed informally to carry
out its provisions in Africa and the Middle East. 91 The 1925 convention similarly imposed more severe restrictions on exports to
special zones that covered most of Africa and parts of what had been the Ottoman Empire. 92 Thus, viewed against this
broader history of arms regulation, negotiations on a putative Arms Trade Treaty (rather like
action on APMs or cluster munitions) do
not represent a novel post-Cold War development that
symbolizes progress on an emancipatory human security agenda consonant with the promotion
of local and global peace. Instead, it reflects the emergence of particular sets of relationships
between power, interest, economy, security, and legitimized military technologies that in turn
create the conditions of emergence for historically contingent architec-tures of
global regulation.

Empirically, policies restricting US arms sales to human rights violaters fail

because they’re based in liberal militarism- legitimates the military industrial
complex and justifies violence
Stavrianakis 16 (Anna Stavrianakis, lecturer in International Relations at the University of
Sussex, “Legitimizing liberal militarism: politics, law and war in the Arms Trade Treaty”, Third
World Quarterly, 37 (5), pp.840-65)//vl
Claims about the normative power of conventional arms transfer control regimes have been
sternly tested by empirical studies. Studies of patterns of arms exports demonstrate how the
"self-declared ethical turn" of major western arms suppliers in the 1990s has not
acted as a bar on weapons exports.34 The US and Western European states "have
generally not exercised export controls so as to discriminate against human rights abusing or
autocratic countries during the post-Cold War period."35 At best, the effect of the EU Code of
Conduct, which served as one of the templates for the ATT, has been that "EU members no
longer appear to reward poor human rights with arms transfers, even if they are not punishing it
either."36 And in specific cases such as EU member states' arms transfers to Libya, evidence
demonstrates comprehensive violation of export control principles even though exporting
governments were aware of the risks posed by transfers: licence denials "constitute exceptions in
an overall export-friendly environment."37 These empirical patterns raise the question
of how liberal states manage to both transfer weapons to human rights violating
and authoritarian regimes, and claim the mantle of responsibility by being
publicly in favour of the ATT. The empirical studies cited above tend to adopt a realist
explanation in which seemingly normatively progressive regimes serve as rhetorical cover for
material or strategic interests,38 yet they do not go into detail as to how that process works.
Realist explanations are inadequate because they fail to take into account the hard work that
such rhetoric performs or the way that regimes function often despite the good intention of
some proponents.39 Law and regulation are not merely superficial cover, a distraction from a
focus on the advancement of material interests: law "does matter; that is both the problem and
the promise."40 Thus whilst constructivists are right that rationalist assumptions of narrowly
instrumental behaviour are false,41 they do not give an adequate explanation of the significance
of the morally oriented work that is going on in the ATT: the ways in which a seemingly
progressive initiative contains the seeds of its own complicity in broader systems of preparation
for war and violence. Yet Price does point to how, "if hypocrisy becomes too endemic then it may
undercut the power of the moral legitimacy more generally that is required for hypocrisy's
piggy-back effects."42 So it may be that arms transfers are so embedded in hypocrisy that
normative shaming is less effective. As Erickson argues, "the ATT faces a hard road ahead":
"without the means to expose and punish noncompliance, ... [ambitious policies] do little
more than enhance states' reputations without improving human rights and
conflict conditions on the ground."43 Yet "Research explaining major suppliers' support
for 'responsible' arms export controls is lacking."44 -To start thinking about this gap between
commitment and compliance, and to explain major suppliers' positions, I advance the concept of
liberal militarism. This moves beyond arguments based on hypocrisy and instrumental or
functional pursuit of material interests, in order to explain key effects of the treaty in ways other
approaches cannot. The normalization and legitimation of liberal ways of war and war
preparation via the ATT are an important component of contemporary militarism.
Neoliberalism has incentivized increase in arms sales
*possible neolib link/link turn
Cooper 11 (Neil, PhD and Head of the Division of Peace Studies and International
Development at the University of Bradford, Contemporary Security Policy, “Humanitarian
Arms Control and Processes of Securitization: Moving Weapons along the Security Continuum,”
published May 24th, 2011, accessed online at Taylor and Francis, pages 147-149, JME.)
The approach adopted to the regulation of the arms trade in general does not only reflect the security labels attached to particular
kinds of technology or the direct interests powerful actors may have in constraining such technology. Regulatory
approaches to the arms trade are also a function of the particular paradigms of political
economy that dominate in specific era. In part this is because they link into particular
understandings of what constitutes economic security. But the link between regulation and the paradigms of
political economy go beyond this, reflecting a much more fundamental common sense about economy and trade. For example, the
rise of mercantilism from about the 1600s meant the previous dominance of private arms traders was replaced by that of
government arsenals64 and the emphasis on autarky encouraged a more restrictive approach to the regulation of arms transfers.65
In England for example, Queen Elizabeth I issued an order in 1574 restricting the number of guns to be cast in England to those ‘for
the only use of the Realm’66 and further Ordnances restricting the export of arms were passed in 1610 and 1614.67 In contrast, the
shift in economic ideology from mercantilism to capitalism led to the more laissez-faire approach to the regulation of arms transfers
in the late 19th century already described above. Britain moved to a more laissez-faire basis from 1862 onwards, France passed
legislation in 1885 reinstituting the private manufacture of arms and also repealed the law prohibiting exports.68 Indeed, this was
an era in which the Prussian government did not even feel able to compel Krupp to abjure exports to Austria on the eve of war with
that country in 1866.69 Economic philosophy also shaped both discourse and practice on the regulation of the arms trade in the
aftermath of World War I. Against the background of what Buzan and Waever have described as a
broader attempt to ‘construct war as a threat to civilisation’ after World War I70 private arms
manufacturers were particularly castigated for the role they had supposedly played in fomenting
war fever to promote sales, a role facilitated by their alleged control over the press in many
countries.71 This partly explained the attempts in 1919 and 1925 to develop international agreements on the regulation of the
arms trade, although in reality a broader set of international order and security concerns were also at work (see below). However,
the 1919 and 1925 agreements never received the necessary ratifications to come into force (although they did have important legacy
effects) and the laissez faire approach to the arms trade still predominated throughout the 1920s. It was only in the 1930s that
concern about the activities of the arms manufacturers gained particular salience in both the media and policy circles. In part this
may have been a function of the deteriorating international situation, but as Harkavy has argued, it was also a function of the fact
that the Great Depression had prompted widespread doubts about the general viability of the capitalist system.72
Consequently, nationalization and greater government oversight of the arms industry was
presented by campaigners and, indeed, some governments, as a vehicle to ensure arms profits
were not pursued at the expense of either state interests or world peace. Although nationalization was,
with the exception of France73 mostly avoided, by the mid-1930s most of the major arms producing states had begun to develop
formal defence export licensing systems.74 In other words, this was the moment when the institutions and processes were
established that would produce the many thousands of ordinary extraordinary export licensing decisions that now occur on a weekly
basis, the point of genesis for a particular habitus of a particular set of security professionals. This shift was not solely a function of
debates about the role of arms merchants in World War I, nor was it purely a consequence of the doubts about unmanaged
capitalism sowed by the Great Depression. Issues of power and security as well as the moments of intervention represented by
successive attempts to agree international arms regulation all played their role in this shift (see below). Nevertheless, attitudes to
economy were an important part of the mix. In the Cold War, the regulation of arms transfers was structured so that it was
simultaneously permissive vis-a`-vis transfers to allies and highly restrictive vis-a`-vis allies of the Soviet Union. In the West at
least, these security rationales overlapped with the dominance of Keynesian approaches to the
economy in which the preservation of defence production emerged not only as a strategic
imperative but as a form of welfare militarism – aimed at maintaining jobs, stimulating
economies in times of recession, and preserving key technology sectors. This implied the further
extension of government oversight of arms sales (albeit principally on a national basis rather than through
international negotiation) and government’s role in the promotion of arms sales. It also meant that
arms sales were pursued primarily (if not exclusively) for political rather than economic reasons. This
contrasted sharply with the late 19th century and even inter-war years when private industry and the search for arms profits were
the principle factors driving supply. However, the end of the Cold War coincided with (and reinforced) underlying shifts in
conceptions of economy and security that influenced the debate on arms transfer control. In terms of economy, the neoliberal
agenda had already been thoroughly mainstreamed in the policy discourse of governments. Greed was good, profit was better and
market principles were the order of the day. In terms of domestic defence procurement policies this was reflected in a shift to the
much wider application of competition policy, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom.75 In terms of the approach
to major arms transfers it underpinned the shift to a more commercial attitude that had been gradually evolving from the 1960s
onwards. Already by 1988 one analyst could note that ‘the political factors that dominated the arms trade in the recent past are
yielding to market forces... the arms trade is returning to its patterns prior to World War II, when the trade in military equipment
was not dramatically different from the trade in many other industrial products’.76 The comparison with the pre-World War II era is
perhaps exaggerated – not least because the frameworks of national oversight and national export promotion are far more extensive,
as are the frameworks of international regulation. Nevertheless, whilst one feature of the post-Cold War era has been the
proliferation of international or regional initiatives to ostensibly restrain arms proliferation, an equally notable feature has been the
relaxation of restrictions on arms supplies, particularly to allies. Both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations in the United
States have attempted to ease restrictions on exports to key allies, most notably in the form of defence trade cooperation treaties
with Australia and the United Kingdom announced in 2007, although these have yet to be ratified by the Senate.77 The effect of
these agreements will be to permit the licence-free transfer of defence goods between the United States and each of the
signatories.78 The Obama administration has, in addition, committed itself to a radical overhaul of the American export control
system to make it easier to export weapons to American allies and to emerging markets such as China. For example, the
administration has claimed that in the case of items related to tanks and military vehicles, the new rules would remove 74 per cent of
the items currently on the US Munitions List.79 In other words, the export of brake pads for tanks may no longer be subject to a
regime of extraordinary measures. Similar processes have been at work in other countries. For example, in 2002 the United
Kingdom announced changes to its methodology for assessing licence applications for components to be incorporated into military
equipment for onward export, a reform generally interpreted as opening ‘a significant export licensing loophole’,80 whilst in 2007
the French government announced it would ease restrictions on products moving within the European Union.81 At the same time as
this occurred NGOs became more focussed on the security outcomes stemming from the trade in small arms and landmines. To
the extent that NGOs and academics have engaged with the issue of major conventional arms
transfers, they have tended to follow the lead set by government and industry by engaging with
the economic rationale for defence exports – albeit in an attempt to debunk them.82 The
combined effect of this has been to give a more central place to a technocratic discourse on
major weapons transfers focussed on their economic costs and benefits to suppliers . This is not to
suggest that strategic rationales for arms transfers have disappeared completely – they still remain important factors in specific
cases particularly post-9/11. Nevertheless, as Hartung has noted, with the end of the Cold War, the economic rationales for arms
sales ‘moved to the forefront’.83 One corollary of this greater emphasis on the economics of arms sales has been the post-Cold War
deproblematization of major arms transfers84 at least in terms of debates about their security outcomes. Today, such sales are
primarily discussed (by exporters at least, if not by recipients and their neighbours) in the language of the technocrat and the banker
- the language of jobs, financing terms, market share, and performance evaluation. Indeed, both government and NGO
security concerns about the negative effects of the arms trade have bifurcated – with concern
focussed either on the problem of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) (problematized primarily in terms of
their potential acquisition by rogues) or, at the other end of the scale, on issues such as small arms (primarily
problematized in terms of the illicit rather than the legal trade in such weapons).
 LINK – INTERNATIONAL LAW
Reject the forced choice of international law’s universality---aligning with those
living under colonialism opens political space for alternatives
Tayyab Mahmud 10, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Global Justice, Seattle
University School of Law. ARTICLE: COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHIES, POSTCOLONIAL
BORDERS, AND ENDURING FAILURES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE UNENDING
WARS ALONG THE AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN FRONTIER, 36 Brooklyn J. Int'l L.

The doctrine of uti possidetis, far from being grounded in any sound legal principle, is thus more
a political instrument to legitimize existing state boundaries. The precarious status of the norm was underscored by the Beagle
Channel Arbitration's observation that it is "possibly, at least at first, a political tenet rather than a true rule of law." n405 Koskenniemi sees in the recognition of uti possidetis
Demarcation of boundaries is,
an acknowledgment that the ethical conception of international law cannot override the sociological. n406

essentially, a political act. However, when reified by international law, these boundaries appear
to have an identity separate from politics of the international system. The primary rationale for the adoption of the
principle has been to avoid territorial conflict among post-colonial states, particularly in the light of international law's primary role--preservation of order. n407 While peace
and order remain elusive in the global system, uti possidetis furnishes a cloak of legitimacy [*66] over colonial disposition of territories of the global South by sidestepping the
questions of the origins of these dispositions. By forcing disparate people to circumscribe their political aspirations within predetermined territorial bounds, uti possidetis
reverses the vision of self-determination that seeks to protect vulnerable populations by allowing them political and territorial arrangements of their own. n408 Ian Brownlie is
unequivocal in stating that "it is uti possidetis which creates the ambit of the pertinent unit of self-determination, and which in that sense has a logical priority over self-
determination." n409 The problem is that this logical priority furnishes the grounds for actually giving territory priority over people when confronted with assertions of the right
of self-determination. C. Colonial Boundaries, Unequal Treaties, and International Law Treaties between imperial powers and a variety of agreements between colonizers and
native authorities played a key role in determining the spatial scope of spheres of control and influence. n410 The Durand Line, [*67] like borders of most postcolonial states, is a
legacy of such treaties, particularly the 1893 agreement between the Afghan Amir and the British. n411 As disputes arise about the validity of these borders, questions about the
legal status of the treaties that determined these borders surface. Most salient among these is the issue of unequal treaties. However, in tune with its gloss on the doctrine of uti
possidetis to protect the status quo, modern international law has similarly resisted confronting the question of unequal treaties for the same purpose. The Durand Line raises
the question of the validity of the 1893 agreement dictated by the British to the reluctant Amir of Afghanistan, a vassal installed over a protectorate in all but name. n412 While
the question of unequal treaties appears to have
examining the validity of such arrangements, one is confronted with the fact that

"evaporated as an issue from the domain of international law," and stands "consigned to the dustbin of 'redundant ideas,'"
n413 deemed a mere "political" argument with scant legal valance. n414 How does a question implicated in colonial territorial treaties that imprison the postcolonial world in
arbitrary spatial cages become invisible to international law? It took a series of conceptual and institutional maneuvers to make it disappear from sight. The status of unequal
treaties n415 in international law first arose in the nineteenth century in the context of treaties between Western powers and East Asian states n416 and was rehearsed in the
early twentieth century by [*68] Soviet jurists. n417 Drawing on extra-textual contexts that animated the texts of colonial treaties, Asian states and Soviet jurists argued that
because imperial powers had used their dominant military position to gain concessions through treaties forced upon weaker states, such treaties were invalid. Because these
agreements were the products of coercion, they implicated questions of status of parties, the context in which agreements were secured, and the nature of consent involved. The
issue of inequality arises both in terms of unequal bargaining power of the parties and the substantive lack of equilibrium with respect to benefits and burdens allocated by these
treaties. Note here that in some instances, the harsh and humiliating terms of unequal treaties were instrumental in the rise of anti-colonial resistance and nationalism in Asia
and unprecedented collective military action by Western powers to quell this resistance. n418 Indeed it was the coordinated military action in China by Western powers to put
down the anti-Western Boxer Uprising of 1900 that fashioned a new and enduring stratagem of international politics--collective military action by the Western powers in the
global South. n419 Faced with questions about the validity of unequal treaties, the initial Western response was that these treaties were necessary given the "backwardness" of
Asian societies and legal orders, and that once those "shortcomings" are remedied, the treaties will lose their force by the absence [*69] of their raison d'etre. n420 By the late
nineteenth century, international law's turn to positivism, with its recognition of differentiated sovereignties, stepped in to acknowledge and accommodate a diplomatic practice
rooted in culture and history as the primary source of norms. n421 The contemporary Concert of Europe rested upon the Act of the Vienna Congress (1815), the peace treaty at
the culmination of the Napoleonic Wars, and related agreements. n422 Preservation of the Concert of Europe and the attendant distribution of power became a primary
preoccupation of international law. n423 Since peace treaties are unavoidably unequal in nature, international law now framed the question of sovereign consent as a purely
formal one subject to overarching norms of preservation of order in the international system. n424 The classic notion that validity of [*70] treaties rests upon consent by
formally equal and sovereign states gave way to a positivist recognition that "[t]he obligation of treaties, by whatever denomination they may be called, is founded, not merely
upon the contract itself, but upon those mutual relations between the two states, which may have induced them to enter into certain engagements." n425 Political realities
trumped formal legal categories now deemed quaint. In this frame, unequal treaties of yesterday, however secured, furnished the grounds of the prevailing international order.
To question their validity retrospectively raised the specter of unraveling the fragile order of things. With the question of state consent rendered a formal one, today any
arguments based on consent to explain validity of treaties become "deceptively simple. . . . [because t]heir theoretical power lies in the suggestion that perhaps nothing really
needs to be justified." n426 International lawyers deployed the same line of reasoning to defang the classic doctrine of ribus sic stantibus (things thus standing), whereby a
fundamental change of circumstances can justify unilateral termination of treaties. Unequal treaties are particularly vulnerable to this line of attack with the passage of time and
changes in the post-Napoleonic European balances of power. n427 When the issue arose within Europe in the late nineteenth century, international law's response was that
because sanctity of treaties is essential to the maintenance of order, even in the face of changed circumstances, termination or modification of treaty obligations requires the
consent of other parties. n428 As pressure for revision of treaty arrangements mounted, in light of a changed balance of power within Europe in the early twentieth century,
international law's turn to institutions to deal with problems of order, now seen as essentially political in nature, provided an opening--signaling "a movement from a moment of
law to politics." n429 The doctrine of ribus sic stantibus was now read as embracing two separate issues to be framed and resolved along two separate tracks. The political issue
of accommodating changes in the [*71] interests and powers of states was to be dealt with by the League of Nations under article 19 of its Charter. n430 The legal issue was to be
narrowly construed as one of clausula--the relationship between underlying consent and changed circumstances--deemed suitable for judicial determination by the Permanent
Court of International Justice ("PCIJ"). n431 As now enshrined in article 62 of the Vienna Convention, the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus stands confined within narrow limits as
a legal question--a treaty is terminable only when unforeseen changes in the circumstances underlying the conclusion of the treaty transform radically the extent of the
obligations still to be performed. n432 In the end, rebus sic stantibus stands sacrificed at the altar of pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept). International law deals
with the issue of coercion, duress, and unequal treaties with institutional and interpretive moves. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties addresses the issue through
articles 51 and 52--making coercion and threat or use of force "in violation of the principles of international law in the Charter of the United Nations" grounds for voiding a
treaty. n433 With this iteration of a classic rule, "the problem has been legislated away." n434 The repackaging of what coercion, threat, or use of force is impermissible subtly
altered the classic treaty law rule on duress that condemned all coercion. The prohibition on duress in the formation of a treaty now stands conditioned by the legal status of the
coercion used. The qualifier "in violation of international law" on the [*72] prohibition against the threat or use of force is to be read in the light of the U.N. Charter that does not
outlaw use of force, only unlawful use of force. n435 Consequently, with unequal treaties of the past, the question becomes not the exercise of coercion and duress, but one of the
legal status of threat or use of force in the eye of international norms in place at the time the treaties were made. The imperial bent of international law in the colonial age
already stood recognized and legitimate by the positivist turn that international law took. n436 The implication is that any alleged use of force in treaties of the past may well
have been lawful under contemporaneous norms. For good measure, the ICJ has held that any accusation of coercion to dispute the validity of a treaty must be accompanied by
"clear evidence" that goes beyond, e.g., the mere presence of naval forces off the coast of the complaining party. n437 This narrow definition of coercion is particularly troubling
in today's global order where effective instruments of economic coercion increasingly complement weapons of physical coercion in relations between states. n438 In the face of
these conceptual and institutional moves, any continuing expectation that international law as it stands may interrogate unequal colonial treaties to rescue territorially
imprisoned postcolonial formations is futile. To those who may still raise the question of unequal treaties, Brierly has an unequivocal response: "we must not invent a pseudo-
legal principle to justify such action. The remedy has to be sought elsewhere, in political, not in juridical action." n439 While the question of colonial unequal treaties stands
brushed aside, what about contemporary treaties that reflect existing international relations of domination? Here, it appears that it is sufficient to acknowledge that "bargaining
frequently takes place in a world of uneven resources and opportunity costs," n440 and move on. [*73] The history of unequal treaties underscores that "the history of the
international system is a history of inequality par excellence." n441 International law's posture towards legacies of colonialism
has created a "legalized hegemony: the realization through legal forms of Great Power
prerogatives." n442 The fleeting and ephemeral career of the unequal treaties doctrine in international law underscores an apparently foundational canon of the law:
the specter of disorder necessitates defense of order, even an unjust order. This is in tune with Kant, author of the
celebrated foundational injunction of the Enlightenment--"dare to know"--who declaimed that: The origin of supreme power, for all practical purposes, is not discoverable by the
people who are subject to it. In other words, the subject ought not to indulge in speculations about its origin with a view to acting upon them, as if its right to be obeyed were
open to doubt . . . . [W]hether the power came first, and the law only appeared after it, or whether they ought to have followed this order--these are completely futile arguments
for a people which is already subject to civil law, and they constitute a menace to the state. n443 International law, like modern law itself, is not so daring after all. It turns out
that its primary function is to enable "[s]tates to carry on their day-to-day intercourse along orderly and predictable lines." n444 It is of little concern to it that the lines within
which states have to exist in order "to carry out their day-to-day intercourse" are unstable, contested, and fruits of the exercise of imperial domination. V. CONCLUSION
Modern colonialism was nothing if not an exercise in audacity. The global reach of colonial rule reordered subjects and
reconfigured space. Fixed territorial demarcations of colonial possessions played a pivotal role in
this process. Issuing from imperatives of colonial rule and compulsions of rivalries between colonial powers, these demarcations often cut across age-old cultural and
historical social units. Postcolonial states inherited these demarcations and, with them, a host of endemic political and security afflictions. The unmistakable

spatiality of the so-called [*74] Great Games, both old and new, brings into relief the continuing
salience of space and territory in an age when the forces and processes of globalization had
supposedly rendered them irrelevant. Modem international law, which in its incipient stage lent
license to colonial rule, today legitimates colonial cartographies, thereby accentuating
postcolonial dilemmas and conflicts. This accords with the larger affliction that plagues
international law: its refusal to squarely face its complicity in the process of empire building
combines with its inability to break free of the shadow of a sordid past . The career of the Durant Line
highlights that when addressing many of today's intractable conflicts, the law as it exists is

more of a problem than a solution. As humanity struggles to imagine political

communities beyond the straitjackets of territorial states, a primary challenge is to clear the
conceptual and doctrinal hurdles that remain in the way . This necessitates breaking free of
imperial geographies and economies of knowledge that undergird modem legal
constructs and international regimes. Albert Einstein cautioned us that " it is theory which
decides what can be observed." The first step in that direction is to align our inquiries and
sights with the other side of the lines drawn by international law.
Rejecting the naturalization of sovereignty is the only ethical option
Sebastien Jodoin 8, Legal Research Fellow at theCentre for
InternationalSustainableDevelopment Law, International Law and Alterity: The State and the
Other, www.sjodoin.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/International-Law-and-Alterity1.pdf
Another set of strategies must be aimed more directly at the ontology of statehood. Althoughcritiquesofitsstate-centriccharacterarecommonplace,
international law continues to take the natural primacy of the state as a dominant form of political organization
for granted.We must oppose the idea that states exist as natural beings, for, as Campbell
explains, [ T]he greatest acts of violence in history have been made possible by the
apparent natural-ness of their practices, by the appearance that those carrying them out are doing no more than following
commands necessitated by the order of things, and how that order has often been understood in terms of the survival of a (supposedly pre-given) state,
a people, or a culture.146 Therefore we must continue to engage in the task of decentring the Self of the state
by putting in doubt its sovereignty and majesty in relation to sub-national actors and movements,
other states, and transnational regimes, forces, and actors, and especially in relation to the
law.We must explainthewayinwhich stateissocially, culturally, and legally inscribed – that is, it is bound by or in interaction with its
environmentandincapableofescapingthisformofinscriptionorinteraction.Most notably, we must reveal to the state the way in
which it is in fact constituted by the Other, transcendedbytheOther,andincapableofunderstandingtheOther. In sum, we
seek to destabilize the idea that the state forms a Self.147 There is an implicit move here from the modern to the post-
modern. Indeed, if modernity bore witness to the rise of both the Self and the state, the post-modern condition is characterized by their decline. Or,
perhaps, this project need not be configured as a move to the post-modern, but as a return to the baroque: with non-exclusive,
overlapping, non-territorial, dissimilar, heteronomous logics of organization whereby individuals were subject to multiple sovereignties
and authorities.148 Such deconstructive strategies may be pursued in academia, politics, public
policy, culture, and indeed the law itself. In the latter case, we may through a decentring of the state and a
celebration of alterity engage in normative world-building.149 By looking at international
law beyond the state, we give new meaning to the law and thereby enact new forms
of international law. Of course, non-state actors are not always benign forces – they may be uncivil and criminal150 – and the
international is not a space of infinite justice. In the pursuit of the ethics of alterity, we must furthermore remain open to the possibility that the state
itself may also form the Other and guard against the danger of founding international law on simply a different ontology, even one which moves away
from the state. Rather, new forms of law and organization must be developed in response to our ethics and
remain subject to infinite reconsideration and deconstruction. Indeed, deconstruction isthe primary mode through which we
may pursue the ethics of alterity.151 Conclusion Beholden to the ontology of statehood, international law remains a law for states, made
by them and made for them. It remains so through its focus on the interiority of the state at the expense of the
exteriority of the Other. The pursuit of the ethics of alterity in international law requires an
inversion of international law’s priorities in this regard. There must first be a move from the
interiority of the state to the exteriority of the law. The force of international law must be conceived as anterior to, as
opposed to subsumed by, the force of the state. There must also be a move towards the exteriority of the Other with the emergence of new ways of
existing and viewing the world, although these new ontologies and epistemologies must remain informed by our ethical responsibilities and thus
critically open to their inherent violence and arbitrariness. These two projects are complementary, for as long as international law is perceived as a legal
system which governs the relations between states, then the latter is likely to remain at its centre. Likewise, as long as states serve as the models for and
arbiters of international personality as well as the gatekeepers of international community and normativity, international law will be statist in
orientation. Our understanding of international legal subjecthood must be reconceived on primarily ethical
grounds in terms of our responsibility to the Other and deployed as the calling into question of the state through
an encounter with the legal Other and the human Other: Ethical subjectivity dispenses with the idealizing subjectivity
of ontology, which re- duces everything to itself. The ethical ‘I’ is subjectivity precisely insofar as it kneels before the other, sacrificing its own liberty to
the more primordial call of the other. The heteronomy of our response to the human other, or to God as the absolute other, precedes the autonomy of
our subjective freedom. As soon as I acknowledge that it is ‘I’ who am responsible, I accept that my freedom is anteceded by an obligation to the other.
Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous
freedom.152 An ethical approach to subjecthood requires openness towards diversity of being and
towards ever greater participation and inclusiveness, awareness of its own inher ent exclusionary character, and a characterization of the legal subject
as responsible before the Law and before the Other. There are a number of tensions at play in this project: ontology—ethics, statehood— alterity, and
law—politics. This last tension is likely to be invoked by international lawyers, as one constant of the discipline has been an affirmation of international
law as law and not as ethics. However, the anxieties about the importance and distinctiveness of the discipline simply bring us back to ontology, while
my per spective is informed by an ethical concern for legal pluralism. International
lawyers should therefore also support
the move to ethics for the same reason that they might strongly oppose it: they themselves have
been victims of the ontological imperialism of those who deny the status of law to
international law 153 A related objection would advance the idea that this project is relativistic and political
whereas international law is seen as an escape from politics into justice and objectivity. This
demonstrates obliviousness to the violence which international law perpetrates on the Other as
well as calls for an abdication of our responsibility to the Other in his singular alterity. There is finally an
undercurrent of fear of the political, ‘of the necessities of politics per se, necessities that can be contested and negotiated, but not escaped or
transcended’.’54 Moreover, moving away from the state or from ontology might also appear to the international
lawyer to be naive, imprudent, or foolish. How can we have intelligent discussions about what to do and what
should be without first establishing what exists in the world ? But the point is not so much that ontology
or statehood are irrelevant to ethical reflection, but rather that they must be apprehended from a
primarily ethical perspective. States most assuredly matter at a number of levels, but they are not all that
matters. As international lawyers, we must contend with the existing ontology and epistemology of statehood, but they need not
be the primary schemes through which we view the world. This article has sought to establish the ethics of alterity as
the pre-eminent concern of our discipline, but never in the belief that it might be possible to do away completely with the state as a category of thought,
or ontology as a mode of thought. Lévinas’s writing itself rests on a constant tension between the Same and the Other wherein he seeks to preserve
both. Indeed, Lévinas argues that ‘the interhurnan is thus an interface: a double axis where what is of the world” qua phenomenological intelligibility is
juxtaposed with what is “not of the world” qua ethical responsibilitÿ.’55 This back and forth is both necessary and futile. ft is necessary because the
pursuit of the ethics of akerity in international law requires a constant negotiation of the tension which exists between statehood and alterity.’S6 ft is
futile because the commitment which some have to statehood and others have to alterity are emotional, ideological, ontological, and epistemological all
at once. These are two worlds with different paradigmatic points of reference whose ultimate origins lie in a certain sensibility about the world. This is
why the question of alterity in international law is more than justa problem of ‘source and method’,’S7 but in fact arises out of deeper ideas and feelings
which we hold about the relationship between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. L.évinas acknowledged that establishing ethics as first philosophy was a bold
move in the light of the obvious pre-eminence of ontology, but he also believed that ‘approaching philosophy through this critique has at least the virtue
of returning to its source, beyond the problems and pathos of Iiterature’.’8 The same maybe said of the approach adopted in this article, that by
returning to the source — the ontology of statehood — we may move beyond the ontological
difficulties which international law has invariably faced throughout its existence as well as better
understand the violence which it has perpetrated on the Other. If Lévinas’s philosophy is haunted by the memory of
Auschwitz,’ S9 then international law today appears haunted by the memory of colonialism. But in our haste to
apologize for Berlin,’6° we should not forget about the violence of the original exclusion of Westphalia. And
perhaps, at a deeper level still, the origins of the tragedy of international law are not German, or American (the new sovereigntists), but irrevocably
Greek.
 LINK – ISRAEL CONDITIONS AFF
Human rights conditions are a liberal ploy which produces a false sense of
ethicality while depolitizing radical politics and promoting a colonial mode of
subjectivity which exists purely as service to the popular sovereign
Weiss 15 (Erica, Ph.D. in Anthropology at Princeton University “Provincializing empathy:
Humanitarian sentiment and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict” p. 276-279)NFleming
Specifically, the humanitarian concept of empathy is used ubiquitously as a counter-discourse to
right-wing politics. Humanitarian discourse dominates leftwing newspaper editorials, and
constitutes the main methodology of peace-building initiatives and left-wing activist activities.
Nearly all of the dozens of peace-themed cultural events I attended during my fieldwork – plays, films, and concerts – relied on
humanitarian empathy with the other side as the ethical motivation for peace. Humanitarian empathy is a deeply entrenched value
in secular Jewish Israeli society.1 This is partially related to Zionism’s historical and cultural overlap with the
secular European development of humanitarian thought, which led to humanitarian empathy’s
codification in certain political norms. But also, humanitarianism is a normative ethical tradition
with global scope, and Israel and Palestine have been targets of humanitarian discourse and
initiatives, further instilling its values as those that define and represent the secular left . The left does
not have a monopoly on this discourse, however. Humanitarian empathy is well represented in state
discourse and initiatives in specific spheres, such as humanitarian relief, for Palestinians and populations internationally. In
recent wars in Gaza, Israeli pundits across the political spectrum used empathy to appeal to citizens’
sympathies alternatively for Gazans and the rocket-barraged Israeli residents of the south of Israel. Despite its appeal and
persuasive power in secular Jewish Israeli society, the evidence suggests that humanitarian empathy has a very
mixed track record of producing political change, often entrenching forms of power with
the salve of moral sentiment . In addition, humanitarian empathy’s hegemonic status and
claims to universal applicability often silence alternative ethical approaches to peace.
Recently, a sustained and multi-vocal theoretical critique of humanitarianism has emerged within anthropology. Many of these
accounts focus on the problematic ethical effects of humanitarian governance and its current political manifestations. Peter Redfield
(2008), Ilana Feldman (2007), and Mariella Pandolfi (2010) have all contributed significantly to showing the ways in which
humanitarian values have been made complicit in Realpolitik goals. There is also a strain within this
critique that takes issue with the inherent logic of humanitarian ethics 276 Anthropological Theory 15(3) Downloaded from
ant.sagepub.com at University of Western Australia on December 17, 2015 itself. In his ongoing efforts to ‘follow humanitarianism to
its logical conclusion’ (Fassin, 2007: 502), Didier Fassin takes issue with the way ‘ humanitarian
reason’
manifests itself in global governance to legitimize state violence through military
intervention, as well as the ways in which the virtues of suffering and compassion
come to replace justice and the rights of citizenship (Fassin, 2012). Erica Bornstein interrogates the
logic of humanitarianism and finds it impoverished in its understanding of relationships, especially those of
reciprocity (Bornstein, 2012). Miriam Ticktin offers perhaps the harshest critique of the ‘driving logic’ of humanitarian beliefs,
claiming that the concept of compassion offered by humanitarianism implies a limiting notion of
humanity (Ticktin, 2006: 39). The empirical research carried out in these accounts is indispensable in demonstrating the ways
humanitarian politics have become hegemonic, imposing a culturally laden ethics
on other cultures, and depoliticizing claims to justice. They are absolutely correct regarding the
problematic depoliticizing effects of the cases of humanitarian governance they examine. However, I remain unsatisfied with the way
some of these accounts present the political and ethical effects of humanitarian governance as outcomes of an inherent structural
problem of humanitarian logic, suggesting that certain political manifestations (the maltreatment of refugees,
militarized interventions, arbitrary and unjust distinction between worthy and unworthy
victims, creation of ‘states of exception’) are the inevitable outcome of this ethical
tradition . Not only is this type of critique more suited to philosophy than to anthropology but, more importantly, it does not
reconcile with my fieldwork experiences. Many humanitarian-based peace initiatives in Israel and Palestine make very problematic
assumptions about the universality of humanitarian values, and also depoliticize claims to justice. Yet, my experiences with Israeli
conscientious objectors suggested two factors that challenge the academic critique of humanitarian values, as opposed to critiquing
current political uses of humanitarian resources. One is the ways my interlocutors used assailed humanitarian empathy to further
radical political goals. The other is that an ethnographic examination of their experiences reveals humanitarian values to be
more than an intellectual political commitment. Rather, it is
a culturally embedded ethical tradition that
structures emotional responses, as well as informing basic understandings of justice. This suggests
values of empathy and compassion are too culturally deep to be easily substituted through intellectual critique, and anthropological
understandings should reflect this reality, while not renouncing its critical faculty. My goal in this article is not to pathologize
humanitarian empathy, as the above authors have done to varying degrees. Neither do I focus on the distance between rule and
behavior. Rather, I suggest ‘provincializing’ humanitarian empathy, to challenge its hegemony and
universalizing claims without dismissing the potency of this framework for those who have been
socialized into this ethical tradition. In doing so, this article tries to offer an alternative to the
hegemonic and universalizing ambitions of adherents of humanitarianism, and also to academic critiques of
humanitarian empathy that see it as inherently problematic. In this, I follow the example Dipesh Chakrabarty laid out in
Provincializing Europe (2001). Weiss 277 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at University of Western Australia on December 17,
2015 There, he makes clear that European culture itself – its traditions, worldview, and values – is not the problem as such. Rather,
its hegemonic and imperial status are the appropriate objects of criticism. This provincialization of humanitarian
empathy is aided by recent developments in the anthropology of ethics that suggest a less
teleological, more hermeneutical approach than the ‘genealogy of morals’ that has influenced the anthropological
treatment of humanitarianism. This literature has demonstrated that people are constantly occupied with evaluating the good and
attributing responsibility (Lambek, 2010; Keane, 2010; Robbins, 2013). In recent years, anthropologists have commandeered some
of Alasdair MacIntyre’s ideas of ‘tradition’ (Lakoff and Collier, 2004; Lambek, 2008; Mattingly, 2012).2 MacIntyre describes
tradition as ‘an argument extended through time’ (1989: 12), a specific cultural system of justice that has its own logics and
rationalities through which moral and ethical issues are thought and problematized. According to him, we should think about
‘justices rather than justice’ (1989: 9). Such traditions are largely incompatible with one another, though in reality through
interaction and exchange they are subject to debates within and between traditions. What is appealing about this idea of tradition is
the balance it strikes between continuity and change. It allows us to see how people are informed by disparate and incommensurable
cultural ideas and ways of reasoning about ‘the good’, both at the level of habitus and at the level of reflexive engagement. At the
same time, while recognizing that ideas of justice vary, it specifically allows for people to engage actively with their own tradition,
recognize shortcomings, and try to correct them by engaging with interpretive traditions and other means of intervention.3
 LINK – ISRAEL-US ALLIANCE
US-Israel cooperation exports the permanent war state abroad and reaffirms
colonial militarism in the west
Graham 10 (Stephen, Professor of Cities and Society at the School of Architecture, Planning
and Landscape at Newcastle University, Brown Journal of World Affairs, “Laboratories of War:
United States-Israeli Collaboration in Urban War and Securitization,” published Fall 2010,
accessed on ProQuest, pages 47-48, JME.)
This essay has demonstrated that the security-industrial complexes of Israel and the United
States are in the process of integrating seamlessly within the militaryindustrial complexes of
those nations. This is occurring in a context marked by widespread imitation of the legal, geopolitical, geographical, and
technological means through which the Israeli state has mobilized to fight permanent urban warfare against non-state enemies.
The centrality of the Israeli doctrine as an exemplar underpinning the US global war on terror,
in particular, has meant that the US-Israel security-military-industrial complexes are
becoming umbilically connected, to the extent that it would perhaps make more sense to
consider them as one transnational unit. Fuelled by the closely related ideologies of permanent
war emanating from the US and Israeli states—within the infinitely flexible and extendible confines of the global
war on terror—these processes of exemplification, experimentation, imitation, and justification are
forging the rapid integration of the permanent war economies of both Israel and the United
States. The US-Israeli security-industrial bubble—a rare point of growth amongst recession-prone stocks and a global economic
downturn—is based heavily on the generalization and imitation of doctrines and technologies of security forged during the long
standing lockdown and repression of Palestinian cities by Israeli military and security forces. Through it, Israeli practices of urban
hyper-militarism are in the danger of being generalized and normalized on a transnational scale. Such a prospect raises key
questions about the global political economies of the security industries that the critical security and international relations scholars
have barely started to address. It challenges scholars to address the way legal, socio-technical, geopolitical, and political-economic
aspects of imitation relate within broad, global trends towards intensifying surveillance and securitization. Additionally, it forces
scholars to address how the militarized spaces of surveillance experimentation, within the urban warfare zones of colonial frontiers,
connect and also to address the broader generalization of these techniques within the urban domains of civilian life. “It should never
be forgotten,” Michel Foucault wrote: ...that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and
juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a
considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the
apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was
brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling
colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.62 Clearly, the efforts described above, which
work to diffuse and normalize military and security norms and techniques for permanently
targeting and locking-down urban civilian life, represent a very powerful and important set of contemporary
boomerang effects. These operate by seeking to stealthily extend Israeli doctrine, technique, and technology, thereby telescopically
connecting urban counterinsurgency practices in “war-zone” cities such as Gaza, Baghdad, and Kabul with the spaces and sites of
“domestic” or Homeland cities. Both domains, thus, increasingly blur as expeditionary warfare centers more and more on pacifying
cities and domestic policing centers increasingly on preemptively identifying malign threats within the everyday sites and spaces of
cities. A burgeoning, transnationally-organized security-industrial complex, with the Israeli-US nexus at its hub, is both the cause
and result of such processes. In such a context, the challenge for critical scholarship is to excavate and contest the Foucauldian
“boomerang effects” that surround the blurring of US and Israeli military and security doctrine practices with the surrounding
circuits of exemplification and imitation.
 LINK – MIDDLE EAST WAR DISCOURSE
Refuse military-startegic expertist discourse pervading military presence in the
Middle East – it’s a self-referential, financially incentivized machine of falsehood
that makes incalculable violence invisible to Westerners, generating abject misery.
Morrissey 11 [John, professor of geography at the National University of Ireland, “Architects
of Empire: The Military–Strategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US National Security,”
Antipode, Volume 43, Issue 2, pages 435–470, March 2011]

Henri Lefebvre may have been writing in 1974 but his perceptive thoughts are perhaps as vital today as ever. The
“specialized
knowledges” of the “military–strategic studies complex” have long been patronized, prioritized
and actioned by the US military. The cosy “collusion” between the Pentagon and military–strategic
studies has been instrumental in the contemporary “production of military space”.
Reductive scriptings of national security, abstracted geopolitical visions and dreams of empire have
collectively served to occlude geographies of the “lived experience” (Chandrasekaran 2006; Packer 2005).
As Bradley Klein (1994:3) reminds us, “questions of war and peace are too important to leave to students [and practitioners] of
Strategic Studies”. Strategic studies knowledges have long been “above lived experience”, yet their power has been
instrumental in unleashing catastrophe, terror and abject misery for the very people
whose lives they are “above”. But clearly there is “catastrophe” for “us” too: the catastrophe of being
overwhelmed by the collusion of power and knowledge, the catastrophe of the militant and deeply
unequal world in which we live and the catastrophe of inaction—politically, discursively and
otherwise.
But of course there has been action, with some of the most significant resistance taking place
outside the academy, such as that seen in the unprecedented global protests against the Iraq War in February and March
2003, and continued anti-war activism worldwide since then. Geographers and other academics have of course been
variously actively involved. Within the academy, geographers have illuminated key aspects of the US-led
war against “militant Islam”, including its place-making strategies, its territorial responses to
terrorist attacks and its exceptional legal and biopolitical geographies (Coleman 2003; Elden 2007;
Morrissey 2011; Reid-Henry 2007). Others have revealed the imperial historical geographies of
contemporary geopolitics, and signalled its geoeconomic underpinnings (Cowen and Smith 2009; Harvey 2003; Kearns
2006; Smith 2003a). In addition, geographers have depicted the violent geographies of recent western
military interventions (Dalby 2006; Flint 2005; Graham 2005; Gregory and Pred 2007). And focus has been placed too on
the state discourses of military power and broader imaginative and affective geographies legitimating that violence (Bialasiewicz et al
2007; Hannah 2006; Ó Tuathail 2003; Woodward 2005). Such counter-geographies are important, yet their
disruptive power, as Matthew Sparke notes (2007:347), is perhaps ultimately “practically limited”. In spite
of the above work, and after a cultural turn in the US military that has produced a “powerful rhetorical effect” that justifies
“more killing to stop the killing” (Gregory 2008a:21), reductive vernaculars, reifying essentialist tropes of terror, threat,
correction and security still prevail and discursively underpin the war in Iraq and broader war
on terrorism. The military–strategic studies complex plays a central role in advancing such discourses, and possesses vital
forums through which to enunciate their endgame: legitimized state violence. I want to conclude more positively, however, by
suggesting ways to effectively oppose them.
As an academic working in political geography, a key starting point of resistance for me is the careful
detailing of the largely unseen inner workings of empire in our contemporary world, ultimately
in order to be better able to resist it (which is what this paper has been about). That resistance can
manifest itself in counter-scriptings in a variety of contexts, from lecture halls to town halls,
from academic journals to online blogs . And in a variety of public forums, many geographers have
played, and continue to play, important roles in critiquing the war on terror and advancing more
nuanced, reasoned and humane geographies and histories of Islam and the Middle East (Gregory 2005). Such
academic and public intellectual work can also crucially liaise with, learn from, and be
transformed by grassroots activists in peace and social justice movements
throughout the world .44 And linking to their work in our teaching especially has more power than perhaps we
sometimes realise; especially given the multimedia teaching and learning tools available today.45
A recent Antipode special issue saw a number of insightful reflections on the possibilities of “practising public scholarship”[volume
40(3), 2008]. The contributors outline various ways in which critical geographies can support and enable
political and social activism. In addition, Don Mitchell makes an important point in reminding us that academic
“intellectual” and “bureaucratic” work are also “vital parts of any activism” (Mitchell 2008:448).
Disrupting and countering the abstracted geopolitical scriptings of strategic studies can take on a variety of forms. But both
inside and outside the academy, a key intellectual task, I think, is theorizing anti-imperialism—both
historically and in our contemporary moment. Effective counter-discourses for our time must surely
incorporate the lessons learned from the anti-imperial/anti-colonial struggles of history—from
Ireland to India, from Algeria to Vietnam. Appellations like “insurgents” do the same discursive work today as the historical
preference “rebels” did in reductively demonizing whole populations and delegitimizing their right to resistance. But more
importantly, perhaps, they serve too to disengage us from unpacking the discourses and practices of
contemporary anti-imperialism. Yet historical contexts of resistance have much to offer if our endgame is articulating
critical and humane geographies of our contemporary world. And this is a crucial challenge, given the sheer pervasiveness of
strategic geopolitical discourses that negate human geographical realities. Such scriptings are not only intellectually unconvincing;
they are dangerous and hugely consequential.
In seeking to avoid dangerously reductive accounts of the world, geography for me has always had a particular
responsibility and strength. In understanding conflict, past and present, discourse has perpetually played a troubled role.
In reading the current proliferation of “geopolitical discourse”, it is useful to bear in mind
history's multiple reminders of the impossibilities of “colonial discourse” (Morrissey 2010). There is a
need to spatialize and locate the material and corporeal geographies of war; not just its imaginative geographies. The spaces
and agency of resistance or so-called “insurgency” in the war on terror, for example, are little
theorized and frequently not even recognized; reflecting a power relations of knowledge familiar
to any student of colonial history. This remains a key challenge for critical accounts of our contemporary geopolitical
world. That said, however, connecting what James Sidaway calls the “banal geopolitics” of militarism to its
brutal consequences will always be an urgent task too (Sidaway 2001, 2008). And the dots can be joined.
The military–strategic studies complex in contemporary America is a powerful producer of
banal geopolitics , patronized and prioritized geographical knowledge and ultimately actionable geostrategic intelligence.
Its experts and advocates are both architects of empire and apologists for its
consequences . Their dominant national security discourse is about positing legitimized,
aggressive US military action against the threat of irrational terrorism emanating from the
Middle East; it is about presenting the USA as the guardian of global economic health; and it is about imperial ambition too.
This paper has sought to expose the military–strategic studies complex as playing a central role
in support of that imperial ambition and in the advancement of its aggressive geopolitics. I hope it
has signalled too the imperative of resistance. In the face of ubiquitous scriptings of insecurity, war and geopolitics in our
contemporary world, the task
of both exposing the geoeconomic stakes and insisting on real
places with real people , with bodies and rights just like us, is as urgent as ever.
 LINK – NORTH KOREA
Their securitization of North Korea is enabled by a neoliberal tactic of
epistemological capture which only exacerbates North Korean aggression
Hong 13 (Christine, specializes in transnational Asian American, Korean diaspora, U.S. war
and empire, and comparative ethnic studies. At UC Santa Cruz, received phD from the UC
Berkeley English department “THE MIRROR OF NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS” in
Critical Asian Studies p. 576-579)NFleming
Securitization, Michael Dillon observes, is an epistemological process: “You cannot secure anything
unless you know what it is.”77 “Integral to the problematizations of security,” he adds, “are the ways in which people,
territory, and things are transformed into epistemic objects.”78 In the service of North Korean regime change,
liberation technology has been wielded to out North 576 Critical Asian Studies 45:4 (2013) 70. Stanton n.d.
(North Korea). 71. As Stanton asserts, as “anyone who has ever worked on a ranch know[s,]…barbed wire fences…run in straight line
segments.” Since camps must have barbed wire and the satellite image of the compound he chances upon has straight fence-lines, it
stands to reason—according to Stanton—that what he has found is a labor camp. See Stanton n.d. (Camp 25). 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74.
Ibid., emphasis added. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. It is also worth noting that Camp 25 now has its own Wikipedia page. 77. Dillon 2007, 12.
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 04:53 20 December 2017 Korea, yet in the process produces “North
Korea” as a construction of intelligence. YouTube videos of defector accounts of North Korea’s
inhumanity and Google Earth images pored over by an army of largely male “citizen snoops” who thereby acquire “a
dominating subjectivity formerly only available to military and intelligence elites at the center of
state administrative control” have become stock features of NKHR critique as a U.S. hegemonic
discourse in which scalar distinctions between state-level and crowd-sourced dossiers on “evil” do not always
obtain.79 Indeed, the zeal with which the civilian sector has taken up North Korea watching might be described as “an application
of free market dogma to intelligence gathering.”80 In “Wired for War,” Arun Kundnani examines the collusion of media
and military technologies in both promulgating a politics of fear and eliciting virtual
engagement from Americans on the homefront. Americans were “encourag[ed] to imagine
[themselves] in the front line of a hidden war”—a war in fact fought by less than 1 percent of the population: The
use of embedded reporters in the war on Iraq took this to a new level, with journalists telling their audiences: “we’re moving out
now” rather than “they’re moving out now.” The media and, by implication, the viewer became incorporated into
the military machine. A nation of armchair warriors was the result.81 Insofar as “America’s asymmetric
enemies” have been perceived as seeking to visit harm on ordinary Americans, the “war on
terror [has] become personal.”82 The neo-imperial hubris of both armchair watcher and
“armchair warrior ,” vicariously embedded in structures of U.S. power and violence, points to the unsavory
nature of liberation technology whose tools are seldom analyzed within the context of an uneven
world system, much less considered for their dark side—in particular, their dual use and origin in military intelligence.83
“Information superiority,” after all, “is not just about gaining market advantage in the commercial world…. It is about ‘domination’
of an adversary, and is implied in the very term ‘command and control’.”84 That technologies of liberation double as
and interface with technologies of war returns us to the mirror of North Korean human rights—a structure
of misprision in which freedom and violence are counterposed reflections of a single delirium. Even as North Korea is said to
resist empirical investigation and positivist portrayal, as long-standing U.S. target, it has been rendered
through incursionary military technologies, both virtual and visual, that despite their irreality and
unverifiability are hypostatized as “the real thing.” As global secuHong / Mirror of North Korean Human Rights
577 78. Ibid. 79. Ramstad 2009; Harris 2006, 119. 80. Kundnani 2004, 123. 81. Ibid., 118. 82. Ibid. 83. Consider David Harvey’s
critique of information technology as “the privileged technology of neoliberalism.” See Harvey 2005, 159. On the military origins of
the internet as a distributed communications network meant to survive a nuclear attack, see Abbate 2000. 84. Harris 2006, 106.
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 04:53 20 December 2017 rity menace or human rights dilemma, “North Korea”
garners coherence, otherwise put, from technology deployed in remarkably speculative ways. As
simulacrum, it is inextricable from the anticipatory logic of the war machine, which
“makes spaces into objects of knowledge well before they are occupied,
partitioned, and demarcated .”85 Not, however, a mere rehearsal for war, the virtual penetration of
“North Korea” is an operation of war . Given the Korean War’s irresolution, “the reality of the
virtual,” what Slavoj Šišek defines as “real effects produced…by something which does not yet fully exist,” exacerbates the
ongoing state of siege and hostilities on the Korean peninsula, the consequences of which are
indisputably real.86 Nowhere is the dystopian militarized potential of liberation technology more apparent than in annual
joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises. Attesting to the critical value of the U.S.–South Korean alliance
within an Asia-Pacific–focused global U.S. military strategy—namely, the “forward-deployed,”
strategic “pivot” of the U.S. military to Asia—the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle combined war exercises supposedly
defend “liberty on Freedom’s Frontier.”87 Revealingly, however, these exercises entail that U.S. and South Korean
forces carry out scenarios against an enemy that they create and put into motion. Virtual and real,
these war games involve massive coordinated maneuvers—live fire drills and counterinsurgency operations on the ground, in the air,
and on the sea—all in response to a simulated North Korean offensive.88 As the “largest computer-simulated exercises in the world,”
these elaborate maneuvers, as of 2010, featured 600 gamers, “well-versed in North Korean tactics,” who played the part of enemy
forces.89 According to Command Sergeant Major Robert Winzenried, “we practice if North Korea invaded, what our response would
be,” adding “[i]t makes it a little more real to you.”90 Moreover, the staging of a North Korean attack or North Korean crisis enables
the U.S. military to maintain that these war games are defensive in nature.91 Having in previous years involved the rehearsal of
contingency plans for various “scenarios of sudden change in the North—a coup, [a] civil war, a mass exodus of North Koreans, a
massive natural disaster, and kidnapping of South Korean citizens by the North”—the 2012 Key Resolve and Foal Eagle operations,
the largest and lengthiest of these exercises to date, “for the first time practiced deploying more than 100,000 South Korean troops
into North Korea to stabilize the country in case of regime collapse.”92 Speaking 578 Critical Asian Studies 45:4 (2013) 85. Horn
2003, 73. 86. Šišek, as quoted in Wright 2004. 87. Ham 2012. On the “pivot” to Asia, see Clinton 2011. See also Bumiller 2011. 88. Of
the significance of the 2012 exercises, which were lengthened to nearly two months following Kim Jong Eun’s succession and
denounced by North Korea as a “silent declaration of war,” Eighth Army Operational Chief of Staff, Major General Eldon Regua
stressed the heightened strategic importance of the U.S.–South Korea alliance given “the shift in the U.S. military’s focus…to the
Asia Pacific region,” stating, “We continue to stand side-by-side with our ROK allies defending liberty on Freedom’s Frontier and
providing security in this vital region of the world.” On North Korea’s response, see North Korea 2012. On Eldon Regua’s remarks
about the joint exercises, see Ham 2012. 89. Rowland 2010. 90. Lopez 2008, emphasis added. 91. See Rabiroff and Chang 2012.
Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 04:53 20 December 2017 to the Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean government official described
Kim Jong Il’s death as an apt occasion to enact a regime-collapse scenario since “the regime of new leader Kim Jong-un is still
unstable.”93 Denouncing such exercises as “an unpardonable grave military provocation to the sovereignty” of North Korea and “a
wanton challenge to…peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula,” North Korea condemned the 2012 Key Resolve and
Foal Eagle exercises as “reckless joint military maneuvers aimed to establish [a U.S.] sphere of
politico-military domination over the Korean Peninsula and the rest of Northeast
Asia.”94Dismissing such protests, the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes reverted to causal fallacy, identifying North Korea’s
response rather than the war games themselves as the source of hostilities on the peninsula: “the North uses…rhetoric” to inveigle its
people into believing that North Korea is being subjected to “a never-ending series of threats.”95 Yet within this dramaturgy of war,
the virtual value of “North Korea,” annually staged as threat and target, effectively voids North
Korea’s actual objections to these exercises as an affront to peninsular peace. Not simply a deferral of
the resolution of the Korean War, these war games—performed in the name of Korean liberty—are central to the war’s
perpetuation.
 LINK – OIL SHOCKS
Fears of oil shocks ensures militarization of foreign countries with resources
Huber 11 (Matt, Department of Geography @ Syracuse; Specialist in Resource geography,
historical geography, political economy, energy, industrial ecologies; author of ‘Lifeblood: Oil,
Freedom, and the Forces of Capital,’ “Shocked: “Energy Crisis” and Neoliberal Transformation
in the 1970s,” 10/14/11,
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/bwep/colloquium/papers/Huber_Shocked.pdf, ND)
Naomi Klein argues that the “shock doctrine” is imposed on societies during moments of political and
economic crisis, and the notion of an “oil shock” fits within the larger crisis of the 1970s.70 It was oil’s
unique centrality to social reproduction as whole which created the imagery of an oil shock, or what
Daniel Yergin called at the time, “an oil-induced economic crisis” (14).71 Oil was constructed as a
ubiquitous commodity – not only central to the multiplicity of everyday practices that constitute
“life”, but also as an input to virtually every stage of economic activity not the least of which was
the transportation of commodities which had shifted dramatically toward diesel powered
trucking in the postwar period. Petroleum’s pervasiveness meant an increase in the price of oil
permeated through the prices of all commodities, and thus was seen as a singular force causing
inflation, recession, and eroding the capacity to make a living. The imaginary of an “oil shock”
corresponds nicely to what Michael Watts calls “commodity determinism.”72 Watts uses this concept to
critique the so-called “oil curse” wherein oil-endowed nations are automatically beset by state
corruption, non-diversified economies, violence and war.73 Oil shock discourse explained
economic crisis as naturalized products of commodity price increases, and underemphasize the
concurrent power shifts within the broader American political economy. Thus, the focus on the
oil shock stood in as an external explanation for the dramatic declines in living standards during
the rise of what David Harvey calls neoliberalism as the “restoration of class power.”74 Yet, more
important than the vision of an externally induced crisis, was how the “crisis” itself was explained – and, as it turns, it wasn’t seen as
a real crisis at all. While many naturalized the oil shock as an inevitable product of geological
scarcity, the vast majority saw the oil crisis as not natural, but politically “contrived.” As one letter
put it, “The ‘energy crisis’ is phony and a hoax on the people.”75 Like the major explanations of the
drivers of inflation, many blamed forces of “market power” whose institutional presence in the
economy allowed oil prices to be rigged for the benefit of special interests. As stated above,
the most obvious villain – and easy target for xenophobic rage – was OPEC who unabashedly
announced their presence in the market as a cartel with political interests. As one OP-ED
summarized, “the Arabs play...[a]…special mixture of politics and economics.”76 Like the politics
surrounding inflation, it was this mixture that offended the logic of a free and fair market. It was their
use of a vital commodity to advance political goals that informed the idea of “the oil
weapon.” The oil weapon – one headline called it “stronger than armies”77 – was seen as an “extra-economic”
form of violence imposed upon ordinary consumers.
 LINK – PEACE PROCESS
The peace process is depoliticizing, corrupt, and fundamentally biased towards
Israeli colonialism
Nakhleh 14 (Khalil, Palestinian anthropologist from the Galilee, Israel/Palestine, with a Ph.D.
from Indiana University, US., “OSLO: REPLACING LIBERATION WITH ECONOMIC NEO-
COLONIALISM” p. 3-4)NFleming
Overall, the social and economic development of Palestine since the 1978 Camp David Accords and
particularly since the 1993 Oslo Accords has been fragmented and non-cumulative. It has been impeded
primarily by the Israeli occupation’s colonization of land and siphoning of resources but also by
an informal coalition of Palestinian capitalists and political elites, development NGOs, and
transnational aid agencies. This coalition has depended on the flow of transnational money and collaboration with Jewish-
Israeli corporations within Israel, in the region, and globally. Many – including the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu – hoped that this would generate a permanent state of “economic peace.” (For further analysis, see my book Globalized
Palestine: The National Sellout of a Homeland.)1 The aid advanced to Palestine in the context of the Oslo Accords’
agenda under prolonged occupation 1Trenton, N.J. and London: The Red Sea Press, 2011, available at
www.africaworldpressbooks.com and at www.amazon.com. The book is based on nearly 30 years of experience in a variety of
institutions through which I had hoped to contribute to the development of my homeland, Palestine – historical Palestine. 3 Oslo:
Replacing Liberation with Economic Neo-Colonialism al-shabaka the palestinian policy network contact@al-shabaka.org www.al-
shabaka.org and colonization is political aid par excellence. It has been advanced specifically to
force and entice the Palestinian people to acquiesce and submit to an imposed political and economic agenda
that is determined, shaped, and dictated by the global neo-liberal strategy of Palestine’s occupier. Such aid focuses on non-
production and on brazen conspicuous consumption by relying on readily available credit from financial institutions, thus
mortgaging and holding hostage the entire current society and future generations to political and economic debt. It is this aid that
directs Palestinians to consume what they don’t produce; and eat only what and when their occupier allows. There is an
alternative: a different
approach to development that I call People-Centered Liberationist Development.
This would involve re-engineering our mental constructs and social, economic, and educational
institutions to lead cumulatively towards social, economic, and political self-determination and
liberation. Such a re-engineering process would target the entire society in order to strengthen and
enhance its indigenous resources and is aimed primarily at resisting and ending foreign
occupation, political and economic re-colonization, and the predatory classes. (See also “Farming Palestine for Freedom” and
“Defeating Dependency, Creating a Resistance Economy.”) The challenge is how to re-engineer this artificially imposed environment
Palestinians need to avoid those who
in order to render it people centered and liberation promoting. First,
insist impatiently on immediate solutions within the existing framework, a status
quo that they accept, support, and from which they benefi t. Rather, our approach has to be
strategic and long term. The process must begin with self-liberation of the kind that Frantz Fanon advocated in his
book, The Wretched of the Earth, grounded in an indigenously-generated and -nurtured consciousness
that is embedded in people’s history, strengths, and value systems. A key step toward this goal is a revision
of the educational curricula in order to redefine what it means to be a Palestinian in the context of prolonged occupation and re-
integrating this understanding of Palestinian-hood with that of the rest of the Palestinian people. A related step is re-instilling
positive cultural values in our society, particularly volunteerism. Concurrently, efforts should be focused on re-
establishing “popular sovereignty” by reclaiming the agricultural means of production – our
lands and natural resources, especially water. Agricultural cooperatives should be the way forward for the
foreseeable future. Imitating capitalism and its socalled open markets is not the way to consolidate our societal fabric under
oppression and occupation. We must work on production rather than conspicuous consumption and promote the aim of consuming
what we produce. Such strategic approaches would eventually lead to Palestinians’ collective emancipation and liberation. They
would take time, but the Palestinian people can draw from the experience of their many struggles in the past century. There is really
liberation, independence, self-sufficiency, and sovereignty cannot be
no other way:
achieved within the framework created by the Oslo process.
 LINK – PROLIFERATION RHETORIC
Their prolif impact constructs the world in imperialist terms—Western analysts
obsess over the danger that nations in East Asia and the Global South pose to
global stability, while the fact that we have dozens as times as many nuclear
weapons seems to barely warrant a second thought. This double standard
condemns the global South to violent intervention and discipline.
Behnke 2k—Andreas Behnke, Prof. of Poli Sci @ Towson [January, International Journal of
Peace Studies 5.1, “Inscriptions of the Imperial Order,”
http://www.gmu.edu/academic/ijps/vol5_1/behnke.htm]

David Mutimer (1997) has argued that the use of the metaphor 'proliferation' carries certain entailments. That is to say, it
structures our understanding and handling of the problem. In particular, he refers to the "image of a
spread outward from a point or source", and the "technological bias" introduced in the discourse
(Mutimer 1997:201-2). As concerns the first point, 'proliferation' presupposes a center at which WMD are to
be held and controlled, and from which these weapons disseminate into the body of the international society. To the extent
that this process gets out of the center's control, certain measures have to be taken to 'suffocate', limit, or curb the 'spread' of these
weapons. As concerns the second point, Mutimer (1997:203) points out the peculiar agency implied in the concept: "Notice that the
weapons themselves spread; they are not spread by an external agent of some form - say, a human being or
political institution". The fact that a large number of these weapons were actually 'spread' by Western
states is consequently hidden through this discursive structure. These points are also relevant for the
Mediterranean Initiative. We can add a third entailment to the list which appears through a critical reading of the NATO/RAND
narrative. As the RAND authors (1998:15) observe, "The mere existence of ballistic missile technology with ranges in excess of 1,000
km on world markets and available to proliferators around the Mediterranean basin would not necessarily pose serious strategic
dilemmas for Europe." In fact, we might even agree with the neorealist proposition that 'more might be
better', above all in terms of nuclear weapons. This is certainly the preferred solution of John Mearsheimer (1990)
for the stabilization of European political order after the end of the cold war. After all, conventional wisdom has it that nuclear
weapons and the threat of mutually assured destruction preserved stability and peace during the Cold War. The RAND authors,
however, failto grasp the irony in their identification of WMD proliferation, which ends up
denying this central tenet of cold war strategy. According to them, "the WMD and ballistic
missile threat will acquire more serious dimensions where it is coupled with a proliferator's
revolutionary orientation. Today, this is the case with regard to Iran, Iraq, Libya, and arguably Syria"
(RAND, 1998:16). What preserved the peace during the cold war -- mutual deterrence -- is now
re-written as a strategic problem : As a result of proliferation trends, Europe will be increasingly exposed to the
retaliatory consequences of U.S. and European actions around the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, including the Balkans.
... As a political threat and a weapon of terror capable of influencing the NATO decisionmaking during a crisis, their significance [of
conventionally armed ballistic missiles] could be considerable (RAND, 1998:16). Two implications of these arguments deserve
elaboration. First, there is the reversal of the traditional relationship between WMD and rationality.
For whatmakes the presence of WMD in the South so worrisome is the absence of
the requirements of reason and rationality . Within NATO's discourse on the South, 'revolutionary
orientation' accounts for the undesirability of distributing these weapons to such unfit hands. In order to qualify for their possession,
reason and rationality must be present -- as they are obviously assumed to be in the West. The discourse of proliferation
consequently produces a third entailment by constructing the relationship between West and South in
'orientalist' terms. In this rendition, the South becomes the quintessential antithesis of the West, the
site of irrationality, passion, and terror (Said, 1995). Within this site, different rules apply, which are
not necessarily subject to Western ideals of enlightened reason. 'Proliferation' articulates a
hierarchical structure in global politics, with the West as the privileged site of from which to
surveil, control, and engage the rest of the world . This privilege is further dramatized in the above
complaint about the possibility of retaliation. For the South to achieve the possibility of influencing NATO decisionmaking is to
violate the epistemic sovereignty of the West. 'U.S. and European actions' and interventions have to be
unrestrained in order to constitute proper crisis management. NATO demands a docile subjectivity and
accessible territory from the South, the latter's identity cannot be ascertained against the West. Its arms have to be surrendered, its
retaliatory capabilities to be revoked. 'Information' is the third mode besides 'Securitization' and 'Proliferation' within which we can
discern the subjugation of the South to the strategic Western gaze. A central purpose of the Mediterranean Initiative/Dialogue is to
improve 'mutual understanding' and to 'dispel some of the misperceptions and apprehensions that exist, on both sides of the
Mediterranean' (Solana, 1997a:5). And both the RAND Corporation and NATO put some emphasis on public information and
perception. Yet the structure of this relationship proves to be unbalanced and virtually unilateral. As mentioned above, for NATO,
the prime task is above all the "further refinement of its definition of security" (de Santis, 1998). The general identity of the South as
a site of danger and insecurity is consequently never in question. Western perceptions are never problematized. Knowledge of the
South is, it appears, a matter of matching more and better information with proper conceptual tools. On the other hand,
(mis)perceptions take the place of knowledge in the South. NATO is perceived widely as a Cold War institution searching for a new
enemy. That is why the best course to change the perception of NATO in these countries is to focus more on "soft" security, building
mutual understanding and confidence before engaging in "hard" military cooperation. Measures should be developed with the aim of
promoting transparency and defusing threat perceptions, and promoting a better understanding of NATO's policies and objectives
(de Santis, 1998:34). To interpret political misgivings about NATO and its post-cold war diplomacy as 'misperceptions' which can be
put straight by "educat[ing] opinion-makers in the dialogue-countries"(RAND, 1998:75) tends to naturalize and objectify the
Western rendition of NATO's identity. The possibility that from the perspective of the 'Southern' countries NATO's political and
strategic design might look quite different is lost in this narrative. NATO's identity is decontextualized and objectified, the
productive role of different cultural and strategic settings in the establishment of identities and formulation of interests denied. To
maintain such a lofty position becomes more difficult if we let the Mediterranean participants voice their concerns openly. Far from
being 'misperceptions and misunderstandings', these countries' less than enthusiastic attitudes towards NATO are based on, for
instance, the establishment of powerful Western military intervention capabilities off their beaches. Also, NATO's attempts to
institutionalize a military cooperation is interpreted as an attempt to gain a strategic foothold in the region in order to monitor the
flow of missile technology and the possession of WMD (Selim 1998:12-14). In other words, we encounter rather rational and
reasonable security political and strategic concerns. The fact that NATO is unwilling or unable to acknowledge their concerns once
again demonstrates the 'imperial' nature of the purported dialogue. Conclusion: The Imperial Encounter In her exploration of
Western representations of the South, Roxanne Doty (1996:3) describes the relationship between these two
subjectivities as an "imperial encounter" which is meant "to convey the idea of asymmetrical encounters in which
one entity has been able to construct 'realities' that were taken seriously and acted upon and the
other entity has been denied equal degrees or kinds of agency". Her focus is on an aspect of power which has
received increasing treatment within critical International Relations (IR) theory during the last years, that is, the power to define
and articulate identities and to determine the relations between them. As was argued above, the Western invention of the
South during the cold war can be interpreted as an imperial gesture. The South was rendered into a West-
in-the-making, with its own distinguished historical, cultural, and social features reduced to indicators of 'underdevelopment'.
Ultimately, the narrative proclaimed, the South would become part of the Western 'Empire', the latter would be able to expand into
'barbaric' areas of the world -- provided it could win the war against Communism. The end of the cold war saw this
'expansionist' logic give way to a exclusive posture. The relations between the West and the South are no longer
mediated through time. Instead, a spatial differentiation now structures the imperial encounter, the
South is no longer to be 'developed' and 'Westernized'. It is to be surveilled, controlled and
disciplined, its 'spillage' of crisis and instability to be contained. NATO's Mediterranean Initiative is a
cornerstone in this new rendition. For while we so far cannot observe any direct military intervention by the Alliance in the
Mediterranean region, NATO's discourse on the South in general, and the Initiative in particular render it accessible and available
for such action. Strategic knowledge is produced as an expression of, and in anticipation of, strategic power. The 'self-determination'
of NATO as a continuously capable and competent military agent is effected through a discourse that inscribes a particular,
securitizing, strategic order upon the South, positing it as a site of danger, irrationality and insecurity against the West. In this
context it is interesting to observe the exclusion of states from the Mediterranean Initiative that are not considered to be 'moderate,
Western-looking [and] constructivist' (RAND 1998:57). This differentiation between insiders and outsiders appears to be based on
the degree to which the respective countries are willing to subject themselves to the imperial encounter with the West, and to open
themselves to the strategic gaze and control of NATO. The imperial encounter is then made possible and supported by what one may
call the Emperor's two bodies. On one hand, the West appears as a cultural identity among others, located in space (North of the
Mediterranean) and time (in the post-cold war era). In this sense, the West is the entity that needs to be protected from the dangers
and threats which 'spill over' from the South through adequate strategic means. On the other hand, the West is presented as
a 'site of knowledge', as the source or author of the proper and objective 'world-picture' that depicts
the realities of post-cold war global politics. In this sense, the West becomes the metaphysical
grounds from which knowledge can be gathered and disseminated. And in its different versions --
securitization, proliferation, and information -- this knowledge draws on and reproduces this
metaphysics. There are consequently reasons to be skeptical about NATO's ability to conduct a 'dialogue' with an other it is
unwilling to listen to.
 LINK – RUSSIA WAR DISCOURSE
Russian threat discourse is a political charade – internal link turns the aff
Raitasalo 17 [Jyri Raitasalo is docent of strategy and security policy at the Finnish National
Defence University. Previously he served as head lecturer of strategy at the Finnish National
Defence University. “Western Societies Shouldn't Buy Into the Russia Hype,”
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/western-societies-shouldnt-buy-the-russia-hype-
20089?page=0%2C2]

Russia’s capability to alter Western narratives about the international

A lot has been said and written down lately on

security system. Proponents of this information warfare genre refer to “ hybrid warfare ,” “ false
narratives ,” “ troll armies ,” “ fake news ” and “ the weaponization of information .” It has been
purported that Russia today—like never before—is able to change Western narratives or to create new
ones, and that Western states have few effective tools to counter these malign influence attempts. From this perspective
the West is facing enormous problems in dealing with and countering the false Russian narratives on Ukraine, Syria, NATO and a whole set of other topics. Alternatively, it

has been argued that even if Russia is not capable of changing Western narratives, it is able to
corrode the domestic politics of Western states and sow distrust in Western societies . This, it is argued,
makes it easy for Russia to exploit the divided West and allows the Kremlin to achieve its political goals—at the expense of Washington, DC and many European capitals. I argue
that the West is much more resilient to Russia’s “ narrative manipulation ” and its attempts to create havoc within the domestic politics of Western states than the proponents of

Russia’s narrative power posit. Most of the weaponization of information discourse within the West is analytically limited—and maybe even politically motivated. This
discourse is also facilitating Russia with new ‘tools’ as Western states —together with Western media
outlets— have created an overall media hysteria, which is based on buzzwords and
slogans instead of prudent judgement and rational analysis . European states should be
much more concerned with the low level of military capability at their disposal rather than the
inflated threat of false narratives . Yes, Russia has acted aggressively for many years, most notably against
Georgia and Ukraine, but also in Syria, Libya, the Balkans, the Baltics and a lot of other places. And yes, Russia has used a wide variety of

means—political, military, economic and others (including information) to get what it wants. But, what else should one expect
from a revisionist great-power feeling disillusioned by the development of its status in the post-Cold War international security order and faced with the
prospects of future loss of prestige and power due to enormous societal problems , including demographic problems and economic decline? Add this with a

regime that feels insecure—not only against external threats (including NATO enlargement and the loss of many post-Soviet states to the West) but also
domestically— and the recipe for massive threat inflation, grandstanding and aggressive

behavior is ready. It must be noted that Russia has proved to be surprisingly successful in many arenas during the last three years. Western “eastward
expansion” is halted, Ukraine and Georgia are subdued, Syria’s future cannot be negotiated without Russia holding the pole position, and the return of violence to the Balkans is
only a matter of time—if Russia so chooses. In addition, Russia has strengthened its relationship with the other revisionist great power in the world—China. Also, Russia’s role in
Libya is increasing—potentially having its stranglehold on Europe in matters of migration and the spread of terrorism. But if there is one domain where Russia’s actions have not
been successful, it is the information domain. Despite the multitude of propositions concerning Russia’s information warfare capabilities, it needs to be asked: which Western
narratives has Russia been able to change after it annexed the Crimean Peninsula and started a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine? After all, the West has united against Russia after
2014. Not even the sitting president of the United States has the power to mend relations with Russia as objections within the U.S. domestic political circles prohibit a warming—
or relations—between the Trump administration and Putin’s Russia. So strong is the prevailing Western narrative on Russia. In fact, there has been only one strategic narrative
Before 2014, Russia was regarded as a partner to be
that Russia has been able to change within the West during the last three years.

engaged and cooperated with. As the 1994 National Security Strategy of the United States noted: “In Russia, the economic transformation undertaken
will go down as one of the great historical events of this century. The Russian Government has made remarkable progress toward privatizing the economy and reducing inflation.
But much remains to be done to build on the reform momentum to assure durable economic recovery and social protection. President Clinton has given strong and consistent
support to this unprecedented reform effort, and has mobilized the international community to provide structural economic assistance.” The above mentioned approach
The Western narrative on Russia that had developed and matured
changed significantly during the first half of 2014.

almost twenty-five years changed surprisingly quickly. The role of Russia , from a Western point of view,
changed from a partner to to an adversary —even an enemy . The narrative power of Russia has not been able
to change the strategic framework of Western states regarding Ukraine, Syria or Libya. Rather, the multitude of Russian attempts to change Western narratives have caused a

massive setback: anything and everything Putin’s Russia says or does today is interpreted
from a highly critical perspective . In the words of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley , “We cannot trust Russia. We
should never trust Russia.” In order to make some sense about the possibilities of Russia to change Western narratives on security and defense, it is important to

differentiate between false news stories and headlines on the one hand and narratives on the
other. These days anyone can get his or her message out in some form—whether it is through social media or
established media sources. But it is a totally different thing to say that it would be easy, or even possible, to

change preexisting narratives or to create new ones. Narratives inform people how they “see”
reality “out there,” but more importantly narratives constitute our identities . Thus, narratives are not
 Narratives are deep-seated cultural constructs through which
only “stories” that can be made up by anyone.

people infer meaning about the social world. Thus, narratives are “sticky” in nature—resistant to change—
because changing narratives implies changes to the way people identify themselves and how
they see the world. Concerning narratives, there is a strong bias on status quo over change. The more
“information warfare,” “the weaponization of information” or “hybrid warfare” become established as the Western perspective on Russia’s relations with the West, the more we
will overemphasise the coherence and effectiveness of the Kremlin as a hub of power and at the same time risk simplifying domestic discussions in Western societies. Yes, “the
Kremlin” is trying to maximize its leverage across issues with strategic interest to Russia using a multitude of tools, including information. This is called statecraft. But to see
Western audiences tend
Russia behind every problem within Western societies actually empowers Russia as a strategic actor rather than curtails its power.

to give Russia much more credit than it actually deserves. By focusing on Russian narrative
power and Western inability to counter it, the West is, in fact, providing Russia
with new tools—or weapons—to use against Western interests . Western states are by
their own actions creating hysteria throughout the Western security community and
thus opening up new “seams” through which its societies become more vulnerable
and susceptible to external influence attempts . The recent—and still ongoing— U.S. political circus
and media frenzy around President Trump’s potential Russia connections, coupled with Russia’s possible election
hacking in the United States, have more to do with Russia as a theme of U.S. domestic politics than Russia
as an actor. Russia may very well have tried to corrode the American political system during the presidential race and it may even have tried the same over many years.
However, the ongoing media charade in the United States owes to problems of longer

pedigree. The American society has over many years become so polarized politically and
socially that any potential theme —like Russia— is used to the fullest extent in domestic
political maneuvering . And many of the U.S. media corporations live in a symbiotic relationship with the divided political establishment. Yes,
Russia has done nasty things against the United States using subversive means. But this should
have been self evident for any analyst of international relations when relations between the West
and Russia turned sour in a process that started at least ten years ago. International Relations
101: adversarial great powers do nasty things. But there is a difference between trying and
succeeding. This Western tendency to conceptualize “the Kremlin” as the hub of all power in
Russia, with its unhindered capacity to translate strategic goals into action, is in fact one reason
why Russia has had some influence—at the tactical level— on the way that its capability and power is
conceptualized in the West . The Western narrative on Anti-Access and Area Denial , or A2/AD, is a good example of
this. When Russia deploys SS-26 Stone (or 9K720 Iskander-M) ballistic missiles to Kaliningrad, which are mobile missile platforms intended to be moved, their strategic or
operational value is rather limited—at least before the shooting war starts. But translating the concept of A2/AD from the Asian

theater ( China’s Maginot line ) to Europe, Russia’s nonstrategic military actions get a heightened
sense of urgency. A simplified understanding of Russia coupled with media frenzy
about everything that Russia does creates self-inflicted wounds that almost force
Western states to play according to rules set by Russia . For example, instead of asking which
targets can be destroyed with the SS-26 within a 500 kilometers radius around Kaliningrad (the estimated range of the SS-26 missile system), we
should be asking the question: so what? The same goes for the other A2/AD systems, the S-300/S-400 air defense missile systems and the Bastion-P
coastal missile systems. Modern military systems do not in and of themselves translate into operational tactical success or politically desirable goals. In addition, it would be
good to notice that, for Russian military planners, the geostrategic location of Kaliningrad is a nightmare. The exclave is practically an island in the middle of NATO, located on
the coast of the Baltic Sea, which is practically an inland sea of NATO and the European Union. Without going nuclear, there would be practically no way to defend Kaliningrad if
should Western states be chasing
a large-scale war broke out. Deploying SS-26, S-300/400 and Bastion-P systems will not change that fact. So,

around every troop deployment or snap military exercise that Russia makes? If Western
states decide it is wise to do so, then they let Russia define the rules of the game .
They also enhance Russia’s ability to control their thinking, actions and maybe
even their narratives . Instead of letting Western media frenzy drive policy decisions, it would
be advisable to finally burst the “A2/AD bubble” in Western strategic discourse that has been created by overemphasizing the effect of
Russian military capabilities whether in Kaliningrad or the Black Sea. This does not mean that Western states should not change

their procurement priorities after twenty-five years of cashing in the post-Cold War era “ peace
dividend .” There is a capability gap in the European theater—between Russian armed forces and European ones. Western states, mostly in Europe, should start taking
defense seriously. However, it is time to stop the unanalytical, slogan-based overemphasis around the

possibilities that Russia has to control Western narratives. Buzzwords rarely form sound
foundations for security strategy and defense posture. Hybrid warfare, information war and the misperception that Russia has the
potential to alter our narratives have received way too much media coverage during the last three years. The ability to make headlines does not equate to the ability to change
deep-seated Western narratives.

Demonizing Russia causes serial policy failure and turns their internal links
Cohen 18 [Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New
York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation. “Debasing US
Policy Discourse About Russia,” https://www.thenation.com/article/debasing-us-policy-
discourse-about-russia/]
Baseless and reckless tropes about Russia, Cohen points out, have proliferated in the US political-media
establishment during the new Cold War, and even more since Russiagate allegations began to circulate widely two years

ago, in mid-2016. The worst of these tropes—in effect an incitement to war —is that “Russia attacked

America during the 2016 presidential election.” But there are others equally unfounded and
almost as detrimental to Washington policy-making. Among them, as The Economist and The New York
Times recently asserted, are that on today’s “world stage” Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “pariah” and his country

“isolated from the international community .” Indeed, the Times insisted, quoting a British intelligence chief, that Russia is
“becoming a ‘more isolated pariah.’” These assertions are so detached from geopolitical realities that

they may be expressions of some Putin-Russia Derangement Syndrome , as others have

suggested. Consider only last week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual event conceived by the Kremlin as a kind of Russian Davos. By most media
accounts, including non-Russian ones, it was the best attended and most successful since 2014, when the West began imposing escalating economic sanctions on the country.
Leaders of France, Japan, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and scores of less consequential states were there, along with innumerable international corporate executives, the director
of the International Monetary Fund, and the president of Boeing, who declared that Russia “is a place for long-term partnership.” Judging by press reports, television footage,
and transcripts of meetings, virtually all of them were eager for close encounters with the “pariah” Putin. Indeed, just prior to the event, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Sochi to meet separately with Putin. Again, all this against the backdrop of new financial and diplomatic sanctions rained on Russia

it is impossible to isolate
by London and Washington and very perfunctory, if at all, implemented by their European “allies.” In reality,

Russia , the planet’s largest territorial and most natural-resource rich nation. There is no “global politics,” no “world order,” without
Russia. Its natural gas and oil resources, carried west and east through its far-flung networks of pipelines—both existing ones and those under
construction— make such an effort an epic geopolitical folly . So too does Moscow’s political-

diplomatic influence in vital regions, from Europe, China, and Afghanistan to the Middle East. (Consider its crucial role, for example, in any crisis-resolution
involving Iran or North Korea.) Much of this is due not primarily to Moscow’s modernized conventional and nuclear weapons but to its foreign-policy philosophy under

Putin. Simply put but often elaborated: In accord with national sovereignty, we are ready for good relations with any
government that seeks good relations with us. Contrast this with Washington’s longstanding ideological,
highly militarized, and often hegemony-aspiring foreign-policy tenets. As a result, unlike the Soviet Union, post-
Soviet Russia has few, if any, unwilling allies, semi-allies, or partners in international affairs. China and Iran are big and important allies. Semi-allies and occasional partners
include India and, of course, the other BRICs nations; Saudi Arabia, with whom Russia has cooperated in order to raise international oil prices; and Israel, whose prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an honored guest in Moscow for Russia’s most sacred memorial holiday, Victory Day, on May 9. America’s European NATO allies may seem
united in “isolating” Russia, but not the leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, or the president of France. Indeed, Emmanuel Macron, again accompanied by his wife, did a
mini-version of his effervescent socializing with President Trump in Washington with Putin in St. Petersburg, while also signing a major energy deal with Russia and hoping that
France will become “Russia’s largest investor.” Another test of Europe’s fidelity to the United States (and its devout UK partner) will come in July, when EU sanctions on Russia
must be continued or terminated. A single “no” vote will end them. Until now, Europe has been swayed—or coerced—by Washington. But can the new government now being
formed in Italy be made to conform, or other governments now rebelling against Trump’s renewed sanctions on Iran, with which not a few European companies have highly
profitable business relations? But can the new government now being formed in Italy be made to conform? And what of the other governments now rebelling against Trump’s
renewed sanctions on Iran, a nation with which not a few European companies have highly profitable business relations? Is, as an official Russian news agency hopes, an “anti-

sanctions coalition” forming against the United States? If so, who would be isolated? Where did the foolish notion of “isolating Russia”
originate? This, at least, cannot be attributed to President Trump, but to President Obama. In April 2014, he made known, as reported by the Times, that
henceforth his policy would focus on “isolating…Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world…effectively making it a pariah state.” This was

extremist folly , not, as the Times correspondent thought, “ an updated version of the Cold War strategy of
containment .” Containment was intended not to isolate the Soviet Union but to keep it from spreading its military and political influence beyond its own existing
“bloc” of allies. Washington and its allies have certainly tried to isolate “Putin’s Russia.” Hence the multiyear cascade of tantrum-

like, pointless, mostly ineffective, even counterproductive sanctions . In addition, whether by

chance or intent, political campaigns have erupted on the eve of Putin and Russia’s emerging on “the

world state” in ways that demonstrate their central role in international affairs. Thus the media
campaign to frighten away visitors to the 2014 Sochi Olympics with reports that terrorist and homophobic attacks were certain to happen
along with life-threatening mishaps due to “corrupt” construction. (None did.) Now, on the eve of the World Cup championship in Russia, there is perhaps a predictable new
series of US media reports suggesting that Russia should be treated as a pariah nation: accounts of an attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in the UK, an official story that
has almost completely fallen apart, but not before having major diplomatic consequences; a revived report that Moscow was behind the shoot-down of a Malaysian passenger
jetliner over Ukraine in 2014, but without any new actual evidence; a revival of the malicious allegation that Putin and Russia itself are “fascist,” without a word, of course, about
an epidemic of anti-Semitic episodes and armed neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine; and a prominent Times opinion article warning that “L.G.T.B. people” may be in danger
during the World Cup games. An argument about the extent to which Russia is or is not isolated in the world today may seem marginal given the looming dangers inherent in the

even leaving aside the obscurant conceit that Washington and London are “the
new Cold War. But

international community,” it is indicative of the general degradation of American

thinking and discourse about geopolitics and US foreign policy generally in
mainstream media and politics . (There are, of course, many exceptions outside the mainstream, especially in scholarly publications.) Henry
Kissinger once said, “ The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not

having one .” The “isolated pariah” trope is part of that demonizing. But Kissinger was partially wrong: Washington has had Russia
policies in the Putin era— exceedingly ill-informed, unwise, and failed ones.
 LINK – SECURITY REPS
Catastrophe representations mold the populace into supporting an omnipresent
security society while papering over continual structural violence
Melley, 15—professor of English at Miami University (Timothy, “Security, Secrecy, and the
Liberal Imaginary”, Telos 170 (Spring 2015): 149–67, dml)

Welcome to the democratic security society, where “keep calm and carry on” is a slogan for suckers and mass-mediated panic is part
of the rhythm of everyday life. In the democratic security society, fantasizing calamity is job
one, for the collapse of society can be forestalled only by its tireless
contemplation. This strange fact—that contemporary democracy increasingly imagines,
plans, and even rehearses its own destruction—is but one reflection of the growing
contradiction at the heart of contemporary life. On the one hand, modern liberal societies laud the
ideals of participatory democracy, free speech, individual liberty, and governmental transparency. On the other,
they grow ever more committed to the biopolitical regulation of life, the mitigation of threats to
public health and safety, and the restriction of liberties as a way of securing liberty itself.4 This
final strategy—the defense of liberty through the suspension of liberty—is the paradoxical “state of exception”
that Giorgio Agamben finds haunting every democracy.5 Nowhere does this specter now loom larger than in the
United States, which is the democratic security society par excellence. On the one hand, American citizens and leaders
understand their nation as a paragon of liberal democracy—the first modern democracy, a beacon of liberty, “the greatest country on
earth”; on the other, they demand protection from a host of dangers, which they understand partly as threats to
“freedom” itself. The United States thus invests the majority of its disposable income in defense (because “freedom is not free”); it
has erected a massive system of security bureaucracies, checkpoints, walls, and safety protocols; and twenty-five years after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, it commits itself increasingly to a sovereign and clandestine security apparatus constructed in the Cold War.6 But
that is merely the security state proper. The security society is a much larger system of
institutions (private and public), knowledges, attitudes, and representations that
constitute a rationality affecting all aspects of everyday life. If the hallmarks of liberalism are
individualism, liberty, and transparency, then the hallmarks of the security society are borders, surveillance systems, clandestine
agencies, and state sovereignty. Beyond these institutional features, however, a security society is also marked by a
set of cultural dispositions and tendencies: (1) the triumph of a biopolitical model in which power
is deeply committed to the regulation of human life; (2) a culture of futurism, in which everyday
life, cultural production, and economic activity are increasingly concerned with future
possibilities; (3) widespread social adoption of epidemiological and immunological models of
threat mitigation leading to restricted mobility and enhanced surveillance for some populations; and (4) a cultural
imaginary increasingly focused on florid depictions of catastrophe, disaster, and
even apocalypse. This cultural imaginary is essential to the growth of a security
paradigm in the potentially hostile territory of liberal democracy. Securitization is
a process that begins by imagining future threats before they materialize . Imagining
weakness, invasion, and collapse is big business. Corporations increasingly hire “white hat”
hackers to reveal the holes in their cyber defenses. Military intelligence agencies stage fictional
disaster scenarios, and they use filmmakers, writers, and scenarists in these exercises. Beyond such direct connections, popular
fiction powerfully shapes state policy .7 Both the security state and the security
society depend on a rich cultural imaginary to conceptualize the potential threats,
harms, dangers, and catastrophes that better security measures might prevent. In a
society deeply anxious about security, we should expect a rich array of narratives and media constructions of future invasion, deprivation, natural
disaster, war, and apocalypse. This, of course, is precisely what we see. Since the Cold War, U.S. culture has grown increasingly consumed with visions
of alien invasion, nuclear war, zombification, terrorism, mass extinction, contagion, and social and ecological collapse. From The Hunger Games to
Survivor, the Hobbesian state of nature has never had so much representational cache. National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers is now in its
fourth season. In the booming area of Young Adult fiction, dystopia is a mainstay. Since the Cold War, future social collapse has been the focus of
hundreds of major motion pictures and television series, ranging from Mad Max and Blade Runner to recent productions as diverse as 2012, The Day
After Tomorrow, World War Z, Oblivion, Elysium, and Snowpiercer. 8 Perhaps even more notable is the growing focus on ecological catastrophe and
apocalypse in the work of major literary figures like Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Don DeLillo, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and Barbara
Kingsolver, to name but a few.9 Catastrophe narrative is widely understood as “mere entertainment,” but it nonetheless occupies a
great deal of the collective consciousness of contemporary American culture. It attracts massive capital
investment and even greater investments of money and time from consumers. It thus constitutes an omnipresent collective
fantasy, and this fantasy cannot be dissociated so easily from material security measures. The
incessant contemplation of invasion, destruction, and social collapse is in fact one of the things that encourages the construction of survivalist bunkers,
panic rooms, metal detectors, and gated communities. Such
fantasies are in some ways the sign of privilege itself, the unconscious
acknowledgment of dramatic social inequities that are maintained by the strangely porous but guarded borders of elite suburbs,
corporate campuses, and international borders. While these zones are secured against physical threats, their most
important effects may be epistemological ones. Secured boundaries have the effect of
“protecting” privileged populations not only from physical conflict but also from knowledge
about such conflict—that is, knowledge about the living conditions and experiences of those on the
other side of the fence. Because security is a commodity of the privileged, these material and
epistemological barriers undermine the empathy that might lessen social
inequality . Within such a system, the cultural imaginary takes on a far greater role as a source of
“knowledge” about the potential harms facing the security society. But because its “knowledge”
is also fantasy, this arrangement produces a symptomatic irrationality at the heart of the
security society. In response to perceived public demand, leaders often spend vast sums to mitigate
relatively unlikely threats (terrorist attacks, for example) while tolerating all manner of much
graver, but less catastrophic, harms (gun deaths, for example). This is hardly the “rational public sphere” that
liberal society and its open public sphere were supposed to foster.
 LINK – “STABILITY”
The 1ac’s attempt to produce stable security environments relies on obsolete,
ethnocentric theories of norm diffusion that foment and accelerate neo-imperial
experimentation at home and abroad
---good example of this for ASB aff: Their Haddick evidence bills itself as the “crisis-manager’s
handbook”
Barder 15 [Alexander D. Barder is a political scientist at Florida International University in the
Department of Politics and International Relations, Empire Within, Routledge: London and
New York, 2015, p. 128-131]

The low-intensity warfare tactics of the cold war have found their way to the criminalized inner
city.1 The latent guerilla warfare in disadvantaged banlieues could spread outside of them and become a civil war.2 Introduction As
I argued in Chapter 1, much of international theory is predicated upon an understanding of certain boundaries, both conceptual and
practical. International theorists typically attempt to differentiate the international from the set of intra-state interactions. Here we
have the reification of a particular image of the bounded nineteenth-century European sovereign, each master of its own territory,
projected back and forward in time – an aspect of what R. B. J. Walker calls the discourse of eternity. The domestic condition of
hierarchy is contrasted with an international ahistorical condition of anarchy between states. Lately, there is an opposing
attempt in international theory to theorize the hierarchical stratification of the international
system. This attempt includes aspects of the English School and social constructivism, but especially observed
in the work of David Lake or John Ikenberry. Each of these approaches emphasizes the specific diffusion of social norms or the
emergence of authority relationships that call into question the pristine construction of the hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy so
prevalent in realist/neorealist theories. Nonetheless, these approaches
typically remain Western-centric. They
assume that norm diffusion is a one-way street : specifically, they assume that the periphery
remains a passive receptor of norms that have historically emerged in the West. In
other words, such approaches to the theorization of international hierarchy do not take
into account the historical and contemporary imbrications, feedbacks, reverberations of
political, social and institutional norms and practices that were experimented on
in what were/are the (neo)imperial laboratories that make up the significant parts
of the global order . What I have attempted to show in the preceding chapters is that we need to be much more attuned to
the multidirectional reverberations that result from conditions of domination (particular historical forms of formal and informal
imperialism) that have profound effects on domestic institutions and practices. To return to Hoffmann’s point made in 1959,
international theory must be attentive to what “cuts across” states and not simply the
interactions between states. By tracing the ways in which imperial governance resulted in
experiments and innovations of violence, social control and new forms of socioeconomics,
we can observe the extent to which such subordinated spaces have historically possessed forms
of agency that “cut across” and into the “inside” of great powers. The previous three chapters examined the
conjunction between historical changes in the international system and the effects that occurred throughout not only the global
periphery but also the center. While I have stressed three different themes that remain crucial for international theory – namely
violence, social control or security and political economy – my focus has been on demonstrating the links between international
changes (i.e. imperial or hegemonic periods of crisis beginning in the nineteenth century) and the “management” of subaltern and
Western populations. Instead of emphasizing the effects that such international changes have on systemic configurations, the
number of poles in the international system, for example, or, more generally, on statecraft or foreign policy, I have shown how the
materialization of the camp, the colonial surveillance state and neoliberalization were significantly
affected by the transnational diffusions taking place across shifting imperial or hegemonic
networks. The nineteenth-century experimentation with violence in imperial Africa, the colonization of the American West, and
the tectonic shifts in imperial geopolitics during the latter part of the nineteenth century have had fateful implications for the
materialization of the concentration camp and the violence perpetuated within Europe during the Second World War; concerns
about internal threats in newly industrialized European nation-states provoked the emergence of a modern surveillance state that
adapted techniques and technologies developed in imperial domains; the neoliberalization of the global South during the course of
the 1970s proved significant for the reassertion of American hegemony, a political project that would be pushed forward by the
adoption of a similar neoliberalization in the United States and the United Kingdom. Subordinated peripheries are not passive
receptors of norms devised in the imperial West; historically they have proved to be significant “laboratories of modernity” where
imperial agents could experiment, innovate and “discover” novel modes and technologies of governing that would undoubtedly
prove problematic, at least initially, to implement directly within the metropole. As I have argued in Chapter 1, we should
understand the metaphor of the laboratory in the Latourian sense. According to Latour, by forcing the social world to
conform to its requirements, the laboratory becomes the vector for defining the parameters of
legitimate political and social action. In an analogous way, the (neo)imperial laboratory defines the
contours of valid social and political governance. What gets developed, innovated and
experimented on in the crucibles of imperial domains becomes perceived as “tried and true”
practice, especially in response to conditions of political, social or economic crisis. In this way,
the imperial laboratory normalizes new forms of violence, social control, and the reorganization
of domestic politico-economic institutions. Thus the linkages between the international, the domestic, the
peripheral and the metropole are much deeper and intense than international theorists usually accept. They involve processes of
horizontal as well as vertical diffusion of norms and practices, of material assemblages that connect hierarchical relations between
periphery and metropole. However, the relevance of uncovering these processes of co-constitution between metropole and periphery
is not just for a deeper awareness of the historical implications of imperial international relations. As I started off describing in the
Introduction, the Global War on Terror is itself an intensified contemporary moment of neoimperial
experimentation with significant reverberations not only for the United States itself but also
across a wide array of Western states. This is not to say that the processes of militarization of the domestic space
underway are novel or specific to the United States. As the epigraphs to this chapter show, the militarization of policing is a long-
term process that can be traced back to the American involvement in the Philippines (as McCoy has shown) and is something that is
also occurring beyond the United States, for example in France (as Mathieu Rigouste has also shown). What is perhaps novel about
our traditional spatial definitions that delineate the
our contemporary period, however, is that
applicability of specific forms of violence are becoming increasingly difficult to
maintain. As Carlos Galli argues, the very notions of internal and external vis-à-vis state
control over territory have essentially lost their meaning .3 “ In the global age ,” Galli
argues: modern political spatiality – the State, with all its right and its ability to enclose an
internal sphere with order and security, creating a space where “not everything can happen” –
has ceased to be fully in effect, challenged as it is by the power of economic flows and the
needs of capital, which demand a new politics and which no longer allow the State to be the
operative center of political reality and its interpretation.4 Threats can no longer be
properly demarcated (if they ever were completely) according to a fixed spatial configuration (i.e. the
traditional cartography of the Westphalian order of states ). What we end up with is a
global form of “Empire” possessing neither “interiority” nor “external” edges, laced with a
shifting multiplicity of borders , center-less and unstable. What emerges is a planetary condition in which this:
global Empire [is] locked in a struggle against itself, against anomalous functions that exist
within it. In short, it is an Empire whose inner discontinuity produces conflicts that, no matter
where or how they are generated, all have local status, and all of which also fall immediately –
with unforeseeable effects – into the Whole.5 An effect of this effacement of any notions of inside and outside – something, for
example, Carl Schmitt recognized long ago – is that, as Galli puts it, “the Enemy today presents himself as the Disturber, the specter
of all that is internal and domestic – as our own wicked caricature, our Double, our Shadow.”6 It is the persistent fear that
an amorphous enemy infiltrates the polity, undermining it through persistent and ubiquitous
subversion that conditions a specific governmental response. This concluding chapter thus explores some of
the nascent consequences of these (neo)imperial experiences during the better part of a decade of the Global War on Terror, in
light of a novel form of spatiality that progressively effaces distinctions between internal and
external, metropole and periphery. Experimentation may well occur in Iraq or
Afghanistan and reverberate back into the US ; but urban American environments may
also become laboratories for testing different techniques and technologies by a state that no
longer entirely differentiates inside from outside. What defines the intensified proliferation of
military techniques and technologies at “home” and “abroad” is a concern with the long-term
maintenance of American authority.7 What this results in is a consistent hollowing out of
liberal-democratic institutions and the decaying civic participation of the population largely
perceived as being a threat to state authority. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, “the superimposition of empire and
democracy, the corruption of representative government, the declining status of the citizen, the hegemonic status of American power
in the world – suggest that the traditional categories of citizen, democracy, state and power desperately need reformulation.”8
 LINK – TERRORISM DISCOURSE
Their advantage is a sham rooted in vested interests and violent national identity
formation—the impact is expansive structural violence and racist political
subjectivity
Desiree Bryan 12, Research Assistant at Middle East Institute. MScECON Candidate: Security
Studies at Aberystwyth University, The Popularity of the ‘New Terrorism’ Discourse,
http://www.e-ir.info/2012/06/22/the-popularity-of-the-new-terrorism-discourse/

The opening sentence of a textbook on terrorism states, “Terrorismhas been a dark feature of human behavior since
the dawn of recorded history” (Martin, 2010, 3). If this is the case, what makes the ‘new terrorism’ different from the old? According
to the mainstream orthodoxy on terrorism, the old terrorism was generally characterized by: left wing ideology; the use of
small scale, conventional weapons; clearly identifiable organizations or movements with equally clear political and
social messages; specific selection of targets and “explicit grievances championing specific classes or ethnonational groups” (Martin, 2010, 28). Also
according to the orthodoxy, the shift to the new terrorism, on the other hand, is thought to have emerged in the early 1990s (Jackson, 2011) and took
root in mass consciousness with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. (Martin, 2010, 3). The new terrorism is
characterized by: “loose, cell-based networks with minimal lines of command and control,” “desired acquisition of high-intensity weapons and
weapons of mass destruction” (Martin, 2010, 27), “motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology and it is aimed at
causing mass causality and maximum destruction” (Jackson, 2007, 179-180). However, these dichotomous definitions of the old and new types of
terrorism are not without problems. The first major problem is that terrorism has been characterized by the
same fundamental qualities throughout history. Some of the superficial characteristics, the means of implementation (e.g. the
invention of the Internet or dynamite) or the discourse (communism vs. Islam) may have evolved, but the central components remain the same. The
second major problem is that the characterization of new terrorism is, at best, rooted in a particular political
ideology, biased and inaccurate. At worst, it is racist, promotes war mongering and has contributed
to millions of deaths. As David Rapoport states: Many contemporary studies begin … by stating that although terrorism has always been a
feature of social existence, it became ‘significant’ … when it ‘increased in frequency’ and took on ‘novel dimensions’ as an international or transnational
activity, creating in the process a new ‘mode of conflict’ (1984, 658). Isabelle Duyvesteyn points out that this would indicate evidence for the emergence
of a new type of terrorism, if it were not for the fact that the article was written in 1984 and described a situation from the 1960s (Duyvesteyn, 2004,
439). It seems that there have been many new phases of terrorism over the years. So many so that the definition of ‘new’ has been stretched
significantly and applied relatively across decades. Nevertheless, the idea that this terrorism, that which the War on Terror (WoT) is directed against, is
the most significant and unique form of terrorism that has taken hold in the popular and political discourse. Therefore, it is useful to address each of
the so-called new characteristics in turn. The first characteristic is the idea that new terrorism is based on loosely organized cell-based networks as
opposed to the traditional terrorist groups, which were highly localized and hierarchical in nature. An oft-cited example of a traditional terrorist group
is the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who operated under a military structure and in a relatively (in contrast to the perceived transnational operations of
al-Qaeda) localized capacity. However, some of the first modern terrorists were not highly organized groups but small fragmented groups of anarchists.
These groups were heeding the call of revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and other contemporary anarchists to achieve anarchism, collectivism
and atheism via violent means (Morgan, 2001, 33). Despite the initial, self-described “amorphous” nature of these groups, they were a key force in the
Russian Revolution (Maximoff, G.). Furthermore, leading anarchist philosophers of the Russian Revolution argued that terrorists “should organize
themselves into small groups, or cells” (Martin, 2010, 217). These small groups cropped up all around Russia and Europe in subsequent years and
formed an early form of a “loosely organized cell-based network” not unlike modern day al Qaeda. Duyvesteyn further notes that both the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964, and Hezbollah, founded 1982, operate on a network structure with very little central
control over groups (2004, 444). The second problematic idea of new terrorism is that contemporary terrorist
groups aim to
acquire and use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This belief is simply not supported by empirical evidence.
One of the key problems with this theory is that WMDs are significantly more difficult to obtain and utilize than
most people understand. Even if a terrorist group were to obtain a biological WMD, “Biologist Matthew
Meselson calculates that it would take a ton of nerve gas or five tons of mustard gas to produce heavy causalities
among unprotected people in an open area of one square kilometer” (Mueller, 2005, 488). And that’s only an example of the problem with the
implementation of WMDs, assuming they are acquired, transported and desirable by a terrorist group in the first
place. Additional problems, such as the fact that WMDs “are extremely difficult to deploy and control” (Mueller, 2005,
488) and that making a bomb “is an extraordinarily difficult task” (Mueller, 2005, 489), further diminish the risk. It is
interesting to note that, while the potential dangers of WMDs are much lauded, the attacks of September 11th
were low tech and had been technologically possible for more than 100 years. Mueller also states, “although
nuclear weapons have been around for well over half a century, no state has ever given another
state (much less a terrorist group) a nuclear weapon that the recipient could use independently” (2005, 490). All of this talk
about the difficultly of acquiring and deploying WMDs (by non-state agents), is not to diminish the question of what terrorists have to gain by utilizing
these weapons. It
is important to question whether it would even further the aims of terrorists to use
WMDs. The evidence suggests otherwise. In the “Politics of Fear” Jackson states, “Mass casualties are most often
counterproductive to terrorist aims – they alienate their supporters and can provoke harsh
reprisals from the authorities […]” in addition, “[…] they would undermine community support, distort the terrorist’s
political message, and invite over-whelming retaliation” (2007, 196-197). Despite popular rhetoric to
the contrary, terrorists are “rational political actors and are acutely aware of these dangers” (Jackson,
2007, 197). Government appointed studies on this issue have supported these views . This leads us to the third problem with
new terrorism, which is the idea that we are facing a new era of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology. As stated
previously, earlier, so-called traditional forms of terrorism are associated with left wing, political ideology, whereas contemporary terrorists are
described as having “anti-modern goals of returning society to an idealized version of the past and are therefore necessarily anti-democratic, anti-
progressive and, by implication, irrational” (Gunning and Jackson, 3). Rapoport argues the idea that religious terrorists are irrational, saying, “what
seems to be distinctive about modern [religious] terrorists, their belief that terror can be organized rationally, represents or distorts a major theme
peculiar to our own culture […]” (1984, 660). Conveniently for the interests of the political elites, as we shall see later, the idea of irrational fanaticism
makes the notion of negotiation and listening to the demands of the other impossible. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the U.S. has, for
decades, given billions of dollars in aid to the State of Israel, which could be argued to be a fundamentalist, religious organization that engages in the
terrorization of a group of people. Further, it is difficult to speak of The Troubles in Northern Ireland without speaking of the religious conflict, yet it
was never assumed that the IRA was “absolutist, inflexible, unrealistic, lacking in political pragmatism, and not amenable to negotiation” (Gunning and
Jackson, 4). Rapaport further reinforces the idea that religious terrorism goes back centuries by saying, “Before the nineteenth century, religion
provided the only acceptable justifications for terror…” (1984, 659). As we have seen here, problems with the discourse of new terrorism include the
fact that these
elements of terrorism are neither new nor are the popular beliefs of the discourse
supported by empirical evidence. The question remains, then, why is the idea of new terrorism so popular? This question will be
addressed next. Political Investment in New Terrorism There are two main categories that explain the popularity of new terrorism. The first category is
government and political investment in the propagation of the idea that a distinct, historically
unknown type of terrorism exists. The mainstream discourse [1] reinforces, through statements by political elites,
media, entertainment and every other way imaginable, the culture of violence, militarism and feelings of fear. Through
mass media, cultural norms and the integration of neoliberal ideology into society, people are becoming increasingly
desensitized to human rights issues, war, social justice and social welfare, not to mention apathetic
to the political process in general. The discourse of the WoT is merely the contemporary incarnation
of this culture of fear and violence. In the past, various threats have included American Indians, women, African Americans,
communists, HIV/AIDS and drugs, to name but a few (Campbell, 1992). It can be argued that there are four main political functions of terrorism
discourse. The first is as a distraction from other, more immediate and domestic social problems such
as poverty, employment, racial inequality, health and the environment. The second, more
sinister function is to control dissent. In looking at both of these issues Jackson states: There are a number of clear
political advantages to be gained from the creation of social anxiety and moral panics. In the first place, fear is
a disciplining agent and can be effectively deployed to de-legitimise dissent, mute criticism, and constrain internal
opponents. […] Either way, its primary function is to ease the pressures of accountability for political
elites. As instrument of elite rule, political fear is in effect a political project aimed at reifying
existing structures of power. (Politics of Fear, 2007, 185). Giroux further reinforces the idea that a culture of fear creates
conformity and deflects attention from government accountability by saying, “the ongoing appeal to jingoistic forms of
patriotism divert the public from addressing a number of pressing domestic and foreign issues; it also contributes to the increasing suppression of
dissent” (2003, 5). Having
a problem that is “ubiquitous, catastrophic, and fairly opaque” (Jackson, Politics of
Fear, 2007, 185) is
useful to political elites, because it is nearly impossible to address the efficacy of
combating the problem. At least, empirical evaluation can be, and is, easily discouraged in academic circles through research funding
directives. Domestic problems such as the unemployment rate or health care reform, on the other hand, are directly measurable and heavily monitored
by domestic sources. It is possible to account for the success or failure of policies designed to address these types of problems and the (re)election of
politicians often depends heavily on success in these areas. However, the public is neither involved on a participative level nor, often, socially aware of
what is happening in murkier and unreachable areas like foreign policy. The third political investment in maintaining the terrorism discourse has to do
with economics. “At a material level, there
are a great many vested interests in maintaining the widespread condition of fear,
not least for the military-industrial complex which benefits directly from increased spending on
national security” (Jackson, Politics of Fear, 2007, 186). This is true with all forms of crime and insecurity as all of them factor into the greater
security-industrial complex. Not only do these industries employ millions of people and support their families, they boost the economy. Barry Buzan
talks of these the importance of these issues to both the government and the public in
terms of a ‘threat-deficit’ – meaning that U.S.
policy and society is dependent on having an external threat (Buzan, 2007, 1101). The fourth key political
interest in terrorism discourse is constructing a national identity. This will be discussed more thoroughly in the
following section, however, it is important to acknowledge the role the WoT (and previous threats) has had on constructing and reinforcing a collective
identity. Examples of this can be seen in the discourse and the subsequent reaction to anyone daring to step outside the parameters of the Bush
Administration-established narrative in the days immediately following the September 11th attacks. A number of journalists, teachers and university
professors lost their jobs for daring to speak out in criticism of U.S. policy and actions following the attacks. In 2001, Lynne Cheney attacked the then
deputy chancellor of the New York City Schools, Judith Rizzo, for saying “terrorist attacks demonstrated the importance of teaching about Muslim
cultures” (Giroux, 2003, 22). According to Giroux, this form of jingoistic
patriotism “becomes a euphemism for shutting
down dissent, eliminating critical dialogue, and condemning critical citizenship in the interest of conformity and a
dangerous departure from what it means to uphold a viable democracy” (2003, 24). The message is,
we are not the other (Muslims), patriotism equals agreement and compliance and our identity is based on the
shared values of liberty and justice. According to Carol Winkler, “Negative ideographs contribute to our collective identity by
branding behavior that is unacceptable … American society defines itself as much by its opposition to tyranny and slavery as it does by a commitment to
liberty” (Winkler, 2006, 12). Terrorism, and by association in this case, Islam, functions as a negative ideograph of American values. It thereby tells us
what our values and our identity are by telling us who the enemy is and who we are not. According to Jackson, “[…] some have argued that
Western identity is dependent on the appropriation of a backward, illiberal, violent Islamic
‘other’ against which the West can organize a collective liberal, civilized ‘self’ and consolidate its
cultural and political norms” (Jackson, Constructing Enemies, 2007, 420). Through this analysis we can see there are four key ways in
which the hegemonic system is invested in propagating a culture of fear and violence and terrorism discourse. Not only is it key for
political elites to support this system, it is also crucial that there be an ever renewing threat that
is uniquely different from past threats. These new threats allow for the investment of significantly more
resources, the continuation of the economy, the renewal of a strong sense of cultural identity and the indoctrination and obedience of new
generations of society. This essay will now look at how individual and collective psychology supports the popularity of the new terrorism discourse.
Psychology of the Masses The second category of reasons why new terrorism discourse is popular can be called the psychology of the masses. There are
a number of factors that fall under this category such as: the hyper-reality of the modern era; the culture of fear; the carryover of historical archetypes
and the infiltration of neoliberal values into cultural norms. The topic of social and individual psychology and how it relates to the propagation and
acceptance of hegemonic discourse is broad. It is also an important aspect of critical terrorism studies and merits further exploration. However, in this
section will outline the basis for the popularity of new terrorism discourse and discuss several ways in which this popularity is manifested and
reinforced in contemporary society.
IMPACTS / AT: IMPACT TURNS
 2NC IMPACT – LAUNDRY LIST
Liberal democracy is intrinsically genocidal and structurally unsustainable –
ecological devesation, financialization, nuclear weapons, resource shortages, and
militarization
Mbembe 16 (Achille, philosopher and sociologist, phd in political science, “The Age of
Humanism is Ending” https://mg.co.za/article/2016-12-22-00-the-age-of-humanism-is-
ending)NFleming
There is no sign that 2017 will be much different from 2016. Under Israeli occupation for
decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on Earth. In the United States, the killing of
black people at the hands of the police will proceed unabated and hundreds of thousands more
will join those already housed in the prison-industrial complex that came on the heels of
plantation slavery and Jim Crow laws. Europe will continue its slow descent into liberal
authoritarianism or what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism. Despite
complex agreements reached at international forums, the ecological destruction of the Earth will
continue and the war on terror will increasingly morph into a war of extermination
between various forms of nihilism. Inequalities will keep growing worldwide. But far from
fuelling a renewed cycle of class struggles, social conflicts will increasingly take the form of
racism, ultra nationalism, sexism, ethnic and religious rivalries, xenophobia, homophobia and
other deadly passions. The denigration of virtues such as care, compassion and kindness will go
hand in hand with the belief, especially among the poor, that winning is all that matters and who
wins — by whatever means necessary — is ultimately right. With the triumph of this neo-
Darwinian approach to history-making, apartheid under various guises will be restored as the
new old norm. Its restoration will pave the way to new separatist impulses, the erection of more
walls, the militarisation of more borders, deadly forms of policing, more asymmetrical wars,
splitting alliances and countless internal divisions including in established democracies. None of
the above is accidental. If anything, it is a symptom of structural shifts, which will become
ever more apparent as the new century unfolds. The world as we knew it since the end of World
War II, the long years of decolonisation, the Cold War and the defeat of communism has ended.
Another long and deadlier game has started. The main clash of the first half of the 21st century
will not oppose religions or civilisations. It will oppose liberal democracy and neoliberal
capitalism, the rule of finance and the rule of the people, humanism and nihilism. Capitalism
and liberal democracy triumphed over fascism in 1945 and over communism in the early 1990s
when the Soviet Union collapsed. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent of
globalisation, their fates were disentangled. The widening bifurcation of demo-cracy and capital
is the new threat to civilisation. Abetted by technological and military might, finance
capital has achieved its hegemony over the world by annexing the core of human
desires and, in the process, by turning itself into the first global secular theology. Fusing the
attributes of a technology and a religion, it relied on uncontested dogmas modern forms of
capitalism had reluctantly shared with democracy since the post-war period — individual
liberty, market competition and the rule of the commodity and of property, the cult of science,
technology and reason. Each of these articles of faith is under threat. At its core, liberal
democracy is not compatible with the inner logic of finance capitalism. The clash between these
two ideas and principles is likely to be the most signifying event of the first half of a 21st-century
political landscape — a landscape shaped less by the rule of reason than by the general release of
passions, emotions and affect. In this new landscape, knowledge will be defined as knowledge
for the market. The market itself will be re-imagined as the primary mechanism for the
validation of truth. As markets themselves are increasingly turning into algorithmic structures
and technologies, the only useful knowledge will be algorithmic. Instead of people with body,
history and flesh, statistical inferences will be all that count. Statistics and other big data will
mostly be derived from computation. As a result of the conflation of knowledge, technology and
markets, contempt will be extended to anyone who has nothing to sell. The humanistic and
Enlightenment notion of the rational subject capable of deliberation and choice will be replaced
by the consciously deliberating and choosing consumer. Already in the making, a new kind of
human will triumph. This will not be the liberal individual who, not so long ago, we believed
could be the subject of democracy. The new human being will be constituted through and within
digital technologies and computational media. The computational age — the age of Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter — is dominated by the idea that there are clean slates in the unconscious.
New media forms have not only lifted the lid previous cultural eras had put on the unconscious.
They have become the new infrastructures of the unconscious. Yesterday, human sociality
consisted of keeping tabs on the unconscious. For the social to thrive meant exercising vigilance
on ourselves, or delegating to specific authorities the right to enforce such vigilance. This was
called repression. Repression’s main function was to set the conditions for sublimation. Not all
desires could be fulfilled. Not everything could be said or enacted. The capacity to limit oneself
was the essence of one’s freedom and the freedom of all. Partly thanks to new media forms and
the post-repressive era it has unleashed, the unconscious can now roam free. Sublimation is no
longer necessary. Language has been dislocated. The content is in the form and the form is
beyond, or in excess of, the content. We are now led to believe that mediation is no longer
necessary. This explains the growing anti-humanist stance that now goes hand in hand with a
general contempt for democracy. Calling this phase of our history fascist might be misleading
unless by fascism we mean the normalisation of a social state of warfare. Such a state would in
itself be a paradox because, if anything, warfare leads to the dissolution of the social. And yet
under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, politics will become a barely sublimated warfare. This
will be a class warfare that denies its very nature — a war against the poor, a race war against
minorities, a gender war against women, a religious war against Muslims, a war against the
disabled. Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of
whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to
violence and existential threat. They genuinely long for a return to some sense of certainty, the
sacred, hierarchy, religion and tradition. They believe that nations have become akin to swamps
that need to be drained and the world as it is should be brought to an end. For this to happen,
everything should be cleansed off. They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent
struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they attribute to the weaker among them,
the weak they do not want to become. In this context, the most successful political
entrepreneurs will be those who convincingly speak to the losers, to the destroyed men and
women of globalisation and to their ruined identities. In the street fight politics will become,
reason will not matter. Nor will facts. Politics will revert into brutal survivalism in an
ultracompetitive environment. Under such conditions, the future of progressive and future-
oriented mass politics of the left is very uncertain. In a world set on objectifying everybody and
every living thing in the name of profit, the erasure of the political by capital is the real threat.
The transformation of the political into business raises the risk of the elimination
of the very possibility of politics. Whether civilisation can give rise at all to any
form of political life is the problem of the 21st century.
 2NC IMPACT – THREAT MULTIPLIER
Our impact is a threat multiplier
Nixon 11 (Rob, ph.D from Colombia, “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” p.
2-3)NFleming
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink—
politically, imaginatively, and theoretically—what I call “slow violence.” By slow violence I mean a
violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is
dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at
all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as
erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence
that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its
calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to
engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of
slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnifi cation, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths
of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational
obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted
casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or introduction [3] climate change—are
underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with
weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional defi nitions of
violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries
with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to
include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions
about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We
need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we
perceive and respond to a variety of social affl ictions—from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in
particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols
slow violence is often not just
adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially,
attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel
long-term, proliferating confl icts in situations where the conditions for sustaining
life become increasingly but gradually degraded.
 2NC EXTINCTION IMPACT CALC
Certain bodies are marked as of lesser value, which means that you can’t solve util
anyways. Extinction rhetoric only matters because the global North experiences
the violence. We control probability and timeframe.
Martin 82 [Brian Martin, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong,
Australia; “Critique of nuclear extinction”; Published in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No.
4, 1982; http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html]

(g) White, western orientation. Most

of the continuing large-scale suffering in the world - caused by
poverty, starvation, disease and torture - is borne by the poor, non-white peoples of the third
world. A global nuclear war might well kill fewer people than have died of starvation and
hunger-related disease in the past 50 or 100 years.[22] Smaller nuclear wars would make this sort
of contrast greater.[23] Nuclear war is the one source of possible deaths of millions of people that
would affect mainly white, rich, western societies (China and Japan are the prime possible exceptions). By
comparison, the direct effect of global nuclear war on nonwhite, poor, third world populations
would be relatively small. White westerners may tend to identify their own plight with that of the
rest of the world, and hence exaggerate the threat of destruction wreaked on their own societies
into one for all of humanity. White westerners may also tend to see the rest of the world as vitally
dependent on themselves for survival, and hence see catastrophe for all as a result of a nuclear war
which destroys 'civilisation'. In practice, poor non-white populations arguably would be better off without the attentions
of white, western 'civilisation' - although nuclear war is hardly the way to achieve this.

Extinction is inevitable in a world structured by ontological American superiority

– it creates a pathology of violence that pre-authorizes use of nuclear weapons
against those that are different
Anthony ’95 - Carl Anthony is the Executive Director of the Urban Habitat Program and the
chair of the East Bay Conversion Reinvestment Commission Remembering the Cuban Missile
Crisis: Freedom from Annihilation Is a Human Right Spring Summer
1995 http://urbanhabitat.org/node/945
Nuclear weapons are tools of a conquering, violent culture. Racism at domestic and
international levels heightens the potential vulnerability and miscalculation
surrounding nuclear proliferation. Few people of color have had any role in debate,
development, or decision-making about the goals of this brutal technology. In a nuclear
holocaust whole populations will be vaporized in the flash of an eye. People deciding the
appropriateness of such a choice inevitably would bring their prejudices and fears to
the devastating decision to annihilate whole peoples. The concentration of nuclear
power in the hands of a Eurocentric technological elite, paranoid about the aims and
aspirations of the majority of the world's population—people of color—magnifies the
potential for global disaster. The great and growing gulf of human communication between
the rich and poor, European and non-European, multiplies the potential antagonism that
could result in planetary holocaust. In this context organizing against nuclear
proliferation is, by definition, a multicultural effort, bringing the intelligence and wisdom of
every community to the global task of defeating the excesses of racism, human aggression, and
technology-gone-berserk.
 2NC STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE/UTIL IMPACT CALC
Structural violence locks in social and environmental tension – culminates in
extinction and makes war inevitable
Szentes 08 (Tamás Szentes 08, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest.
“Globalisation and prospects of the world society” 4/22/08
http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf)
It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries
cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world,
undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the
collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly
needed for development, --many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in
mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor
health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised
injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious
minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that -- the “war
against Nature ”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale
pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and
“invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted
development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions ,
thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars . It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of
war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course,
necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of
the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-
society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national
emancipation , a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all
people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with
an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-
violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of
accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if
reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot
be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others
suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide
equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of
environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature
with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no
ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep
international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to
global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-
games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is
not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human
life”, i.e. survival of mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box
was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies
are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing
development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development
patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development
studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost
permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological,
behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The
narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated
by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for
the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in
the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or
authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new forums for negotiations,
conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human
rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries
concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to a
point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common solution. Under
the
circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human
society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international
inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated . Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer
afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and
the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-
sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner
becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of
visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and
democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by
the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to
irreversible changes in natural environment.

Our impacts should come first –their threats are constructed by the state and the
military-industrial complex to justify militarism while distracting the public from
growing structural inequality – that outweighs and is the most probable impact
Jackson, 12 - 8/5/12 - Director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the
University of Otago. Former Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University
(Richard, The Great Con of National Security,
http://richardjacksonterrorismblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/the-great-con-of-national-
security/)
It may have once been the case that being attacked by another country was a major threat to the lives of ordinary people. It may also
be true that there are still some pretty serious dangers out there associated with the spread of nuclear weapons. For the most
part, however, most of what you’ve been told about national security and all the big threats which
can supposedly kill you is one big con designed to distract you from the things that can really
hurt you, such as the poverty, inequality and structural violence of capitalism, global warming, and the
manufacture and proliferation of weapons – among others. The facts are simple and irrefutable: you’re far more
likely to die from lack of health care provision than you are from terrorism; from stress and overwork than Iranian
or North Korean nuclear missiles; from lack of road safety than from illegal immigrants; from mental illness and suicide
than from computer hackers; from domestic violence than from asylum seekers; from the misuse of
legal medicines and alcohol abuse than from international drug lords. And yet, politicians and the
servile media spend most of their time talking about the threats posed by terrorism, immigration,
asylum seekers, the international drug trade, the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea,
computer hackers, animal rights activism, the threat of China, and a host of other issues which are all about as
equally unlikely to affect the health and well-being of you and your family . Along with this
obsessive and perennial discussion of so-called ‘national security issues’, the state spends truly vast
sums on security measures which have virtually no impact on the actual risk of dying from these
threats, and then engages in massive displays of ‘security theatre’ designed to show just how seriously the state takes these threats
– such as the x-ray machines and security measures in every public building, surveillance cameras everywhere, missile launchers in
urban areas, drones in Afghanistan, armed police in airports, and a thousand other things. This display is meant to
convince you that these threats are really, really serious. And while all this is going on, the rulers of
society are hoping that you won’t notice that increasing social and economic inequality in society
leads to increased ill health for a growing underclass; that suicide and crime always rise when unemployment
rises; that workplaces remain highly dangerous and kill and maim hundreds of people per year; that there are preventable
diseases which plague the poorer sections of society; that domestic violence kills and injures thousands of women
and children annually; and that globally, poverty and preventable disease kills tens of millions of
people needlessly every year. In other words, they are hoping that you won’t notice how much
structural violence there is in the world. More than this, they are hoping that you won’t notice
that while literally trillions of dollars are spent on military weapons, foreign wars and security theatre
(which also arguably do nothing to make any us any safer, and may even make us marginally less safe), that domestic violence
programmes struggle to provide even minimal support for women and children at risk of serious harm from their
partners; that underfunded mental health programmes mean long waiting lists to receive basic care for at-risk individuals; that drug
and alcohol rehabilitation programmes lack the funding to match the demand for help; that welfare measures aimed at
have been inadequate for decades; that health and safety measures at many workplaces
reducing inequality
remain insufficiently resourced; and that measures to tackle global warming and developing alternative energy remain
hopelessly inadequate. Of course, none of this is surprising. Politicians are a part of the system; they don’t want to change it. For them,
all the insecurity, death and ill-health caused by capitalist inequality are a price worth paying to keep the basic social structures as
they are. A more egalitarian society based on equality, solidarity, and other non-materialist values would not suit their interests, or
the special interests of the lobby groups they are indebted to. It is also true that dealing with economic and social inequality, improving
public health, changing international structures of inequality, restructuring the military-industrial complex, and making the necessary
economic and political changes to deal with global warming will be extremely difficult and will require long-term commitment and
determination. For politicians looking towards the next election, it is clearly much easier to paint immigrants as a threat to social order
or pontificate about the ongoing danger of terrorists. It is also more exciting for the media than stories
about how poor people and people of colour are discriminated against and suffer worse health as a
consequence. Viewed from this vantage point, national security is one massive confidence trick –
misdirection on an epic scale. Its primary function is to distract you from the structures and
inequalities in society which are the real threat to the health and wellbeing of you and your family, and to
convince you to be permanently afraid so that you will acquiesce to all the security measures which keep
you under state control and keep the military-industrial complex ticking along. Keep this in mind next time
you hear a politician talking about the threat of uncontrolled immigration, the risk posed by asylum seekers or the threat of Iran, or
the need to expand counter-terrorism powers. The question is: when politicians are talking about national security, what is that they
don’t want you to think and talk about? What exactly is the misdirection they are engaged in? The truth is, if you think that
terrorists or immigrants or asylum seekers or Iran are a greater threat to your safety than the capitalist
system, you have been well and truly conned, my friend. Don’t believe the hype: you’re much more likely to
die from any one of several forms of structural violence in society than you are from immigrants
or terrorism. Somehow, we need to challenge the politicians on this fact.
 2NC CAP UNSUSTAINABLE
Financialization is linked to imperial lashout and war-making which turns the case
Karatasli & Kumral 13 (Şahan Savaş and Refika, comparative-historical sociologist and
assistant research scientist at the Arrighi Center for Global Studies, Johns Hopkins University,
Sefika Kumral, PhD Candidate, JHU. “Financialization and International (Dis)Order: A
Comparative Analysis of the Perspectives of Karl Polanyi and John Hobson”)NFleming
Interestingly, however, during the contemporary era of financialization, the terms “imperialism”, “new-
imperialism” and “empire” have also come back to the literature (Go 2011: 206-234; Harvey 2003; 1 In The Great
Transformation, haute finance (high finance) refers to big "international" banks and bankers (e.g. Rothschild family or J. P Morgan)
located at the center of global capital markets (e.g. London in the nineteenth century). Polanyi ([1944] 2001: 10) distinguishes haute
finance from ordinary banks and bankers based on their economic and political power, their independence from single governments
(even from the most powerful ones) and from the central banks. Although they are independent from all of these actors, they can
influence these actors (see Polanyi ([1944] 2001: 10-14). The content of the term is similar to Hobson's "big financiers". 42
BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY Johnson 2004; Steinmetz 2006; Arrighi 2007). For many, this intensification of
imperialist aggression led by the declining hegemonic power is closely linked to
various aspects of financialization (Harvey 2003; Steinmetz 2006; Martin 2007; Arrighi 2007). Giovanni
Arrighi (1994; also see Arrighi and Silver 1999) emphasized that during the contemporary period of financial
expansion, as during previous periods of financialization in historical capitalism, profit-making
activities shift from productive to non-productive sectors, including war-making activities,
most notably the lending of money to states to pay for military build-ups and open
warfare . David Harvey has argued that the rise of the neoconservative “new imperialism” in the
twentyfirst century is associated with the consequences of neoliberal imperialist policies
implemented after the turn to financialization (Harvey 2003: 183- 212). Based on Tim Mitchell's (2002)
interpretation of the relationships between oil and US foreign policy, Steinmetz (2005) suggests that the war in Iraq must
be seen as a part of a larger historical trend toward financialization which is inherently linked
to postfordist neoliberalism . While it is true that the contemporary era of financialization is
characterized by attempts to establish self-regulating markets and an increasing commodification of land,
labor, and money, it is also characterized by increasing militarization and interstate warfare. In the
literature it is not uncommon to find that scholars who wish to emphasize both trends often refer to Karl Polanyi side by side with a
rich literature on the role of finance capital and imperialism - including Hobson's Imperialism: A Study. Although such
interpretations are feasible and even useful, especially for explaining the emergence of vicious cycles of economic, social and political
destruction of human society in national and international spheres during periods of financialization, the theoretical framework set
up by Polanyi in The Great Transformation does not permit such readings. In the Polanyian schema, selfregulating markets
destroy human society, the environment, and production on national levels, where haute finance
assumes the role of protecting global peace and order. That's why a direct adaptation of Polanyi's arguments for the contemporary
era of financialization presents important problems which must be addressed. Our study discusses Polanyi's arguments regarding
haute finance and the rivalry among the great powers during the nineteenth century in comparison to John Hobson's ([1902] 1988)
study of imperialism. This comparative analysis, which takes Hobson's paradigm as the reference for comparison, is critical for
understanding Polanyi's line of reasoning in The KARATASLI AND KUMRAL 43 Great Transformation, as well as for overcoming
difficulties in the adaptation of certain arguments in the same work to the contemporary era of financialization. Among all
alternative explanations regarding the relationship between haute finance and imperialism, Hobson's paradigm is a more fruitful
source for comparison because both Hobson and Polanyi took as their case the United Kingdom (more specifically the London
capital markets and the House of Rothschild) during the last thirty years of the 19th century2 . Although Hobson and Polanyi looked
at the effects of the same financial actors, the contrast in their conclusion is stark. Hobson regarded financial interests
as the “governor of [new] imperialism”, whereas Polanyi saw the same financial actors as the protectors of peace and
order3 .

Capitalism collapse is the best chance at reversing warming

Holthaus 18 (Eric, meteorologist and columnist for Grist, covering climate science, policy, and
solutions. He has previously written for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and a variety of other
publications. “What the Stock Market Crash Means for the Environment”
https://grist.org/article/what-the-stock-market-crash-means-for-the-climate/)NFleming
There’s evidence that an economic downturn could be good for the planet. The rare
times the world has successfully temporarily stabilized or decreased annual emissions were
during economic recessions like 1990-93 and 2008-09. Recessions can force a rethink of the
status quo; they demand efficiency and innovation. In short, during a recession, the economy
must figure out how to do more with less. That’s exactly the challenge we face now that the
science is absolutely clear that radical change is our only hope to stop climate change before
irreversible tipping points kick in. But while our capitalistic, growth-based economy is still
closely tied to fossil-fuel use and a sustained downturn would likely reduce emissions, the whole
truth is not so simple. Economic hardship doesn’t just hurt the rich, who are (by far!) the world’s
biggest carbon emitters. Economic downturns hit hard in places with large inequality like Miami
and Puerto Rico, which are also slated to bear some of the biggest burdens of climate change.
Not only would another recession impact unemployment, it could result in a shift in priority
away from long-term challenges (like climate change) and onto short-term survival. And
because governments have a bad habit of choosing austerity as a tool for cutting spending, it’s
likely the rich will try to pass off the burden of their mistakes on the backs of the working class.
It’s impossible to know whether a future economic downturn in the U.S. would result in a
widening gap between rich and poor, popular revolt (as we recently saw with France’s yellow
vests), or something else entirely. But according to the Trump administration’s own climate
reports, there is a strong possibility of long-term global warming-related GDP shrinkage. Even
though many people (including me) have argued that the human costs of climate change are
more important than the monetary ones, that doesn’t mean environmentalists can afford to
ignore a possible market downturn. Those hurricanes are going to keep on coming, and
someone has to pay the bills. Climate change is much more terrifying than a potential
recession. Still, we SHOULD care about the volatility of the stock market and a looming
recession — at the very least, it should make us pay attention to the fragility of our current
system and provide excuses for rethinking the way things work. Dig Our Work?
The economy is on the verge of impending collapse – global debt, student loans,
china, brexit,
Williams 12/18 (Alex, featured journalist for the New York Times, “Are You Ready for the
Financial Crisis of 2019?” in The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/style/2019-financial-crisis.html)NFleming
For moneyed Americans, most of the past year has felt like 1929 all over again — the fun, bathtub-gin-quaffing, rich-white-people-
doing-the-Charleston early part of 1929, not the grim couple of months after the stock market crashed. After a decade-long stock
market party, which saw the stocks of the S. & P. 500 index create some $17 trillion in new wealth, the rich indulged in $1,210
cocktails at the Four Seasons hotel’s Ty Bar in New York, in $325,000 Rolls-Royce Cullinan sport-utility vehicles in S.U.V.-loving
Houston and in nine-figure crash pads like Aaron Spelling’s 56,000-square-foot mansion in Los Angeles (currently on the market for
$175 million, more than double what it fetched just five years ago). Will it last? Who knows? But in recent months, the anxiety
that we could be in for a replay of 1929 — or 1987, or 2000, or 2008 — has become palpable not
just for the Aspen set, but for any American with a 401(k). Overall, stocks are down 1.5 percent
this year, after hitting dizzying heights in early October. Hedge funds are having their worst year since the
2008 crisis. And household debt recently hit another record high of $13.5 trillion — up $837
billion from the previous peak, which preceded the Great Recession. After a decade of low interest rates that fueled a massive
run-up in stocks, real estate and other assets, financial Cassandras are not hard to find. Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire
investor, recently posited that we are likely in a “global debt bubble,” and Jim Rogers, the influential
fund manager and commentator, has forewarned of a crash that will be “the biggest in my lifetime ” (he is
76). What might prove the pinprick to the “everything bubble,” as doomers like to call it? Could be
anything . Could be nothing. Only time will tell if the everything bubble is a bubble at all. But, just a decade after the last
financial crisis, here are five popular doom-and-gloom scenarios. 5. Student Debt Remember how the 2008 crisis was triggered by a
bunch of people, who probably should not have been lent giant amounts of money in the first place, not making their mortgage
payments? That was just the precipitating factor, but go back and stream “The Big Short” if none of this rings a bell. Then fast-
forward to 2018, where bad mortgages may not be the problem. Consider, instead, the mountain of student debt out
there, which is basically a $1.5 trillion bet that a generation of underemployed young people will
ever be able pay off a hundred grand in tuition loans in an economy where even hedge funders
are getting creamed. Already, a lot of them aren’t paying and can’t pay. In a climate where “there are massive
amounts of unaffordable loans being made to people who can’t pay them,” as Sheila Bair, the former head
of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, described the student debt problem in Barron’s earlier this year, n early
20
percent of those loans are already delinquent or in default. That number could balloon
to 40 percent by 2023, according to a report earlier this year by the Brookings Institution. Now, lots of that debt is owed the
federal government, so it’s unlikely to poison the banking system, as mortgages did a decade ago. But this burden of debt is
already beginning to wipe out the next generation of home buyers and auto purchasers. As a
result, a generation of well-educated and underemployed millennials, told to value a college education above all, could
drag down an economy that never seemed to want them in the first place. 4. China You know who has
racked up even more debt than hopeful 20-something ceramics-studies grads in the United States? Here’s a hint: It’s a not-exactly-
Communist country in Asia that has been on such a wild debt-fueled building spree that it somehow used more cement in just three
years earlier this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Think about that. Now think about it some more. Over
the past decade, China devoted mountains of cash to build airports, factories and entire would-be cities — now
known as “ghost” cities, since the cities are populated by largely empty skyscrapers and apartment towers — all
in the name of
economic growth. And grow it did. The result is a country with a supersized population (1.4 billion people) and supersized
debt. Where things go from here is anyone’s guess. Optimists might argue that those trillions bought a 21st-century Asian equivalent
of the American dream. Pessimists describe that massive debt as a “mountain,” a “horror movie,” a
“bomb” and a “treadmill to hell,” all in the same Bloomberg article. One thing seems certain, though: If the so-
called “debt bomb” in China explodes, it’s likely to sprinkle the global economy with ash. And with
President Trump teasing a trade war that already seems to be threatening China’s massive, export-
based economy, we may have our answer soon. 3. The End of Easy Money Say you lived in the suburbs, and
one day your neighbor suddenly pulled up her driveway in a new $75,000 Cadillac Escalade. A week later, she was tugging a new
speedboat. A few weeks after that, it was Jet Skis. You might either think, “Wow, she’s rolling in it,” or “Golly, she hates glaciers.”
(Hatred of glaciers may prove, actually, to be the real spark of the financial end times.) But what if it turned out that she bought all of
those carbon-dioxide-spewing toys on credit, at crazy-low interest rates? And what if those rates suddenly started to spike? The
result would likely be good news for the polar ice caps and bad news for her, when the repo man (not to cave to gender stereotypes
about repo-persons) came calling. O.K., overstretched metaphor alert: The “neighbor” is us. Ever since the Federal
Reserve started printing money in the name of “quantitative easing” to pull us out of the last financial
crisis, money has been cheap, and seemingly any American with a pulse and a credit line has been able to fake
“rich” by bingeing on all sorts of indulgences — real estate (despite tighter lending standards), fancy watches and
awesome gaming systems, to say nothing of the debt that corporations were racking up, which some market analysts think might be
the biggest threat of all. The problem is:
The whole system is now running in reverse. The Fed has
been hiking rates and spooking markets in order to stave off inflation and other potential ills.
Is this an overdue fit of fiscal sanity, or the equivalent of taking away the punch bowl just as the party was getting started, then
dumping it on our heads? There is at least one person at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who thinks this could all end badly. “The United
States should not be penalized because we are doing so well,” Mr. Trump tweeted on July 20, just one of a series of broadsides
against the current Fed policy, adding, “Debt coming due & we are raising rates - Really?” 2. Italexit I know, it’s a crazy thought:
Imagine that a bunch of neighboring countries with wildly different languages, customs, values, and priorities somehow failed to get
along? We don’t have to rewind 70-something years to the last Pan-European shooting war. Just witness the continuing problems in
the European Union. Ever since Britain voted to leave the union in the Brexit referendum of 2016,
Europeans have been engaged in a dark parlor game, speculating on who might be next. Might it be
a “Frexit” spurred by nationalists in France? A “Nexit” stoked by the anti-immigrant far right in the Netherlands? Lately, the fears
have focused on Italy, where an “Italexit” — or “Quitaly,” if you can’t help yourself — has been bandied about by populist politicians
as they threaten to abandon the euro, or leave the European Union altogether, over an ongoing tiff with European neighbors over
deficit spending, migration and whatever else drums up votes. The turmoil has already sent ripples through
global markets during the past year. In recent months, Italian populists are still making veiled threats to break up the
coalition, and the official denials are not 100 percent reassuring. Following the latest budget squabble with
Brussels, the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told news reporters: “Read my lips: For Italy
there is no chance, no way to get ‘Italexit.’ There is no way to get out of Europe, of the eurozone.” Was he aware that
“read my lips” is American political shorthand for a “broken promise”? 1. An Anti-Billionaire Uprising Across
America It could happen . Just sayin’.1
Collapse by 2020 – interest rates
Fascaldo 6/23 (Donna, journalist for more than fifteen years, currently a freelance writer
reporting on personal finance, entrepreneurship, investments and technology for a variety of
media outlets including Investopedia, Money Crashers and PYMNTs. After years of covering the
equities markets as a technology reporter and special contributor to the Wall Street Journal, she
embarked on a successful freelance career providing her readers with invaluable advice on how
to invest and save money, land a job and everything in between. Donna has previously written
for a variety of publications including Dow Jones, Fox Business and The Wall Street Journal.
Donna received her bachelor's from St. John's University. “Next Housing Recession in 2020,
Predicts Zillow” in Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/investing/next-housing-
recession-2020-predicts-zillow/)NFleming
The housing market in the U.S. could enter a recession in under five years , with online real estate
company Zillow predicting that it will happen in 2020. In a research report in which Zillow
polled 100 real estate experts and economists about their predictions for the housing market, it disclosed that
nearly half of all survey respondents said the next recession will commence in 2020, with the
first quarter of the year cited the most as to when the recession will start. The main culprit for the
housing recession: monetary policy. "As we close in on the longest economic expansion this country has ever seen,
meaningfully higher interest rates should eventually slow the frenetic pace of home value appreciation that we have seen over the
past few years, a welcome respite for would-be buyers," said Zillow senior economist Aaron Terrazas in the research report.
"Housing affordability is a critical issue in nearly every market across the country, and while much remains
unknown about the precise path of the U.S. economy in the years ahead, another housing market crisis is unlikely to be a central
protagonist in the next nationwide downturn." KEY TAKEAWAYS The U.S. housing market has recovered from the 2008–09
financial crisis, with home prices exceeding the pre-collapse valuation in many areas. Despite a record bull market over
the past decade, the housing market in the U.S. could enter a recession in 2020, according to Zillow.
This prediction is based on their own outlook combined with results from a survey of
homeowner sentiment. Zillow Survey Insights If the survey respondents' predictions prove true, the current economic
expansion will be the longest ever recorded. While a housing collapse ushered in the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, most survey
respondents don't think a downturn in the economy will be centered on the housing market this time around. They think the Federal
Reserve's actions when it comes to interest rates will be the biggest reason for the looming recession. After
all, if
rates go up, it will be more costly to take out a mortgage, shutting some buyers out of the
purchasing process. They noted that, if the Fed raises rates too quickly, it could slow down the
economy and thus lead to a recession. Zillow pointed out that, less than a year ago, survey respondents were more
concerned with geopolitical issues, citing a crisis on that front as the most likely cause of a future recession. Those worries
are now below monetary policy concerns. Other concerns are focused on a trade war with China, a stock
market correction, and unexpectedly high inflation. Those same respondents expect the housing market to
continue to grow, with home values expected to rise 5.5% this year. At this time a year ago, the real estate experts thought home
values would increase 3.7% this year. "Constrained home supply, persistent demand, very low unemployment, and steady economic
growth have given a jolt to the near-term outlook for U.S. home prices," said Pulsenomics founder Terry Loebs, which conducted the
survey for Zillow. "These conditions are overshadowing concerns that mortgage rate increases
expected this year might quash the appetite of prospective home buyers ."
Market collapse inevitable by December – interest rates
Richter 6/6 (Wolf, Wolf Richter is the CEO of Wolf Street Corp. and the editor-in-chief at Wolf
Street. He has over twenty years of C-level operations experience, including turnarounds and a
VC-funded startup. He earned a BA and MBA in Texas and an MA in Oklahoma “Here’s My
Prediction: If the Fed Doesn’t Cut Rates 3 or 4 Times by Dec 11, Markets Are Going To Crap” in
Wolf Street https://www.businessinsider.com/author/wolf-richter
Stock market and corporate bond market are in la-la-land, pricing in an economic boom. They’re not seeing a rate-cut economy. So
why would the Fed? Granted, Wall Street always wants rate cuts, no matter what. But this is getting funny. The probability of three
and even four rate cuts by December 11 are suddenly gaining the most favor in how the market are betting on 30-day Fed Fund
futures. And the markets are now pricing in practically a zero-percent chance – currently a 2.2%
chance up from a 0.8% chance yesterday – of no rate cut by December 11, the day of the Fed’s post-meeting
announcement and press conference. In other words, the market is betting there’s just a near-zero chance the
Fed’s target for the federal funds rate will remain at the current range between 2.25% and 2.50%
(chart via Investing.com): Markets were very wrong about this in 2018. In early 2018, the probabilities were stacked for
only two rake hikes that year. But the Fed was able to “gradually” walk markets toward the expectations
of four rate hikes, and other than yields adjusting upwardly there was no huge reaction in the
market – until suddenly there was, starting in October, when the bottom fell out of the credit
market and the stock market. This lasted through December 24, by which time the Fed had started to walk markets back
from the brink. The chance of only one rate cut by December has collapsed to only 13.6% at the moment, according to bets on 30-day
Fed Fund futures. That probability had hit a low of 8.8% yesterday. One rate cut would bring the Fed’s target to a range between
2.0% and 2.25% (chart via Investing.com): The bet on two rate cuts by December 11 is getting more popular. This would bring the
Fed’s target down to a range between 1.75% and 2.00%. That probability had jumped to 36% by the end of May but has since ticked
down to 34%, under pressure as three and four rate cuts are drawing more bets (chart via Investing.com): The probability of three
rate cuts by December 11 has now soared to 34% at the moment, up from about 0% chance in early May. Three rate cuts would push
down the Fed’s target for the federal funds rate to a range between 1.50% and 1.75% (chart via Investing.com): Ha, and even four
rate cuts by December 11 – I mean, don’t laugh – has skyrocketed from nothing as recent as May 23, to 20% yesterday, though it has
ticked down to 16% at the moment: But here is the thing: The stock market is near its highs and is predicting
boom times forevermore. During a downturn of the type that would induce the Fed to cut rates,
corporate earnings collapse, revenues fall, PE ratios go to heck, and over-
leveraged companies begin to default on their debts, which tends to wipe out
shareholders . Economic downturns can be terrible for stocks that have been inflated like this and priced way beyond
perfection. But there are no signs yet that the stock market, which is supposed to be forward-looking, is pricing in any of these risks.
It’s gallivanting around in la-la-land. The corporate credit market is sanguine. Junk bonds too are once
again in la-la land. Junk-bond yields are low, given the risks. And yield spreads – the difference between junk
bonds and Treasury securities – are still narrow though they have started to widen a tiny bit, showing that the corporate bond
markets, like the stock market, is seeing an endless boom. Junk bonds get hammered in a big
way when the economy turns south because in a downturn these over-leveraged cashflow-negative
companies are suddenly grappling with existential problems. But that’s not happening yet. In terms of the
economy, first quarter GDP grew at a rate of 3.1%, the best Q1 since 2015. Over the past 13 years, there were only three years with
higher first-quarter GDP growth rates (2012, 2013, and 2015). But there were four years when GDP declined in Q1 (2008, 2009,
2011, and 2014). So Q1 2019 was pretty good. Not a lot of data has come in for Q2 yet. So far, it looks a little weaker than Q1, but OK-
ish. Unemployment claims are bouncing along multi-decade lows. The labor market is a heck of a lot better than it was and is the
strongest in years. Manufacturing is still growing, if barely, and growth is slowing and might turn negative, but it’s only a small part
of the US economy. Services, which dominate the US economy – finance and insurance, healthcare, professional services,
information services, etc. – are growing at a decent clip. Consumers are making more money and are spending more at a decent clip.
Consumer confidence is high. Government spending is growing in leaps and bounds, which stimulates the economy too. So neither
stocks nor riskier bonds are seeing a recession. And yet a different end of the market – the one that bets on
Treasury securities, Fed Fund futures, and the like, is betting on three or four rate cuts over the
next six months. Based on what? That pressure from the White House will trigger a political panic at the Fed? Could be. But it
could also just be market delusion. Some people are hanging their hat on “low inflation.” Inflation is ticking
up again, but as painful as it already is for many people, it’s a little below the Fed’s 2% target as measured by core
PCE (1.6%). So maybe the Fed should choose a different inflation measure. One step up might be core CPI (2.1%), in which case the
Fed would already be above its target. But there is not a whole lot else to hang your hat on for rate cuts. I’m not sure how this circus
will turn out, but if those three or four rate cuts that are now increasingly being priced in and taken for granted in some parts of the
market don’t materialize by December 11, 2019, and if
the Fed can’t figure out in a New York minute
how to walk markets back “gradually” from those expectations, you might want to
fasten your seat belt.
 AT: CAP SOLVES ENVIRONMENT
Stopping growth solves extinction from eco collapse – decoupling is impossible even
under perfect conditions, and transition dangers are overhyped
Hickel 18 [Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Why Growth Can’t Be Green. Foreign Policy Magazine. September 12, 2018.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/]
Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major
newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion,
deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations . These crises are being
driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying
the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say
must be respected to avoid triggering collapse .
Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “ green growth .” All we
need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives,
and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an
unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of
natural resources, according to the U.N. definition.
New evidence suggests
It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. There’s just one hitch:
that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isn’t even possible .
Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the United Nations Cosnference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro.
In the run-up to the conference, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.N.
Environment Program all produced reports promoting green growth. Today, it is a core plank of the U.N. Sustainable Development
Goals.
But the promise of green growth turns out to have been based more on wishful thinking than on evidence. In the years since the Rio
conference, three major empirical studies have arrived at the same rather troubling
conclusion: Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource
use is not possible on a global scale.
A team of scientists led by the German researcher Monika Dittrich first raised doubts in 2012. The group ran a
sophisticated computer model that predicted what would happen to global resource use if
economic growth continued on its current trajectory, increasing at about 2 to 3 percent per year. It found that
human consumption of natural resources (including fish, livestock, forests, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels)
would rise from 70 billion metric tons per year in 2012 to 180 billion metric tons per year by
2050. For reference, a sustainable level of resource use is about 50 billion metric tons per year—a boundary we breached
back in 2000.
The team then reran the model to see what would happen if every nation on Earth immediately
adopted best practice in efficient resource use (an extremely optimistic assumption). The results improved;
resource consumption would hit only 93 billion metric tons by 2050. But that is still a lot more than we’re
consuming today. Burning through all those resources could hardly be described as absolute decoupling or green growth.
In 2016, a second team of scientists tested a different premise: one in which the world’s nations all agreed to go
above and beyond existing best practice. In their best-case scenario, the
researchers assumed a tax that would raise
the global price of carbon from $50 to $236 per metric ton and imagined technological innovations that would double the
efficiency with which we use resources. The results were almost exactly the same as in Dittrich’s study. Under these conditions, if
the global economy kept growing by 3 percent each year, we’d still hit about 95 billion metric tons of
resource use by 2050. Bottom line: no absolute decoupling.
Finally, last year the U.N. Environment Program—once one of the main cheerleaders of green growth theory—
weighed in on the debate. It tested
a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per metric ton,
slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred
by strong government support . The result? We hit 132 billion metric tons by 2050. This
finding is worse than those of the two previous studies because the researchers accounted for
the “rebound effect,” whereby improvements in resource efficiency drive down prices
and cause demand to rise—thus canceling out some of the gains.
Study after study shows the same thing. Scientists are beginning to realize that there are physical limits to how
efficiently we can use resources. Sure, we might be able to produce cars and iPhones and skyscrapers more efficiently, but we can’t
produce them out of thin air. We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout
studios require material inputs. Once we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resource use
back up.
These problems throw the entire concept of green growth into doubt and necessitate some radical rethinking. Remember that each
of the three studies used highly optimistic assumptions. We are nowhere near imposing a global carbon tax today, much less one of
nearly $600 per metric ton, and resource efficiency is currently getting worse, not better. Yet the studies suggest that even if we do
everything right, decoupling economic growth with resource use will remain elusive and our environmental problems will continue
to worsen.
Preventing that outcome will require a whole new paradigm. High taxes and technological innovation will help, but they’re not going
to be enough. The only realistic shot humanity has at averting ecological collapse is to impose hard caps on resource use, as the
economist Daniel O’Neill recently proposed. Such caps, enforced by national governments or by international treaties, could ensure
that we do not extract more from the land and the seas than the Earth can safely regenerate. We could also ditch GDP as an indicator
of economic success and adopt a more balanced measure like the genuine progress indicator (GPI), which accounts for pollution and
natural asset depletion. Using GPI would help us maximize socially good outcomes while minimizing ecologically bad ones.
But there’s no escaping the obvious conclusion. Ultimately, bringing our civilization back within
planetary boundaries is going to require that we liberate ourselves from our dependence
on economic growth—starting with rich nations . This might sound scarier than it
really is . Ending growth doesn’t mean shutting down economic activity—it simply means that
next year we can’t produce and consume more than we are doing this year. It might also mean shrinking
certain sectors that are particularly damaging to our ecology and that are unnecessary for human flourishing, such as advertising,
commuting, and single-use products.
But ending growth doesn’t mean that living standards need to take a hit. Our planet provides more than enough for all of us; the
problem is that its resources are not equally distributed. We can improve people’s lives right now simply by sharing what we
already have more fairly, rather than plundering the Earth for more. Maybe this means better public
services. Maybe it means basic income. Maybe it means a shorter working week that allows us to scale down production while still
delivering full employment. Policies such as these—and countless others—will be crucial to not only surviving
the 21st century but also flourishing in it.

The best econometric analysis disproves environmental decoupling

Mir & Storm ‘16 (Goher-Ur-Rehman, Ecofys Consulting, and Servaas, Department of Economics of Technology and
Innovation, Faculty TBM, Delft University of Technology, “Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production-based versus
Consumption-based Evidence on Decoupling,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper No. 41, pp. 23-25) **CKC =
EKC

We estimated the relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth using input-output- based
production- and consumption-related CO2 emission inventories from WIOD’s environmental accounts for 39 different countries for a period of

13 years (1995-2007). Our CO2 emissions data include emissions embodied in international trade
and along internationally fragmented commodity chains—and hence represent the most
comprehensive accounting of both production- and consumption-based GHG
emissions to date. While there is econometric evidence in support of a CKC
pattern for production-based CO2 emissions , the estimated per-capita income turning
point implies a level of annual global GHG emissions of 70.3GtCO2e, which is 40% higher than the 2012
level and not compatible with the COP21 emissions reduction pathway consistent with keeping global
warming below 2oC. The production-based inverted U- shaped CKC is , in other words, not a relevant

framework for climate change mitigation. In addition, we do not find any support for a
decoupling between living standards and per capita consumption levels on the one hand and
GHG emissions per person on the other hand. This means that the Annex-I countries (which are mostly the rich OECD
countries) have managed to some extent to delink their production systems from GHG emissions by

relocating and outsourcing carbon-intensive production activities to the non-Annex I countries—

as is indicated in the growing carbon-import surplus of the former and the growing carbon-export surplus of the latter group of countries (Figure 2). The generally

used production-based GHG emissions data ignore the highly fragmented nature of global
production chains (and networks) and are unable to reveal the ultimate driver of increasing CO2
emissions: consumption growth (or “affluenza”) in the rich economies. What appears (at first sight) to be the
result of structural change in the economy is in reality just a relocation of carbon-intensive
production to other regions—or carbon leakage. In terms of consumption patterns, we find no noticeable structural change as (direct and indirect)
consumption-based GHG emissions continue to rise with higher per capita GDP.

there is no such thing as an automatic decoupling

These results should be sobering as they strongly indicate that

between economic growth and GHG emissions. It means we have to give up on the
notion of the CKC (see also Storm 2009; Lohmann 2009). To keep warming below 2°C de-carbonization has to
be drastic and it has to be organized by deliberate (policy) interventions and conscious change in
consumption and production patterns. Grubb (2014), Mazzucato and Perez (2014) and the Global Apollo Programme (2014) formulate
potentially feasible innovation agendas to bring about the needed transformative change, away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy systems, which all rely on some
form of “entrepreneurial state intervention”. The rich Annex-I countries which are in the forefront of technological innovation, are in the position to take the lead and also
encourage the developing non-Annex-I countries to participate by investing heavily in the development of new energy technologies that are clean, efficient, and are also
the business-as-usual scenario looks bleak, as GHG emissions
affordable for the developing countries. Without such change,

will continue to increase with economic growth and world population growth (Figure 5) and there is
hardly any time or global carbon budget left. Recent projections, based on new modeling using long-term average projections of economic
growth, population growth and energy use per person, by Wagner, Ross, Foster and Hankamer (2016), point to a 2oC rise in global mean temperatures already by 2030. Their
we may be much closer than we realized to breaching the 2°C limit and have already
results suggest that

used up all of our room for maneuver (see Pfeiffer et al. 2016 for a similar warning). This carries considerable risk, as
warming becomes self-reinforcing and dangerous beyond the 2°C limit, and it is the precise
outcome COP21 wishes to avoid—but quite in line with our findings.
There is therefore no escape from deep reforms of the global economy which speed up the process of de-
carbonization (Grubb 2014) as well as lower carbon-intensive consumption (Global Apollo Programme 2014)—and perhaps even restrict economic
growth itself (Martinez Alier 2009, 2015; von Arnim and Rada 2011; Spash 2015). The active participation of and commitment by both the (carbon-importing)
developed countries and the (carbon-exporting) developing countries is critical—it is in this respect that the COP21 agreement between 195 countries is a source of some hope.
However, to make the agreement work, global action to reduce GHG emissions and to share the burden of adjusting to a low- or zero-carbon economy should be fair (Baer et al.
2009) and ideally be based on an assessment of capacity (a country’s ability to pay) and historical responsibility (a country’s cumulative contribution to the problem of excess
GHG concentrations in the atmosphere). As a starting point, this requires comprehensively accounting for the total (direct and indirect) carbon pollution over global commodity
chains as a whole and distinguishing between a country’s production-based and consumption-based CO2 emissions to enable the working out of a “fair” sharing of the
responsibility between the various actors operating in the global commodity chain (on this, see Rodriguez et al. 2006; Lenzen et al. 2007; Marques et al. 2008; Andrew and
Forgie 2008). Our analysis must hence not just be read as a falsification of the Carbon Kuznets Hypothesis (which we think is important in and of itself), but more broadly as
pointing out the urgent need to come to a global agreement on shared producer and consumer responsibility on CO2 emissions (see Lenzen et al. 2007; Grubb 2014).

Anti-militarism policy needs to be built into the Green New Deal—that’s the only
way to stop planetary destruction
Bennis 19 (Phyllis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Jacobin, “A Green New Deal Needs
to Fight US Militarism,” published 5/08/19, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/green-
new-deal-fight-militarism-imperialism, accessed 6/24/19, JME.)
The war on terror unleashed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack has led to almost two
decades of unchecked militarism. We are spending more money on our military than at any
time in history. Endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere are still raging,
more wars are threatened against Iran and beyond, costing the US trillions of dollars and
creating humanitarian disasters. Treaties to control nuclear arms are unraveling at the same time that conflicts with the
major powers of Russia and China are heating up. The Green New Deal must have anti-militarism at
its core. Wars and the military render impossible the aspirations contained in the Green New
Deal. And slashing the out-of-control military budget is crucial to provide the billions of dollars
we need to create a sustainable and egalitarian economy. To fund the Green New Deal, with all of its
component parts, we must transition away from the current war economy that pollutes the planet, distorts our society, enriches only
the war profiteers. An end to US wars across the globe and massive cuts to the military budget will
provide funds for green jobs, public education, health care for all, green infrastructure
development. And we will transition our nation’s security away from failed and failing wars into
a new foreign policy based on peace and diplomacy, not war. The Military and the Environment The
United States’ militarized war economy plays a major role in the destruction of our
planet’s vital life support systems. The military uses enormous amounts of fossil fuels and
other chemicals that poison the air, water, and land human beings depend, both within US
borders and across the globe where US forces, planes, drones and other war machines go to war.
Where the US military establishes bases abroad, the local environment always suffers. As David Vine
noted in his seminal book Base Nation, the carbon footprint of military bases is enormous. They house carbon-spewing tanks and
aircrafts, and use tremendous energy for climate control and electricity. “The military’s thirst for petroleum,” Vine writes, “is so great
that on a worldwide basis, the US armed services consume more oil every day than the entire country of Sweden.” To make matters
worse, in many countries, Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) with the host government prohibit local authorities from
investigating environmental destruction caused by US military bases. As documented by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Poor
People’s Campaign, US wars have left a toxic legacy in their global wake, poisoning soil and water and polluting air for decades after
the formal end to hostilities. And the military sows environmental destruction within the US, as well. The IPS/PPC report notes that
“the Pentagon is directly responsible for 141 Superfund sites” — ten percent of all such sites, far exceeding any other polluter — while
“760 or so additional Superfund sites are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs.” The carbon
footprint of the military industrial complex is also staggering: In 2016, the Department of Defense (DoD) emitted 66.4 million
metric tons of carbon dioxide, representing over two-thirds of the entire emissions of the US government. Tellingly, however, the
military’s overseas emissions are exempted from the U.S. government’s carbon accounting — despite representing a majority of the
DoD’s emissions. Slash the Military Budget, Fund Green Jobs The US military is clearly an obstacle to a safe climate — so any
comprehensive climate justice policy must confront US militarism head on. What would the Green New Deal’s peaceful foreign
policy look like? Since fifty-four cents of every discretionary federal dollar goes to the military, we must massively cut the
military budget, starting with at least a 50 percent cut. We should close most of the 800-plus US
military bases around the world, which are destructive to people’s rights, land, water, and
international law. We should bring home most of the hundreds of thousands of troops deployed
overseas, including the thousands of Special Forces operating in 149 countries. We should end
the air and drone wars that are responsible for so much death and destruction, and move
towards abolition of nuclear weapons. And the money saved from the de-militarization of our
foreign policy should be immediately redirected to fund green jobs and infrastructure programs,
health care and education for all, new diplomatic initiatives, and significant support for
reparations, reconstruction and rebuilding in the countries our wars and economic and
environmental policies have so profoundly damaged. Since most US troops do not stay in the
military for their whole career, most troop cuts could come through attrition rather than lay-offs.
And the majority of the US military budget does not go to pay for troops (it is weapons systems and maintenance of bases and
beyond that take up the bulk of the funds). Undoubtedly there would be some jobs lost among both active-duty troops and in
communities surrounding military bases scheduled for closure, as well as those dependent on large military manufacturing plants.
There will clearly be a need for transitional assistance in those situations, similar to the kind of “just transition” being anticipated for
workers in environmentally-destructive industries, who will need to be provided with re-training and access to new jobs. Funding
and staffing of the Pentagon’s Office of Economic Assistance should be dramatically increased for this purpose. Writing in 2018,
military budget analyst Miriam Pemberton described the OEA’s work. “Though most communities treat the prospect of losing their
base like the coming of a plague, there are plenty of good outcomes to report. When the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard closed in 1995,
10,000 jobs were wiped out. Today, with the OEA’s help, it has more than replaced those jobs with a thriving mix of housing, retail,
and light manufacturing, with a special focus on green businesses.” Just one percent of this year’s $716 billion military budget is
enough to fund 128,879 green infrastructure jobs instead. $1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs — but
the same amount of money would create 26,700 jobs if invested in education, about two-and-a-half times as many. Or 16,800 jobs in
clean energy, or 17,200 in health care. Most of the military budget doesn’t go to “support the troops.” Thousands of active-duty
service people and their families qualify for food stamps because military pay is so low; forty-five percent of children in Department
of Defense schools qualify for free or reduced cost lunch. Most of the military budget goes instead to the major military contractors,
whose CEOs’ salaries average almost $20 million. And those hundreds of billions of dollars going to weapons manufacturers kill
thousands of civilians abroad, and do not keep us safe. Dismantle the Global War on Terror What George W. Bush first called “the
global war on terror” is still raging almost eighteen years later, in different countries using different forms of killing and resulting in
different casualty counts. Today’s reliance on airstrikes, drone attacks and thousands of “trainers” and
special forces has replaced the hundreds of thousands of US and allied ground troops, and today
very few US troops are being killed, while civilian casualties are skyrocketing. We need diplomatic
solutions and strategies instead of military ones. We need a rapid and safe withdrawal of the thousands of US
troops still deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the closure of US bases remaining there. In
Syria, we must withdraw troops, cease airstrikes and drone attacks, and call for an arms
embargo on all sides, as well as supporting the UN’s and other internationally-sponsored de-
escalation efforts, and engaging seriously with Russia and others towards a permanent ceasefire.
In Yemen, we must immediately end all US involvement, including all logistical, refueling,
targeting and other assistance to the Saudi-led coalition, and end all arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
And we need to cut US military aid to Israel, turn over real control of Palestinian-Israeli
diplomacy to the UN, and recognize that, particularly since the “two-state solution” has largely been rendered impossible by
Israel’s settlement expansion and land and water appropriation, we need a policy based on rights and equality for all. We must end
the anti-Iran obsession that has been at the center of Washington’s Middle East strategy for far too long, and the US should re-join
the Iran nuclear deal. The sanctions that are crippling Iran’s economy and destroying the lives of everyday people must be cancelled,
and the threats of military strikes against Iran, including by the US-brokered Israel-Saudi anti-Iran alliance, must be ended. Across
Africa, Washington’s militarized “anti-terrorism” policies and escalating deployments of AfriCom have worsened, rather than ending
the myriad of security, economic, climate, political and other challenges facing the continent. A new policy approach is needed,
reversing the overall militarization of Africa policy. The US must end its unauthorized and largely secretive special operations
ranging across the continent that violate not only international law, but U.S. domestic law as well. U.S. policies regarding Russia,
Latin America and Asia must be retooled away from military threats (including those against China, Venezuela and North Korea)
and towards new diplomacy-based approaches grounded in international law and human rights, respect for other countries’
sovereignty, and multilateral cooperation. Aid to Refugees from War & Climate Around the world, the sites of US
wars, as well as US environmental and economic policies, have helped create crises of violence,
climate catastrophe and privation threatening people’s lives. They thus become areas from which migrants are
forced to flee their homes, causing the refugee crises continuing to erupt in and around the war zones and climate crisis zones of the
Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. The refugees seeking asylum in Europe, and the far fewer trying to come to the United States,
most of whom are fleeing violence and economic crises in Central America directly rooted in earlier US interventions, are fleeing as a
consequence of that wide range of disastrous policies. We need a massive expansion of funding for these
victims of US wars and US environmental and economic policies, including humanitarian
support in their home countries and regions, and a welcoming acceptance of far greater
numbers of refugees into the United States. We need to challenge the xenophobic policies of the Trump
administration that include the Muslim Ban, the separation of children from their families at the border and the vast reduction in
refugees accepted into this country. We need to cut funding for ICE or eliminate the institution altogether. Immigrant rights
advocates are linking movements for sanctuary and against ICE with opposition to the wars and other policies that force people to
become refugees in the first place. Those include local and statewide campaigns to reject the training of US police by Israeli police
and military forces, and challenges to local law enforcement agencies to stop accepting Pentagon offers of weapons and equipment
left over from US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Green New Deal can only succeed when it is
grounded in peace with justice and an end to militarism. Aggressive wars and a giant
military created to maintain global dominance render our vision of a truly new
kind of society impossible. We will need serious education campaigns to convince people
bombarded daily with military propaganda that permanent war does not make us safer. And that to
pay for the visionary components of our Green New Deal we will need to slash the military budget and re-direct those hundreds of
billions of our tax dollars away from the Pentagon to sustainable green jobs, health care for all, free education through university, a
rebuilt green infrastructure, new diplomatic initiatives and more. Our fight for the Green New Deal must include — from the
beginning — the fight to do just that.
 AT: CAP SOLVES POVERTY
Neoliberalism drives widespread global inequality, subjecting billions to abject
poverty—refuse to enclose social progress within the coordinates of averages
Wright ’16 (Erik Olin, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison,
Honorary Visiting Professor in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, How to be an
Anti-Capitalist for the 21st Century, annual Wheelwright lecture at the University of Sydney,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-realutopias-anticapitalism-
democracy/)
For many people the idea of anti-capitalism seems ridiculous. After all, look at the fantastic
technological innovations in the goods and services produced by capitalist firms in recent years: smart
phones and streaming movies; driverless cars and social media; Jumbotron screens at football games and video
games connecting thousands of players around the world; every conceivable consumer product available on the internet for rapid
home delivery; astounding increases in the productivity of labor through novel automation technologies; and on and
on. And while it is true that income is unequally distributed in capitalist economies, it is also true that the array of consumption
goods available and affordable for the average person, and even for the poor, has increased dramatically almost everywhere. Just
compare the United States in the half century between 1965 and 2015: The percentage of Americans with air
conditioners, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, and indoor plumbing has increased dramatically in those fifty years.
Life expectancy is longer; infant mortality lower. The list goes on and on. And now, in the 21st century,
this improvement in basic standards of living is happening even in the poorer regions of the
world as well: look at the improvement in material standards of living of people in China since
China embraced the free market. What’s more, look what happened when Russia and China
tried an alternative to capitalism! Even aside from the political oppression and brutality of those regimes, they were
economic failures. So, if you care about improving the lives of people, how can you be anticapitalist?
That is one story, the standard story. Here is another story: The hallmark of capitalism is
poverty in the midst of plenty. This is not the only thing wrong with capitalism, but it is the
feature of capitalist economies that is its gravest failing. Especially the poverty of children who clearly
bear no responsibility for their plight is morally reprehensible in rich societies where such
poverty could be easily eliminated. Yes, there is economic growth, technological innovation,
increasing productivity and a downward diffusion of consumer goods, but along with capitalist economic
growth comes destitution for many whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the
advance of capitalism, precariousness for those at the bottom of the capitalist labor market, and alienating and tedious
work for the majority. Capitalism has generated massive increases in productivity and extravagant wealth for some, yet
many people still struggle to make ends meet. Capitalism is an inequality enhancing machine as well as
a growth machine. What’s more, it is becoming ever-clearer that capitalism, driven by the relentless search for
profits, is destroying the environment. And in any case, the pivotal issue is not whether material
conditions on average have improved in the long run within capitalist economies, but rather
whether, looking forward from this point in history, things would be better for most people
in an alternative kind of economy . It is true that the centralized, authoritarian state-run
economies of twentieth century Russia and China were in many ways economic failures, but these are
not the only possibilities. Both of these accounts are anchored in the realities of capitalism. It is
not an illusion that capitalism has transformed the material conditions of life in the world and enormously increased
human productivity; many people have benefited from this. But equally, it is not an illusion that
capitalism generates great harms and perpetuates eliminable forms of human suffering. Where the
real disagreement lies – a disagreement that is fundamental – is over whether it is possible to have the productivity, innovation and
dynamism that we see in capitalism without the harms. Margaret Thatcher famously announced in the early 1980s,
“There is No Alternative”; two decades later the World Social Forum declared “Another World is Possible”. My central
argument is this: First, another
world is indeed possible . Second, it would improve the conditions
for human flourishing for most people. Third, elements of this new world are already being
created in the world as it is. And finally, there are ways to move from here to there. Anti-
capitalism is possible not simply as a moral stance towards the harms and injustices in
the world in which we live, but as a practical stance towards building an alternative for
greater human flourishing.
 AT: CAP SOLVES SPACE
Capitalism makes it impossible – if it did happen, it would cause extinction
Haskins 17 -- (Caroline Haskins, Degree of Anthropocene Studies @ New York University,
Capitalism Will Ruin Other Planets After It Ruins Earth, Motherboard, 6-7-2017, accessed 7-3-
2018, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8jv8/capitalism-will-ruin-other-planets-
after-it-ruins-earth)
The search for habitable planets is driven by capitalism's failures. Some left-wing thinkers think
that the galaxy will eventually be in danger of being destroyed by capitalism. At last week's Left
Forum Conference in Manhattan, a NASA researcher suggested that the drive to explore
exoplanets and mine asteroids has been bred primarily out of a need to feed the beast of
capitalism. "[Exoplanet exploration] has been masked as a scientific interest, a human interest,
and human curiosity to explore different worlds," Anastasia Romanou, a climate research scientist for Columbia University and NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. "Late era capitalism is feeling the pressure from resource scarcity, and

therefore, it has to find its own way out. It cannot think outside its own box of solutions, and it
will have to find another place, and another place, and another place to exploit." Romanou fears
that exoplanets will suffer the same fate as the global south, which was first explored, then
mined for minerals and drilled for oil. "Late capitalism" describes the theoretical dying days of a
capitalist economy. These final days include resource shortages and weakened manufacturing
practices—essentially, the bourgeoisie have been stretched too thin. But the term has also been
repurposed as a meme that mocks the absurdity of modern capitalism. Kai Kaschinski, a representative of the Fair
Oceans organization, said that exoplanets and asteroids will one day face the same fate as the deep seas, which

are in the process of being privatized and mined by resource extraction companies. He said that the the
2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which allows US companies to mine celestial bodies such as asteroids for valuable minerals, may be in violation of the
Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Space lawyers say that treaty did not conclusively determine who is allowed to mine asteroids and who isn't. "The argument of the government was
that there is an international secret authority of the law to sea, and the law of sea makes it possible to dig in the area," Kaschinski said. "So the Obama government was of the
opinion that if you can dig in this area of common heritage of mankind, you can also dig in the common heritage of mankind in space." Right now, asteroid mining is still just an
idea with engineering and ethical issues yet to be resolved. Despite this, several companies including Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have announced plans to
mine asteroids and are currently developing the technology necessary to do so. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has also already discovered over 2,000 exoplanets, 21 of which lie
So although we continue to discover more and more exoplanets, the economic
in a "habitable zone."

implications of our drive to explore the galaxy loom on the horizon.

 AT: CAP SOLVES WAR
Capitalism actually causes far more wars than it solves
Dr. David Adams, 2002, former UNESCO Director of the Unit for the International Year for the
Culture of Peace, former Professor of Psychology (for 23 years) at Wesleyan University,
specialist on the brain mechanisms of aggressive behavior and the evolution of war, “Chapter 8:
The Root Causes of War,” The American Peace Movements, p. 22-28, http://www.culture-of-
peace.info/apm/chapter8-22.html
To take a scientific attitude about war and peace, we must carry the causal analysis a step further. If peace movements are caused by wars and war threats, then we must ask,
rs, it is necessary to dismiss a false
what are the causes of these wars, both in the short term and in the long term? Before analyzing the causes of wa

analysis that has been popularized in recent years, the myth that war is caused by a "war
instinct." The best biological and anthropological data indicate that there is no such thing as a
war instinct despite the attempt of the mass media and educational systems to perpetuate this
myth. Instead, "the same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace" (note 15). Since
there are several kinds of war, it is likely that there are several different kinds of causes for war. There are two kinds of war in which the United States has not been engaged for
over two centuries. The first are wars of national liberation such as the American Revolution or today's revolutions in Nicaragua and South Africa being waged by the Sandinistas
and the African National Congress. The second are wars of revolution in which the previous ruling class is thrown out and replaced by another. In the British and French
Revolutions of earlier eras the feudal land-owners were overthrown by the newly rising capitalist class. In the revolutions of this century in Russia, China, Cuba, etc. the
. The six wars and threats of war that have
capitalists, in turn, were overthrown by forces representing the working class and landless farmers

caused American peace movements in this century have been wars of imperial conquest, inter-
imperialist rivalry, and capitalist-socialist rivalry. What are the root causes of these wars in the
short term? For the following analysis, I will rely upon some of America's best economic
historians (note 16). The Spanish-American and Philippine Wars of 1898, according to historian
Walter LaFeber, were inevitable military results of a new foreign policy devoted to obtaining
markets overseas for American products. The new foreign policy was the response to a profound
depression that began in 1893 with unemployment soaring to almost 20 percent. Farm and
industrial output piled up without a market because American workers, being unemployed, had
no money to buy them. Secretary of State Gresham "concluded that foreign markets would
provide in large measure the cure for the depression." To obtain such markets, the U.S. went
into competition with the other imperialist empires such as Britain and Spain. The U.S.
intervened with a naval force to help overthrow the government of Hawaii in 1893, intervened
diplomatically in Nicaragua in 1894, threatened war with England over Venezuela in 1895, and
eventually went to war with Spain in 1898 and invaded the Philippines in 1898. To quote from
the title of LaFeber's book, the U.S. established a "new empire." American intervention in
World War I again rescued the economy from a depression. In 1914 and 1915, as war between
the European imperialist powers broke out, American unemployment was rising towards ten
percent and industrial goods were piling up without a market. One industrial market was
expanding, however, the market for weapons in Europe. The historian Charles Tansill concludes
that "it was the rapid growth of the munitions trade which rescued America from this serious
economic situation." And since the sales went to Britain and France, it committed the U.S. to their side in the war. Finance capital was equally involved: "the
large banking interests were deeply interested in the World War because of wide opportunities for large profits." When bank loans to Britain and France of half a billion dollars
went through in 1915, "the business depression, that had so worried the Administration in the spring of 1915, suddenly vanished, and 'boom times' prevailed." Of course, German
imperialism did not stand idly by while the U.S. profited from arms shipments and loans to their enemies in the war. German submarine warfare against these shipments finally
provoked American involvement in the War. The rise of fascism in Europe was the direct result of still another cyclical depression, the Great Depression that gripped the entire
es. In his recent book on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of
capitalist world in the Thirti

fascism, David Abraham has documented how major capitalists turned to Hitler to fill the
vacuum of political leadership when the economy collapsed. In part, the absence of political
leadership "with the collapse of the export economy at the end of 1931...drove German industry
to foster or accept a Bonapartist solution to the political crisis and an imperialist solution to the
economic crisis. The "Bonapartist solution", as Abraham calls it, was found in Hitler's Nazi
Party. As he says, "By mid-1932, the vast majority of industrialists wanted to see Nazi
participation in the government." For these industrialists, "an anti-Marxist, imperialist program
was the least common denominator on which they could all agree, and the Nazis seemed capable
of providing the mass base for such a program." The appeasement of Hitler's promise to smash the communists and socialists at home
and to destroy the Soviet Union abroad expressed a new cause of capitalist war. Up until that time, inter-imperialist wars were simply the response to economic contradictions at
home and capitalist competition abroad. In part, World War II was yet another inter-imperialist war. But now a new cause of war was emerging alongside of the old. The rise of
socialism was a direct threat to the entire capitalist world. In addition to glutted domestic markets and competition for foreign markets, the capitalists now had to face the
additional problem that the overall foreign market itself was shrinking. Thus, they tended to support each other in the face of a common enemy. After World War II, there was a
particularly sharp shrinkage in the "free world" for capitalist exploitation as socialism and national liberation triumphed through much of the world. The U.S. and its allies
responded by demanding that the socialist countries open their doors to investment by capitalism. According to historian William Appleman Williams, "It was the decision of the
United States to employ its new and awesome power in keeping with the traditional Open Door Policy which crystallized the cold war." As Williams explains, "the policy of the
Diplomatic and military confrontation between
open door, like all imperial policies, created and spurred onward a dynamic opposition."

the U.S. and USSR were used to justify the Cold War and establishment of NATO, but the
underlying issues were economic. As pointed out by historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, "The
question of foreign economic policy was not the containment of Communism, but rather more
directly the extension and expansion of American capitalism according to its new economic
power and needs." In addition to the new problem of shrinking world markets, there remained the problem of cyclical depressions. Although unemployment
was not bad in 1946 because industry was producing to meet the accumulated needs of the war-deprived American people, the specter of another depression was very much a
factor in the Cold War. As the Kolkos point out, "The deeply etched memory of the decade-long depression of 1929 hung over all American plans for the postwar era....In
The Vietnam War
extending its power throughout the globe the United States hoped to save itself as well from a return of the misery of prewar experience."

was a continuation of the Cold War, as the United States tried to prevent further shrinkage of
the world capitalist economic system. The U.S. had already fought a similar war in Korea. In his
chapter, "The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-66: Origins and Objectives," Gabriel Kolko calls the
intervention of the United States in Vietnam, "the most important single embodiment of the
power and purposes of American foreign policy since the Second World War." Elsewhere in his
book, Kolko goes into detail about the economic basis of American imperialism: access to raw
materials, access to markets for American products, and investment opportunities for American
capital. The Vietnam War, he explains, was not a conspiracy or simply a military decision. It was
the natural result of "American power and interest in the modern world." Finally we come to the
question of what has caused the massive escalation of the arms buildup under Presidents Carter
and Reagan (and more recently under Bush, father and son). To some extent, it is a response to
the old problem of cyclical depressions. Since World War II, each recession has been deeper
than the last, until by 1981 unemployment reached double digits for the first time since

the Thirties. Government spending was needed to put people back to work. Would the government spend the
money for military weapons or for civilian needs? A long line of Presidential candidates, standing for the military solution, have been supported in their campaigns by the
The growing
military-industrial complex against other candidates who were unable to wage a serious campaign for civilian spending instead of military spending.

power of the military-industrial complex is a new and especially dangerous addition to the
economic causes of war. It reflects an economic crisis that goes even deeper than those of the
past. In addition to the cyclical depressions and the shrinkage of foreign markets, there is a new
imbalance in the entire structure of capitalism. There is an enormous increase in financial
speculation and short-term profit schemes. The military-industrial complex has risen to become
the dominant sector of the American economy because through the aid of state subsidies it
generates the greatest short-term profits. Never mind if the U.S. government goes into debt to
banks and other financial institutions in order to pay for military spending. The world of
financial speculation does not worry about tomorrow. Not only does this "military spending
solution" endanger the security of the planet, but it also increases the risk of a major financial
collapse and subsequent depression. To summarize, we may point to the following causes of
American wars over the past century: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and
neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of
the "free world" - i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-
industrial complex. In the 1985 edition of this book the argument was made that the socialist countries were escaping from the economic causation of war. In comparison to the
capitalist countries, they did not have the same dynamic of over-production and cyclical depression, with periods of enhanced structural unemployment. As for exploitation and
imperialism, despite the frequent reference in the American media to "Soviet imperialism," the direction of the flow of wealth was the opposite of what holds true under
capitalist imperialism. Instead of the rich nations extracting wealth from the poor ones, which is the case, for example between the U.S. and Latin America, the net flow of wealth
proceeded from the Soviet Union towards the other socialist countries in order to bring them towards an eventually even level of development. According to an authoritative
source associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex, the net outflow from the Soviet Union amounted to over forty billion dollars a year in the mid-1980's. In one crucial
respect, however, the 1985 analysis was incorrect. It failed to take account of the military-industrial complex that had grown to be the most powerful force of the Soviet economy,
a mirror image of its equivalent in the West. The importance of this was brought home to those of us who attended a briefing on economic conversion from military to civilian
production that was held at the United Nations on November 1, 1990, a critical time for Gorbachev's program of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. The speaker, Ednan Ageev, was
the head of the Division of International Security Issues at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was asked by the Gorbachev administration to find out the extent to which
the Soviet economy was being used for military production. Naturally, he went to the Minister of Defense, where he was told that this information was secret. Secret even to
Gorbachev. In conversation, Ageev estimated that 85-90% of Soviet scientific researchers were in the military sector. That seems high until you realize that the Soviet's were
matching U.S. military research, development and production on the basis of a Gross National Product only half as large. Since about 40% of U.S. research and development was
tied to the military at that time, it would make sense that the Soviets would have had to double the U.S. percentage in order to keep pace. How could the Gorbachev
administration convert their economy from military to civilian production if they could not even get a list of defense industries? Keeping this in mind, along with the enormous
militarization of the Soviet economy, it is not so surprising that the Soviet economy collapsed, and with it the entire political superstructure. The origins of the Soviet military-
industrial complex can be traced back to the Russian revolution which instituted what Lenin, at one point, called "war communism". He warned that war communism could not
succeed in the long run and that instead of a top-down militarized economy, a socialist economy needed to be structured as a "cooperative of cooperatives." But war communism
was entrenched during the Stalin years, carried out of necessity to an extreme during the Second World War, and then perpetuated by the Cold War. The economic causation of
the war system is not new. It originated long before capitalism and socialism. From its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia, the state was always associated with war, both to
capture slaves abroad and to keep them under control at home. As states grew more powerful, war became the means to build empires and to acquire and rule colonies. In fact,
the economic causation of war probably extends back even further into ancient prehistory. From the best analysis I know, that of Mel and Carol Ember, using the methods of
cross-cultural anthropology, it would seem that war functioned as a means to survive periodic but unpredictable food shortages caused by natural disasters. Apparently, tribes
that could make war most effectively could survive natural disasters better than others by successfully raiding the food supplies of their neighbors. While particular wars can be
analyzed, as we have done above, in terms of immediate, short-term causes, there is a need to understand the war system itself, which is as old as human history. Particular wars
are the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Beneath war, there has developed a culture of war that is entwined with it in a complex web of causation. On the one hand, the culture of
war is produced and reinforced by each war, and, on the other hand, the culture of war provides the basis on which succeeding wars are prepared and carried out. The culture of
war is a set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that consists of enemy images, authoritarian social structure, training and arming for violence, exploitation of man and nature,
secrecy and male domination. Without an enemy, without a social structure where people will follow orders, without the preparation of soldiers and weapons, without the
control of information, both propaganda and secrecy, no war can be carried out. The culture of war has been so prevalent in history that we take it for granted, as if it were
human nature. However, anthropologists point to cultures that are nowhere near as immersed in the culture of war, and it is the opinion of the best scientists that a culture of
peace is possible. Peace movements have not given enough attention to the internal use of the culture of war. The culture of war has two faces, one facing outward and the other
inward. Foreign wars are accompanied by authoritarian rule inside the warring countries. Even when there is no war threat, armies (or national guards) are kept ready not just
for use against foreign enemies, but also against those defined as the enemy within: striking workers, movements of the unemployed, prisoners, indigenous peoples, just as in an
earlier time they were used against slave rebellions. As documented in my 1995 article in the Journal of Peace Research (Internal Military Interventions in the United States) the
U.S. Army and National Guard have been used an average of 18 times a year, involving an average of 12,000 troops for the past 120 years, mostly against actions and revolts by
workers and the unemployed. During periods of external war, the internal wars are usually intensified and accompanied by large scale spying, deportations and witch hunts. It
would appear that we have once again entered such a period in the U.S. We are hardly alone in this matter. Needless to say, the culture of war was highly developed to stifle
dissent in the Soviet Union by Stalin and his successors of "war communism." The internal culture of war needs to be analyzed and resisted everywhere. For example, readers
living in France should question the role of the CRS. The internal use of the culture of war is no less economically motivated than external wars. The socialists at the beginning
of the 20th Century recognized it as "class war," carried out in order to maintain the domination of the rich and powerful over the poor and exploited. Not by accident, it has
often been socialists and communists who are the first to be targeted by the internal culture of war in capitalist countries. And they, in turn, have often made the most powerful
critique of the culture of war and have played a leading role in peace movements for that reason. Their historical role for peace was considerably compromised, however, by the
"war communism" of the Soviet Union. With its demise, however, there is now an opportunity for socialists and communists to return to their earlier leadership against war,
both internal and external, and to insist that a true socialism can only flourish on the basis of a culture of peace. In considering future prospects for the American Peace
First, let us look back over the economic
Movements, I shall begin with trends from the past and then consider different factors for the future?

factors and movements of the previous century to see if the trends are likely to continue. 1. Wars
are likely to continue because, for the most part, their economic causes remain as strong as ever:
1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-
colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and
investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" -
i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial
speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. The fourth factor is not as
prominent since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there is still evidence of this factor at work: for example, the attempted overthrow of the government of Venezuela in
spring, 2002, was apparently linked to its developing ties with socialist Cuba, especially in terms of its oil resources. Although the coup d'etat failed, there was a risk of plunging
. Although the "war against
Venezuela into warfare, especially considering the increasingly internationalized war next door in Colombia

terrorism" in Afghanistan, Philippines, etc. and the associated military buildup is usually
justified as revenge for the attacks of September 11, there seems little doubt that there are
economic motives involved as well, including the control of oil resources from Central Asia as a
supplement to those of the Middle East. At the same time, the massive expansion of the
military-industrial complex in the U.S. appears at some level to be intended as an increase in
government spending to hedge against declining non-military production, unemployment and
financial crises in the stock markets. 2. The American peace movements have been reactive in
the past, developing in response to specific wars or threats of war, and then disappearing when
the war is over or the threat is perceived to have decreased. In fact, this observation at the macro level is mirrored by an
observation that I have made previously at a micro level: participants in peace movements have been motivated to an important degree by anger against the injustice of war. This
dynamic seems likely to continue. Governments, worried about the reactive potential of peace movements may attempt to engage in very brief wars, just as the U.S. government
cut short the 1991 Gulf War after several weeks to avoid an escalating peace movement. In the future, peace movements need to be broadened by linkages to other issues and by
international solidarity and unity; otherwise they risk being only temporary influences on the course of history, growing in response to particular wars and then disappearing
. The world needs a sustained opposition to the entire culture of war, not just to
again afterwards

particular wars. To be fully successful, the future peace movement needs to be positive as well as negative. It needs to be for a culture of peace at the same time as
it is against the culture of war. This requires that activists in the future peace movement develop a shared vision of the future towards which the movement can aspire. I have
found evidence, presented in the recent revision of my book Psychology for Peace Activists (note 17), that such a shared, positive vision is now becoming possible, and, as a
result, human consciousness can take on a new and powerful dimension in this particular moment of history.
 2NC LIBERAL ORDER / HEG UNSUSTAINABLE
Heg is unsustainable – corruption, excessive market focus, dissipation of
interntional institutions, and permanent credibility loss
Slaughter 17 (Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie Slaughter is the President and CEO of New America, a
think and action tank dedicated to renewing America in the Digital Age. She is also the Bert G.
Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton
University. From 2009–2011 she served as director of Policy Planning for the United States
Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. She received a B.A. from Princeton,
an M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Daniel M. Sachs
Scholar, and a J.D. from Harvard. “The Return of Anarchy?” Journal of International Affairs
https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/return-anarchy)NFleming
Barack Obama re-embraced multilateralism with logic and fervor. The United States needed to prove that it was once
again a good global citizen, not only to uphold and strengthen a rules-based order at a time when rising and returning powers were
increasingly challenging those rules, but also to leverage and extend America’s declining resources as much as possible. Rushing
to fix every crisis, with diplomacy, sanctions, or the threat or use of force, raised expectations the United States could not, and
should not, try to meet. The Security Council, meanwhile, returned to its Cold War habits, meaning
that multilateralism is once again a prescription for inaction . By Obama’s lights, he has played an
honorable game; he also made a virtue of necessity, recommitting to the global order to reduce imperial overstretch. The next
four to eight years may well see the end of the United Nations as a serious forum for global
decisionmaking about peace and security. That may sound melodramatic, but consider Frederic Hof’s
characterization of “the West ” in the Washington Post as a “hollow, demoralized, leaderless
coalition of the frightened and unwilling .” Hof warns of the consequences of standing by and watching as
the Syrian government and its allies systematically killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroyed the country to “save” it.
“Having protected no Syrians from mass murder; having given Russia, the regime, and Iran a green
light to do as they wished by chanting endlessly about there being no ‘military solution’ to the
problem of Syria; having watched the Kremlin draw lessons from Syria to apply in Europe—where does
it now end?” Now ask yourself what a Trump presidency will do to change any of that. He and his generals will be
highly willing to fight the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and any other terrorist groups that could
strike America. They will be completely unwilling to use force to stop a government’s treatment
of its own people, no matter how savage, and inclined to cut deals with other great powers that
allow the big players to have spheres of interest, in the best nineteenth-century style. After all, what
is most important is to make the world safe for business. Based on the extrapolation of current trends (a foolhardy thing to do, but
often the only alternative), I see the following dangers shaking and perhaps toppling the current world order. A Transactional
America. Obama expressed one of the fundamental precepts of his foreign policy in the 2010 National Security Strategy: “America
has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the
direction of liberty and justice.” His was an institutional America, committed to alliances and
organizations that the victors of World War II created and developed to safeguard, however imperfectly, global peace and
prosperity. Trump’s will be a transactional America, looking for the best deal it can get to advance
its interests wherever, whenever, and with whomever . UN approval will become a nice-
to-have rather than a need-to-have. A Preoccupied Europe. Even the cloudiest crystal ball yields this prediction.
Although I am a euro-optimist over the long term, meaning that I believe that European integration will survive and will prove to be
a powerful precedent for other regions over a century or so, the European Union has no bandwidth for anything
other than its own internal challenges. EU countries may be able to pull together on issues like
refugees and direct threats to regional security, but European leaders will step back from global
leadership for the foreseeable future. The strongest traditional partner for the United States, Great Britain, is
contending with the same war-weariness and public mistrust of government-led foreign misadventures as the
U.S. government is. Chinese and Russian Cynicism. Both China and Russia have a major stake in preserving the current
UN-based order because both are permanent members of the Security Council with the right to veto resolutions that contravene
their national interests. Both nations talk a good game with developing countries, periodically presenting themselves as BRICS—
emerging or at least returning powers. But when it comes to the world order, they are deeply status quo . They show
much less interest in actually using the Security Council to authorize actual action (as opposed to resolutions “deploring” or
“regretting” action taken by other nations) to bolster global peace and security. Both are willing to authorize almost
any kind of action taken in the name of fighting global terrorism, because their governments are
genuinely afraid of terrorism and because labeling their domestic opponents “terrorists” has
proved handy. Overall, however, a United Nations used as a prestige platform by Russia and China and a hand-writing forum
by everyone else will become steadily more irrelevant to anything but global humanitarian issues. Value-Free Foreign Policy. In
1945, the most important article in the UN Charter was 2(4), by which all UN members pledge not to use force
against the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of any state. The goal was to avoid a repeat of the two great world wars that
humanity had endured over thirty years. The Security Council was supposed to act whenever a state broke this pledge, deploying the
resources of all states against the aggressor, in furtherance of the opening line of the preamble, to “save succeeding generations from
the scourge of war.” Over time, however, the second clause of the preamble has become more and more
salient, promising “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of
the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” That
provision gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, and a host of human
rights treaties and resolutions commanding the assent—at least on paper—of almost all nations. Even the sovereignty
guardians (many of them with the bitter experience of imperialist interventions behind them)
have steadily recognized that unless the international community cares about what happens to
citizens and not just states, chaos, terrorism, lawlessness, disease, and mass migration result. But
although these values will continue to adorn the “whereas clauses” of UN resolutions, they will be merely a
screen for the classic pursuit of great-power interests . Rising Regional Institutions. In the
absence of meaningful action by global institutions, regional organizations will have no choice
but to fill the vacuum. NATO is an experienced practitioner of this game, although NATO
members much prefer to act with UN authorization whenever possible. The African Union has also played
a valuable security role with UN authorization over the past several decades and the Organization of American States may now be
reinvigorated with the United States finally able to talk to Cuba again. The coming disintegration of Venezuela will test OAS resolve
and offer a harbinger of either continued inertia or more active things to come. ASEAN has also stepped up its level of activity in
recent years, which was made easier by the thaw between the United States and Myanmar. But we will also see more activity from
newer regional organizations, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and other
new regional and particularly sub-regional organizations, that can usefully serve the interests of the biggest power in the
neighborhood, just as the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States authorized the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. The United
States will be getting a taste of its own medicine, as it did with Warsaw Pact authorizations of Soviet incursions during the Cold War.
But with a growing number of powers using these tactics, the world will be a more chaotic place.

Trump not only makes the collapse of American hegemony inevitable, but ensures
destruction of the entire global international order
Gills and Patomäki 17 (Barry K. Gills, Professor of Development Studies and International
Political Economy at the University of Helskinki, Finland, and Newcastle University, and Heikki,
Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland and supervisor of phD
students, “Trumponomics and the ‘post-hegemonic’ world”
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/182413/GILLS_PATOM_KI_Trumponomics
_and_the_post_hegemonic_world_RWER_final_.pdf?sequence=1]// p. 98-100)NFleming
The demise of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in the early 1970s was a consequence of the US unilateral
abandonment of US dollar-gold convertibility. The so-called “Nixon shocks” rocketed throughout the world economy, producing
profound monetary and economic instability, which arguably persists to the present. Contrary to mythologised
accounts of “benevolent” US “hegemony”, the actual historical record reveals contradictory
policies by the dominant power throughout the post-Bretton Woods era. The present Trump administration’s
economic and strategic policies represent important continuities and indeed intensification of past US
non-cooperation internationally, rather than an abrupt about-face. Trump’s economic and security
policies mostly just radicalise existing US foreign policy practices, although this radicalisation may also
involve qualitative changes, for example in US trade policy, where self-regard is now assuming also protectionist forms. Chief White
House strategist Steve Bannon, in a 2014 speech, invoked the Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola, saying that “changing the system is
not a question of questioning and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up” (Navidi, 2017). This point of view also
reflects a new attitude of greater US assertiveness in foreign and security policy. According to former
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, attending the recent Munich security conference in mid-February 2017, representatives
from several countries, including Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia made speeches invoking the theme of a “Post-Western World”
(Glasser, 2017). Albright’s impression of reactions from other states to the new US foreign policy stance reveals a change of mood,
“there was a sense that the bullying approach of the Trump administration was alienating people
rather than giving them solace in terms of the fact that we still were a 9 See also the recent special issue of
Globalizations: “From International Relations to World Civilizations: The Contributions of Robert W Cox”, edited by Shannon
Brincat, Vol. 13:5, October 2016. 10 In his writings from the early 1990s, Cox (1996, pp. 231-2, 311) foresaw remarkably well the
possible and likely developments of the next 25 years. He analyzed the neoliberal era in terms of a global Polanyian double
movement and contestations among different social forces and world order models. The decline of hegemony in the system
“undermines conviction in the legitimacy of the principles upon which the globalization thrust is grounded”. Segmented polarization
leads to identity politics, where nationalism rises and “Islam, for instance can become a metaphor for Third World revolt against
Western capitalist domination”. “The other tendency is toward a world of economic blocs”, competing for shares in world markets
and raw materials. And “a financial crisis is the most likely way in which the existing world order could begin to collapse”. real-world
economics review, issue no. 79 subscribe for free 99 united world.” She lamented that at Munich, the US had moved from being
the “centre of attention” to becoming “the centre of doubt” (ibid.). Alongside his intentions to conduct a very large infrastructural
investment plan, the US president, in a speech on 24 February 2017 to the Conservative Action Conference, pledged to execute “one
of the greatest military build-ups in American history”, upgrading all aspects of the US military, both offensive and defensive. First
indications of the 2018 federal budget outline by the White House also includes core emphasis on
strengthening the US intelligence and national security apparatus, including homeland security and the law
enforcement agencies. The commitment by the new administration to a balanced budget approach, however, despite the anticipated
large increase in military and security expenditures, means that many other areas of federal spending would
undergo very deep cuts, for instance funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, or even the State
Department, along with many other federal department budgets and programmes. The Heritage Foundation has apparently
initiated discussion circulating on Capitol Hill aiming at cumulative reduction of federal spending of 10.2 trillion US dollars over a
ten-year period. However, congressional approval and formal appropriation legislation is necessary for these policy ideas to be
translated into reality, and this, given the recent history of deep divisions on fiscal policy issues across the political spectrum in
this represents nothing less than a
Congress, seems doubtful. If these policies are ever executed in full,
radical transformation of the state itself , and a reorientation of its primary roles in
both domestic and global contexts. All this is an example of a process that has become self-reinforcing. Over
time, this process has led to pathological learning by reducing collective learning capacity and by hardening, on the whole and over
time, the will of the changing US foreign policy makers. Trump’s election is a further step in this process. Already in the 1990s and
early 2000s there were a large number of US international non-cooperations, including its posture towards ILO conventions, the
Law of the Sea Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court and the
Landmines treaty. At present, there are concerns that the new US administration intends to withdraw or
not cooperate with the Paris Agreement on climate change, arguably the single most
important global issue for effective international cooperation to address a severe threat to
human security. There are rumours circulating in Washington that the US administration is considering withdrawing from the
UN Human Rights Council, in part due to alleged “bias against Israel” in that organisation. George Soros, the well-known global
financier and promoter of a global open society named the US as “the major obstacle to international cooperation today” already 15
years ago (Soros, 2002, p. 166). Moreover, Soros shared the observation of many that despite the US holding “special responsibility”
due to its globally dominant position, the US has “not always sought to abide by the same rules that apply to others” (ibid., p. 167).
The exercise of double standards by the US, and the dogged pursuit of its own national
sovereignty and narrow “national interests”, contradicts and tends to undermine the course
of international cooperation and thus destabilise the world economy (when one is actually
applying double standards is of course open to conflicting interpretations). The irony in this historical situation is that the US
appears, both past and present, to assume that the “others” will nevertheless continue to abide by the
agreed rules, norms and principles, though often it does not do so itself. Future scenarios of
global change will now largely pivot upon how all these “others” will respond to
changes in US attitudes and actions . Will the US continue to act uncooperatively internationally, and single-
mindedly pursue its vision of strengthened “national sovereignty” (at home and abroad)? The consequences of such a
course are likely real-world economics review, issue no. 79 subscribe for free 100 to be highly disruptive, not only
for the formal sphere of international cooperation and prospects for future global governance,
but for the global economic system as well. A spiral of aggressive actions and retaliatory
reactions could be set in motion . The probable long-term consequences of such a pattern are quite well known, as
any reading of the first half of the 20th century will reveal (see e.g. Moser, 2016). There are 2 x 3 different possibilities, some of them
more likely than others, as depicted in Table 1. First, there are two possibilities regarding how radical Trump’s foreign economic and
security policies will turn out to be. It is possible, in principle, that through being forced to make compromises because of checks and
balances and multiple interests within the US, and by learning from experiences about the effects of decentralised tit-for-tat
sanctions brought about by the international systems of cooperation, Trump will eventually moderate his stance on a number of
issues. The full realisation of the stated aims of the Trump administration may require
increasingly overt authoritarianism, which in turn is likely to lead to widespread resistance
within the US, including in terms of possible efforts to remove President Trump from office. This
scenario entails intensifying domestic conflict and ideological polarisation, already arguably rather
severe. Such conflict, including in potentially violent forms, could precipitate calls to “restore order”, thus reinforcing the
trend towards erosion of checks and balances and greater domestic repression of the opposition.
However unlikely it may still be, a “civil war” in the US is not anymore an excluded possibility. Table 1 Six scenarios about the effects
of Trumponomics, especially in trade Double standards (no retaliation by others) Limited retaliation targeted to the US Generalised
“beggarthy-neighbour” policies Moderate Trump A B Radical Trump C D Out of the six theoretical possibilities, four
seem relevant in practice. Moderate Trump is compatible with (A) double standards or (B) limited retaliation. Radical
Trump will either (C) trigger limited and targeted retaliation against the US (the rest of the world will continue to abide by the rules
of the WTO and bilateral and regional free trade arrangements amongst themselves) or (D) create a generalizable example to be
followed, leading to widespread “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies. B and C mean that the US share of world
imports (already down from 17 percent in 2000 to just 12 percent in 2013) and US share of world exports will
likely fall further (already down from 12 percent in 2000 to just above 8 percent in 2013).11 D would provoke, at a
minimum, a global recession and, at the maximum, a severe global depression.

Trump marks the finalization of an era of imperial overstretch that ensures the
collapse of hegemony
Habib and Michael 19 (Jasmin, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Waterloo, and Michael, Department of Economics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON,
Canada, “The Political Economy of Donald Trump,” chapter 6 in Reading Donald Trump p. 112-
114)NFleming
All the developments outlined in “Populist Nationalism in Advanced Capitalist Societies” above, which have fueled populist
nationalisms, apply to the United States, but, as the dominant geopolitical power and international hegemon, other factors have also
played a role in the rise of American populism. There has, for example, been a renewed concern that America
may be experiencing “imperial overstretch”.27 Various indices have been suggested to indicate
this, especially by Donald Trump, including large balance of payment deficits since the 1980s, along with a
rising national debt. In the process, the United States has been transformed from the world’s largest
creditor into the world’s largest debtor. And, simultaneously, there has been a significant contraction
in the percentage of world output produced in the United States. While in the early postwar years it 25The
pervasiveness of social media and the widening of associations between people internationally, in work and leisure, may well have
had the same effect outside elite circles. See Goodhart (2017). On selling diversity, see Abu Laban and Gabriel (2002). For critical
theoretical perspectives on nationalism, multiculturalism, and their exclusions, see Day (2000), Kymlicka (1995), Mackey (1999). 26
See the references in Note 24. 27We say “renewed” because this was an argument of Kennedy (1987), but one which had a limited
impact at the time because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the American ascent to unipolar status. J. HABIB AND M.
HOWARD 113 stood in the mid-30s, it now stands in the low-20s.28 Coupled to this have been Trump’s claims that
other countries, including close allies like Germany, South Korea, and Japan, tend to free ride on America’s
management of the world, and take advantage of America’s relatively open markets while acting in a
protectionist manner in their own.29 Trump has also pointed to other indices of overstretch, including the rise of
potential peer competitors to the United States and the failures to achieve victories in recent wars. This
claim reinforces for his supporters, especially those who come from military families or are in small towns or cities that rely on the
military for work, that Trump has their interests at heart. He is positioned as a very strong supporter of the military but one who will
not send them off to fight in futile wars. This feature of his appeal has been neglected by political analysts and is a factor
distinguishing American populism from those of other countries. It is difficult to dispute that the international economic
system promoted by the United States in the postwar years, and secured with its global military reach, has been
especially favorable to allowing “peer competitors” to emerge, most notably China.30 No doubt, this
reflects a significant degree of naivety on the part of American foreign policy elites in the past, who
seem to have believed that economic development would result in the emergence of new liberal
democracies who would accept the American imperium. For the most part, these illusions have now passed, but
the consequences have not.31 Furthermore, it is not simply the rapid development of China that has occurred. Other “revisionist”
The basis for a
powers have also emerged, including, in varying degrees, Russia, Turkey, the EU, India, and Brazil.
multipolar world is beginning to form 28 See Pilbean (2013), pp. 42, 48, 270, and 514 for data on American
payments, deficits, and debt. On the other matters of imperial overstretch, see the references in Note 4. 29There is some truth in
what Trump claims. See, for example, Friedman (2017). As to whether the USA is taken advantage of in matters of trade is another
matter. It is easy to tell stories to this effect because all countries have different institutions and policies that can form part of a
narrative of unfairness, but there are no clear-cut criteria determining what unfairness means. Nevertheless, many American
workers have suffered greatly from imports, most notably from China since it was allowed into the WTO in 2001,
and these have fueled major social problems and support for populists. See, for example, Autor et al. (2017, 2018), and Monnat and
Brown (2017). 30 See McCoy (2017) and Rachman (2017). 31 See, for example, Campbell and Ratner (2018). THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF DONALD J. TRUMP 114 and is therefore less amenable to domination by a single country as in the early years of the
post-Cold War world.32 Strategic mistakes of governmental elites are also evident in America’s wars in
Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the Maghreb over the last two decades. In no case has anything
resembling victory , understood in the classic sense as the imposition of a new political order favorable to the victor, been
achieved.33 Not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, and not in Libya, while American casualties have been many
thousands and the financial cost many trillions. And, it should be no surprise that, independently of any economic
reasons to restrict immigration, Americans who have been bombarded with proclamations of a new “age
of terror” believe it is necessary to secure their borders, north and south, and that a failure to do so
represents a manifest failure of governance (For a discussion about the geopolitical imagination of Donald Trump
and its political and social implications, see Chap. 8 in this volume). Trump also recognized that for all these reasons it
was becoming less possible to gain majoritarian support for the status quo, another phenomenon
typically taken as an index of imperial overstretch in the context of empires. And, of course, he fanned the flames
of discontent as well as aiding its expression. “America First” became a nationalist slogan for a reengineering the
whole orientation of the country, in order to reduce its costs and raise its benefits for those who had lost out.
 AT: LIBERALISM IMPACT D
Their apologism for liberalism is wrong and causes enviro collapse and war
Grove, PhD, 16
(Jairus, Prof IR @ Hawaii http://bostonreview.net/forum/new-nature/jairus-grove-jairus-
grove-response-jedediah-purdy, 1-11)

Unlike many who appeal to the Anthropocene simply to advance the cause of geoengineering, Jedediah Purdy begins with an
fails to appreciate the nature of the geopolitics
assessment of our political condition. Still, he
responsible for the crisis we face . If we are to take up his noble call for an ecological democracy, we must
acknowledge that the violence done to our planet has largely been perpetrated not by all humans but
by a select group of Europeans. The Anthropos—the human species as such—is not to blame. Properly
named, our era is not the Anthropocene but the Eurocene. It was a European elite that
developed a distinctively mechanistic view of matter, an oppositional relationship to nature, and an
economic system indebted to geographical expansion. The resulting political orders
measured success by how much wealth could be generated in the exploitation of peoples and
resources. The geological record bears the mark of this European assemblage of hierarchies.
Understanding the forces of Europeanization—the forces of racial superiority, economic hegemony,
and global resettlement— is essential to understanding how the planet got to this point,
and how “we” could possibly become democratic. Purdy and others claim there are two reasons for
renaming the last few centuries to mark a new geological era. The first is a matter of accuracy: there is significant evidence that
humans have contributed to climate change. The second is a matter of consciousness raising: renaming the Holocene is essential to
raising awareness that humans are responsible. Yet on both counts, we should reconsider what we mean by
“human.” It would be more accurate, and go further in raising awareness, to acknowledge the grossly disproportionate impact
Europeans have had on our planet. This is not just another hyperbolic jeremiad against European peoples:
Purdy’s invitation for global democratic thinking requires a geological history and name that
foregrounds what really stands in the way of such a future. As Purdy points out (unlike Paul Crutzen
and others), the “human” footprint involves much more than just carbon dioxide. On a geological time scale, the
effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide are dwarfed by those of radioactivity and are comparable
to those of plastic, the modern waste product par excellence. If the Anthropocene is meant to
name the scale of human impacts on the planet, it should refer not only to warming but also to
cooling the earth, and Europeanization has done both at levels that even China’s current growth
cannot match. Beginning in 1610, a small-scale ice age took hold of the planet when a wilder arboreal nature took back what
had been inhabited land: some 20 million people killed by the European invasion of the Americas
resulted in vast reforestation of the North and South American continents. The providence
spoken of by those who arrived was not God but syphilis, influenza, and the number of other
species that went along for the ride. Waves of well-armed European explorers and
settlers leveraged the devastation for their own gain. There is no way to know how
many languages, cities, ideas, cosmologies, and ways of inhabiting the world were
lost in this genocide and terraforming of the Americas. The history of nuclear
weapons is also predominantly European . The bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, is only
the beginning of this story. In the years that have followed, more than 2,000 nuclear weapons
have been tested, about 97 percent of which were detonated by European powers. Those
detonations do not appear as tests from the perspectives of the Marshallese or Western
Shoshone. A seventy-year nuclear war has spread cancer, incinerated sacred lands, and made
other spaces uninhabitable on a temporal scale several orders of magnitude more condensed
than the lifespan of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The nuclear powers of the Eurocene—the United States, Russia,
the United Kingdom, France, and Israel—possess 97 percent of the 15,800 nuclear weapons around the planet. The
beleaguered state of the arms control agenda means self-annihilation is still a very
real possibility . As for plastic, the Texas-sized trash gyres that swirl in the world’s oceans are
another reminder of what a cosmology of disposability and synthetic chemistry has wrought.
Plastic may lack the longevity of carbon dioxide and irradiated earth, but for hundreds, maybe
thousands of years it will continue to circulate, wreaking havoc throughout the food chain. We have
post–World War II European development to thank for single-serve plastic shampoo pouches and bottled water—the latter needed
only because nearby streams have been sold to Coca-Cola. Acknowledging the distinctively European history of
our geological era serves a practical as well as a polemical end . Any democratic project
must confront the geopolitics of the Eurocene because it challenges the very paradigm of
equality. “In the Anthropocene,” Purdy writes, “environmental justice might also mean an equal role in shaping the future of the
planet.” In fact, environmental justice will require unequal roles: significantly constraining, even
repressing, the powers of the Eurocene. On the eve of the creation of the United Nations
at the Dumbarton Oaks conference, W. E. B. Du Bois saw the failure of a dream before it had even
been fully formed: the vast new international body was little more than the institutionalization
of the global “color line.” The great powers had insisted upon a Security Council, and the General Assembly would be
subordinated to its nuclear authority. Purdy’s suggestion that the planet could be governed equally ignores
the vast systems of injustice—settler-colonialism, primitive accumulation, and violent power
politics—that stand in the way, upheld by great powers that use nuclear weapons to deter
change and deploy swarms of drones to hunt down those too small for the nuclear
option. I would like to be part of Purdy’s ecological democracy, but he is wrong to say “There is no political agent, community,
or even movement on the scale of humanity’s world-making decisions.” We share a world governed by a few
states with the capability of ending all life on the planet. At the international scale,
these states are essentially authoritarian; they rule by economic violence and
warfare . That some of those states are not authoritarian at the domestic level is of little
consequence to the rest of the world. It should come as no surprise that the leaders of the food sovereignty and anti–
fossil fuel movements Purdy describes belong to marginalized groups that see no future in our current geopolitical order.
Indigenous, black, and brown people are at the vanguard of political struggle not because they are more natural but because they
have had front row seats in the making of this crisis. The Eurocene is not perpetrated by all people of European heritage, many of
whom oppose the existing geopolitical order—myself included. This distinction—between being European
and being an agent of the Eurocene—only intensifies the need to rethink
democratization as demanding a politics of inequality rather than a politics of
incorporation . Such a remaking of justice is as complex and difficult as the climate crisis itself, and just as worthy a
struggle, irrespective of whether we can succeed. As Sylvia Wynter has said, “we must now collectively
undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it. . . . because the West did change the world,
totally.” To do so means exiting the Anthropocene as an idea, and collectively—even
if not equally—exiting the Eurocene as a failed epoch . As Wynter says, we need to consider
other “genres of the human.” Wynter explains she will not miss the Anthropos because she,
among so many others, was never considered human to begin with. To invent a new species is
the task that must be undertaken before there can be a “we,” an “our,” or a “cene” that is more
than a requiem for the end.
 AT: PINKER / WORLD GETTING BETTER
Pinker alienates the experiences of the global South, distorts statistical models,
and has a fallacious account of progression – reject him on face
Robinson 19 (Nathan J., PhD student in Sociology & Social Policy. Nathan is interested in
criminal justice policy, particularly in Louisiana. His research focuses on adult education in U.S.
prisons and on the politics of indigent legal defense. At Yale Law School, he co-directed the
Green Haven Prison Project and worked for the New Orleans public defender and the ACLU's
National Prison Project. “The World’s Most Annoying Man” Foreign Affairs
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man)NFleming
It’s important to see that Pinker is unreliable, and not simply a neutral presenter of The Data, because his
books are bestsellers and are widely praised as brilliant. Yet they reinforce many right-wing talking points and
accepting some of their conclusions would have extremely destructive political
consequences . I actually agree with perhaps 80 percent or more of what is contained in Enlightenment Now, insofar as it is
simply presenting statistics showing that crime has dropped and we are not presently in a world war, or making arguments for
secular humanism and democracy. But he also (1) staunchly defends the inequality produced by free-market
capitalism, (2) is irrationally dismissive of the scale of the risks facing humankind, (3) trivializes
present-day human pain and suffering, (4) whitewashes U.S. crimes and minimizes the dangers
of U.S. military aggression, (5) repeats right-wing smears about anti-racist and feminist ideas,
and (6) has a colossal ignorance about the workings of politics and the struggle necessary to
achieve further human progress. Pinker is one of those people who believes that Donald Trump’s presidency
represents a “backsliding” into unreason after a long period of Progress, and that we simply need to
appreciate the Progress and commit ourselves to maintaining and steadily improving upon the pre-Trump status quo. Pinker’s broad
thesis is that, aside from a few unfortunate statistical blips like the Second World War and the rapid acceleration of climate change,
for the most part life on Earth has been getting better all the time. Usually, he qualifies this by saying that Of Course There Are Still
Terrible Problems and he’s Not Saying This Is The Best We Can Possibly Do (this is how he distinguishes himself from Professor
Pangloss, who already thought the world was as good as it could get). For the most part, he remembers to add the fine print
disclaimer “*Results may vary, your experience of Progress may not match the aggregated median trend.” But sometimes he
accidentally lapses and says things like: “Everything is amazing… None of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our
world has become.” This is, of course, false, insulting, and enraging. Even assuming Pinker’s thesis is accurate, life
is clearly not “amazing” for everyone, like the tens of millions of refugees around the world. “None
of us”? The spectacle of a Harvard professor, with millions of dollars in book sales and friends
among the jet-setting global elite, telling the Rohingya to perk up, and Black Americans to be
more grateful for iPhones, is grotesque. Pinker may reply that by “us” he does not mean everyone, just the statistically
average people for whom things have gotten better. But this is precisely the point: Casually switching between “things
are better at the median than during 1940 or 1410” and “everything is amazing” is appallingly
insensitive to the reality of pain and deprivation. “If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude,” Pinker writes, we
“ought to be” happier. “An American in 2019,” he writes “will live nine years longer” and “have an additional eight hours a week of
leisure,” which they can spend “reading on the Web, listening to music on a smartphone, streaming movies on high-definition TV, …
or dining on Thai food instead of spam fritters.” When people who are not among the Americans who can do these things read a
passage like that, is it any wonder that they get a little ticked? The Thai food in Cambridge may be excellent, but my friend who
teaches elementary school in Detroit still has students coming to school hungry each day. I am sure they’d happily take a spam
fritter, though perhaps they just lack a “shred of cosmic gratitude.” One of Pinker’s critics says that despite Pinker’s tendency toward
ignorant hyperbole, it does him a “grave disservice” to “mistake his data-driven assessment of encouraging global trends for an
insouciance towards continued injustices.” I’m not so sure about that. Dismissing the idea that racism remains
deeply embedded in society seems a bit like insouciance to me, and so do his constant attempts
to show that things aren’t “crises.” “Activist organizations feel they must always cry ‘crisis’ to keep the heat up,” he says.
When he tries to “debunk” the idea that suicide rates in the United States are at “crisis” proportions, for instance, he admits that
there are 40,000 suicides annually in the country, and that this is a 30-year high that has been growing each year, but points to
previous eras in which suicides had been even higher. Because “suicide was more common in the past than it is today,” it’s
“alarmism” to say there is an “epidemic of unhappiness, loneliness, or suicide” and “dire warnings” about a “plague” of suicide or
depression “don’t survive fact-checking.” Besides: “Not every problem is a crisis, plague, or an epidemic… A modicum of anxiety may
be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom. It is another word for the vigilance, deliberation, and heart-searching that
freedom demands.” Now, for me, it is trivializing, even downright insouciant, to talk about the depth of
anguish and despair that millions of people endure daily in this country as a “modicum of
anxiety.” And it is dismissing the urgency of the problem to say it might just be a price we have to
pay. 40,000 people, measured in the official American mass death unit, is over 13 annual 9/11s. It does not matter if this was worse
long ago. It doesn’t follow that it’s not a “crisis,” merely that the crisis is a recurring one and we have never done what we ought to do
in order to try to fix it. It is trivially true that “not every problem” is a “crisis.” But surely, if you do not see 40,000 people
taking their lives each year as urgent, you are the most insouciant of insouciant assholes . In fact,
even when Pinker is talking about things that are pretty obviously calamitous, he has a tendency to encourage us to Always Look On
The Bright Side Of Life: “Suppose there was an episode of bioterror that killed a million people. Suppose a hacker did manage to take
down the Internet. Would the country literally cease to exist? Would civilization collapse? Would the human species go extinct? A
little proportion, please—even Hiroshima continues to exist!… [P]eople are highly resilient in the face of catastrophe.”
Hiroshima: a statistical blip! World War II: a mere outlier along the bumpy road to peace! Mass
murder: Please, it’s not like the human species is literally going to be extinct. Somewhere through
Enlightenment Now, I became positive that Eric Idle’s whistling idiot from Life of Brian, who encourages the crucified men to cheer
There is a giant analytical mistake
up and laugh and sing, is Steven Pinker. They even have the same hair.
underlying many of Pinker’s arguments . He suggests that the proper measure of whether
things are “amazing” is comparing the present to the past. Both Enlightenment Now and Better Angels show
version after version of a similar graph: a trend line of a good thing going up or a bad thing going down. So, if poor people globally
are getting “less poor,” then we can conclude that Capitalism, Democracy, and Science are doing a good job. But you should not
measure your success against what came before, you should measure it against what you
ought to have been doing and could be doing . “Better” does not actually mean “good,” and it might well be
that even if things improve, if they still fall unacceptably short of what we are capable of, there is no reason to diminish one’s amount
of outrage. You could have made the argument that things were “better” than they had previously
been in 1870. You could have told people to look at all the amazing advances the Industrial
Revolution had made. You could have made it in 1910. Hey child laborers, did you know that you’re actually
luckier than previous generations? Let me show you a graph of infant mortality rates. You could have
made it in 1936. “Hey,” you might have told the GM workers during the Flint sit-down strike,
“You’re not peasants or slaves. You are substantially better off thanks to capitalism. Show some
cosmic gratitude.” And the GM workers would have responded to you as we should respond to Pinker: “You do not measure
the justice of working conditions by the working conditions of prior generations, but by the capacity for presently-existing
companies to improve the lives of workers.” As Jason Hickel puts it, what matters in determining how well our
economic system is doing is not the trajectory of global poverty, but “the extent of global poverty
vis-à-vis our capacity to end it, ” meaning that the moral egregiousness of poverty is growing and growing. Pinker
uses an argument that is frequently used to defend sweatshop labor: “The appropriate standard in considering the plight of the poor
in industrializing countries is the set of alternatives available to them and when they live,” he writes. This is what gets you articles
like “the feminist side of sweatshops” and Nick Kristof’s defense of sweatshops as a “dream,” because “in the hierarchy of jobs in
poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.” If working in a sweatshop is better than the presently-existing
alternatives in a given place, then it is Good. But that’s not true: The women who worked in the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory may have taken the best jobs they could get, but that doesn’t mean their
working conditions weren’t outrageous. Sweatshops are bad because there is no reason the world
has to have sweatshops in it. Adding strong labor protections to trade agreements is a perfectly feasible thing, it’s just that
hardly anybody with political or economic power cares much about the rights and well-being of people in other countries. A lot of the
“Capitalism Is The Greatest Poverty Reducer In History” type argumentation is also based on using
distorted charts that minimize the full extent of the gap between rich and poor people around
the world. Jason Hickel, in his response to Pinker, shows that the case for “liberal democratic capitalism” as a
powerful poverty reducer is massively overstated, and the numbers give us little to celebrate.
Countries with significant government intervention in the economy, public health initiatives, and public education have good
poverty-reduction track records, and the much-touted “gains” made by the poor in the Global South are (1)
often notnearly large enough to constitute being “lifted out of poverty” by any reasonable metric and (2)
dwarfed by the amount of wealth that has been accumulated elsewhere. It’s easy to produce
charts showing that poor people are “gaining” while disguising the fact that poor people are
gaining a pittance compared to what rich people are gaining . So Pinker uses the “elephant
chart” that shows both rich people’s incomes and poor people’s incomes have increased, but tracks the gains in percentages. That’s
a good way to make it look like both rich and poor are doing great, even though a 20 percent boost to an income of $2 is far less than
a 20 percent boost to an income of $2,000,000. If
you track absolute gains, it just looks like wealthy
people are hoarding all the fucking money.
Pinker’s “violence down” argument ignores military modernization, nuclear
arsenals, and sanitizes interventionism
Robinson 19 (Nathan J., PhD student in Sociology & Social Policy. Nathan is interested in
criminal justice policy, particularly in Louisiana. His research focuses on adult education in U.S.
prisons and on the politics of indigent legal defense. At Yale Law School, he co-directed the
Green Haven Prison Project and worked for the New Orleans public defender and the ACLU's
National Prison Project. “The World’s Most Annoying Man” Foreign Affairs
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man)NFleming
Nuclear weapons pose a strong challenge to Pinker’s thesis of declining violence, one he never
dealt with adequately. He argues in his books that the “long peace” since World War II was not the result of nuclear
weapons, and argues that nukes are essentially “useless in winning wars and in keeping the peace” since no country would dare to
use them: “Incinerating massive numbers of noncombatants would shred the principles of distinction and proportionality that
govern the conduct of war and would constitute the worst war crimes in history. That can make even politicians squeamish, so a
taboo grew up around the use of nuclear weapons, effectively turning them into bluffs.” Of course, this means the United States itself
has committed the “worst war crimes in history” since it intentionally dropped nuclear weapons on two civilian populations. And
while there is certainly a “taboo” on such behavior—Hiroshima horrified much of the world,
though Americans tend to think it was fine—U.S. commanders contemplated using nuclear
weapons in Vietnam, too. (Good thing Lyndon Johnson got a bit “squeamish,” although not so squeamish as to stop a war
that killed two million Vietnamese people.) Realizing that the presence of thousands of weapons that can
vaporize cities, and the giant U.S. war machine constantly researching terrifying swarms of
autonomous flying death robots, rather undercuts the whole Most Peaceful Era Ever
theory, Pinker points to the fact that “the United States has reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1976 peak.” He
concedes, however, that “Cynics might be unimpressed by a form of progress that still leaves the world
with 10,200 atomic warheads.” Indeed, cynics might! The big problem with Pinker’s violence thesis has always
been that it declares victory prematurely . He is quite clear in saying he doesn’t think peace is necessarily here to
stay, or that progress can’t unravel, and thinks this should silence critics who think he is overly optimistic. But the truth is that
we’re just not far enough past the end of World War II to begin to comment on a
general trend . The two global bloodbaths occurred within the lifetimes of people who are still alive. Over the course of
human history, this is a nanosecond. It’s not a “long peace,” but a very short one. One should probably not be
drawing any conclusions about what kind of era this is until we’ve seen a bit more of it, otherwise you might end up like the
people who said World War One had been the war to “end all wars.” Others have pointed out that
Pinker’s worldview requires him to minimize some pretty heinous violence, especially that
perpetrated by the United States . (A good overview of this is found in the International Socialist Review.) He
trumpets Democratic Peace Theory without much attention to the way the “democratic” U.S. has squelched popular uprisings
abroad that threaten its interests. He even goes so far as to say: “Among respectable countries… conquest is no longer a thinkable
option. A politician in a democracy today who suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but
with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.” Probably true, if they said “conquering.” If they said “liberating” or “spreading
democracy to,” on the other hand, they’d be met with quite a different reaction! To avoid acknowledging U.S.
aggression, he has to downplay the hideousness of the Vietnam War, and mostly blames
“communists” for it, saying that “the three deadliest postwar conflicts were fueled by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese
communist regimes that had a fanatical dedication to outlasting their opponents” and “the American democracy was willing to
sacrifice a tiny fraction of the lives that the North Vietnamese dictator was willing to forfeit.” This exoneration of the U.S.
for the Vietnamese deaths is downright despicable, and Pinker needs to get himself much better
acquainted with the reality of what we did. Naturally, Pinker is more critical of anti-nuclear activists than of the
military industrial complex. “Stop telling everyone they’re doomed,” he warns. “The message that many antinuclear activists want to
convey is ‘any day now we will all die horribly unless the world immediately takes steps which it has absolutely no chance of taking.”
And after all, “the world has survived half-mad despots with nuclear weapons before, namely Stalin and Mao, who were deterred
from using them, or, more likely, never felt the need.” Very reassuring. (He also points out that “war is illegal.”) Illustration by Mike
Freiheit What’s maddening about Pinker’s body of recent work is that it attacks the very people who are doing
the most to address the problems he says he cares about. Progress is made by progressives ,
as Jeremy Lent pointed out, and it’s yesterday’s “social justice warriors” that are responsible for the declines in racist language and
corporal punishment that Pinker shows off as accomplishments of Our Great Liberal Democratic Capitalist Order. The Pinkers
of times past were the one Martin Luther King was addressing in Letter From Birmingham Jail,
who placed trust in the “benevolent forces of modernity” to make things better rather than
actually taking part in a social movement. As my friend Sam Miller McDonald put it, “most of those good things that
Steven Pinker likes to brag about came about because of the hard work and sacrifice of the kind of people Steven Pinker likes to
complain about.” Indeed, Pinker is quite open that he doesn’t believe in “struggle.” He views political problems as “mistakes,” errors
to be corrected through the application of rationality, rather than “conflicts” between values and interests. He wants to “depoliticize
issues as much as possible” and “treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine.” This is why he refuses to see that
certain kinds of power are zero-sum, that the interests of the boss does not coincide with the
interests of the worker. That would mean that advancing the interests of the worker required a political fight, rather than
simply the application of technology. This is the Obama worldview, and the Obama presidency proved why it
doesn’t work. It turns out that interests do conflict, and that if you try to take actions that enrich
working people and threaten corporate power, the people whose power is threatened will do
everything they possibly can to destroy you . Steven Pinker’s works are worth examining for a few
reason. For one thing, they sh ow how deeply conservative a “liberal” worldview can be . Pinker is
all for Equal Rights, Democracy, Sensible Regulation, Secularism, and the other great Liberal values. And yet like many
liberals, he seems to detest the left more than the hard right. (He infamously praised the “highly
literate, highly intelligent” alt-right. Then when he was criticized, he said: “A lot of people who are ignorant of the alt-
right equate them with the skinheads and the Nazis carrying the tiki torches, I was referring to the alt-right strictly from its origins in
internet discussion groups.” So, not Richard Spencer, but… Richard Spencer?) He simply accepts the right-wing
narrative of various events. This often shows up in small framing comments. Bernhard Goetz was “a mild-mannered
engineer” who “became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers,” not a vigilante who attacked four Black men after one of them
asked him for money. (I’ve never looked up what Pinker thinks of James Damore, but I’m sure he thinks he was an intelligent young
man fired for reporting the uncontroversial results of scientific studies.*) He partly defends the Tuskegee syphilis
study, calling it a “one-time failure to prevent harm to a few dozen people,” that “may even have been defensible by the standards
of the day” (It was actually 400 people that the United States government allowed to believe they were being treated for syphilis
when they weren’t, and it lasted 40 years.)

Pinker has sampling bias, relies too heavily on body counts, ignores psychological
violence, and misrepresents modern warfare – violence is not down, it is just more
subversive
Toft 12 (Monica Duffy, director of the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at
the Kennedy School. A former Army sergeant, Toft conducts research on international
relations, religion, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the
relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic
planning. “The Peace Bubble,” in Power and Policy http://powerandpolicy.com/the-
peace-bubble-power-policy/
The books offer us an optimistic view of contemporary history: both essentially reduce to the claim that the world is getting more
peaceful, and as a result, better. Sadly, I remain unconvinced by their characterization (peace),and its implications (a better world),
but even if they are each right, I think what they have described is a bubble: a peace bubble. First, their analyses hinge
largely on data and trends in these data. In looking at their data however, a critical question emerges: are they
sampling on the extreme? In statistical terms this would amount to sampling bias . One of their
responses might be “what about the Thirty Years’ War?” which was responsible for killing one in five Europeans. But
this begs a different question: if it happened before, what is to assure us the trend they have identified is uni-
directional? Again, what if we are witnessing a kind of “peace bubble”? In addition to this sampling bias and the
possibility of extremes, could it be the case that the decline in violence is not an artifact of the
main sources of data? We have excellent data of the wars fought among European powers, for instance,
but even these are subject to considerable debate both on empirical (how many Europeans were there and
how many died in battle?) and definitional grounds (do victims of war-induced famine count, were they counted by some
scholars?). In more contemporary terms, we still don’t know, for example, how many Chinese died during
the Chinese Revolution or Cultural Revolution, or even the more recent 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Body counts themselves are notoriously difficult to assess, yet each author relies (Pinker to a
lesser extent) on these data to support his respective arguments. This last point highlights the scholars’ understanding of violence in
only its most physical manifestation; its implications for death or life. Consider Pinker’s discussion of bullying. Pinker makes the
case that bullying has been one of the forms of violence targeted for elimination, and I agree this is a good thing. But the subject of
bullying opens the door to a very penetrating question: what if it is possible to be more cruel yet less violent? Most people tend
to think of bullying as physical intimidation, which is easier to identify than the much more
destructive (and painful) psychological intimidation which often follows successful efforts to
halt physical bullying. When researchers looking at schoolyard bullying, for example, broadened the definition
of “aggression” to include psychological cruelty, they found that girls were just as “aggressive” as
boys. Moreover, internet bullying is psychologically and emotionally devastating and on the rise, but
only rarely results in any physical injury. So again, harm is increasing even as physical violence is declining.
Rape is yet another example: in most cases it does not result in a death, and because it is systematically under-
reported, it is possible that rape could increasing globally even as violence and war both decline
(Pinker admits he has weak data on the global front). Such a narrow indicator of violence may cause us to overlook critical areas
where harm is still done, just not physically. And Pinker is not alone here. Goldstein too relies on physical harm—death—as his
critical indicator. What about the psychological impact of war (e.g. post traumatic distress disorder)? Due to advances in the
organization of war from medical technology (e.g. surgery, antibiotics) and mobility (e.g. the helicopter) and to the relatively much
smaller scale of wars nowadays, many soldiers who would have died in earlier wars have survived
physically (and not been counted), but been shattered emotionally and psychologically. Many cannot work
and cannot love. Consider brain injuries. According to one estimate, mortality from brain injuries was 75
percent greater in Vietnam than in the most recent Iraq war. Although some soldiers recover, many do not,
suffering both the physical trauma and psychological stress of war far beyond the battlefield.[1] In neither case would the harm
sustained be counted in Pinker’s and Goldstein’s analyses. Making the argument that “all that is true, but it
still matters that deaths are fewer” is akin to responding to a critic of the US war in Iraq by
saying “aren’t you better off with Saddam Hussein dead?” The point of each argument is that the
world is getting better; whereas if we decouple physical violence—and death—from harm, such a
line of argumentation is called into question. More generally, most people in the West believe violent death is a
universal empirical indicator of harm (and so it is). But what if the harm that is being done to people today cannot be captured by
physical violence? This is a major part of the fight between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews: the Arabs
say a Jewish settlement is, in and of itself, an act of violence, which then justifies a violent response (say, a suicide bomb). But in this
interaction the Israelis have had the easier argument, because they can (and do) claim that their settlements are non-violent. We
in the West have arrogated to ourselves the very definition of what counts as violence and
what does not, and this leaves us vulnerable to lethal blind spots when we attempt to
bargain with or coerce people who do not share our axiomatic connection of harm to death.
Consider how advances in technology make it possible to cause grave injury without killing, by say, deliberately creating refugees.
This raises the question of whether the number of peoples left homeless by war has risen in proportion as the number of violent
deaths has declined. If so, we would have another example of decreasing violence masking increased harm. I say this to remind us all
that forced mass expulsion is considered a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions of 1948 and 1949,
and to remind us of Slobodan Milosevic’s strategy in Kosovo: rape and kill a few in order to cause the
bulk of the population to flee. Again, relatively few corpses would result, but the harm would be
grave. Finally, I raise an alternative narrative and the emergence of the moral hazard resulting from the industrial revolution’s
relationship with warfare as proving to be a mixed record. On one hand, if killing conduced to coercion, then the
tools of war that made killing more effective should have conduced to shorter, less bloody wars.
Yet this proved a fallacy of composition , because too many countries were industrialized at
the same time, so wars became nearly suicidal. Then the apotheosis of weapons came: the nuclear
weapon. Now it became impossible to use unlimited means to pursue absolute ends, and under that nuclear umbrella,
the term limited war entered the lexicon of international politics, and not as an ideal. I would argue that not only did this initial
condition subsequently make it possible for bad leaders to murder their own people with less fear of
invasion and conquest from without, but that today, it is the permissive condition which makes it possible for them to
harm their people without killing them. In other words, I raise the uncomfortable issue of moral hazard: were there not
circumstances where war was a good thing? On the other hand, it is fair to point out that the same permissive
conditions and technologies which make it possible to harm without killing, may make it
possible to prevent harm without killing. The key, it seems to me, is to redefine harm and to
separate it from killing. All this is to say that although Pinker and Goldstein have done us a great service in writing these
impressive works of scholarship, the optimism is likely either premature or misplaced. Not only am I not willing to accept that
physical violence is the only or most appropriate metric for measuring a decline of violence, but I remain unconvinced that the
barbarism of humanity is behind us. Even if we concede they are right about the trend save at the margins,
we are given no sound argument for why the trend is uni-directional: what has happened before could
happen again. What Pinker and Goldstein see as the victory of peace, I see as a bubble that can all too easily pop.

Pinker neutralizes important variables – its bad science

Gray 15 (John, John Gray, author of False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black
Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia, and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be
Modern, “John Gray: Steven Pinker is Wrong About Violence and War.” In The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-
war-declining) **images and graphs omitted**
The picture of declining violence presented by this new orthodoxy is not all it seems to be. As some critics,
notably John Arquilla, have pointed out, it’s a mistake to focus too heavily on declining fatalities on the
battlefield. If these deaths have been falling, one reason is the balance of terror: nuclear weapons have so far
prevented industrial-style warfare between great powers. Pinker dismisses the role of nuclear
weapons on the grounds that the use of other weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas has not prevented war in the past;
but nuclear bombs are incomparably more destructive. No serious military historian doubts that fear of their
use has been a major factor in preventing conflict between great powers. Moreover deaths of non-
combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the 10 million deaths due to the first world war were of
non‑combatants, whereas around half of the more than 50 million casualties of the second world war and over 90% of the millions
who have perished in the violence that has wracked the Congo for decades belong in that category. If great powers have
avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars. Neocolonial
warfare in south-east Asia, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-
insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the
Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the
Vietnam war, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, covert intervention in the Balkans and the
Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria,
Russian cyber-attacks in the Baltic states and the proxy war between the US and Russia that is
being waged in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts in which great powers have been involved in continuous
warfare against each other while avoiding direct military conflict. While it is true that war has changed, it has not
become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well-organised states that can at some point negotiate peace, it is
now more often a many-sided conflict in fractured or collapsed states that no one has the power
to end. The protagonists are armed irregulars, some of them killing and being killed for the sake of an idea or faith, others from
fear or a desire for revenge and yet others from the world’s swelling armies of mercenaries, who fight for profit. For all of them,
attacks on civilian populations have become normal. The ferocious conflict in Syria, in which methodical
starvation and the systematic destruction of urban environments are deployed as strategies, is an example of this type of
warfare. It may be true that the modern state’s monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it
is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass
killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror . With increasing
historical knowledge it has become clear that the “Holocaust-by-bullets” – the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet
Union, during the second world war – was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realised.
Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to
uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing
an important role. Peacetime deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million.
Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably
broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear.
Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any
history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be “apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of
this history” (the italics are Pinker’s). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of
the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision. Estimating the numbers of those who
die from violence involves complex questions of cause and effect, which cannot always be
separated from moral judgments . There are many kinds of lethal force that do not produce
immediate death. Are those who die of hunger or disease during war or its aftermath counted among the casualties? Do
refugees whose lives are cut short appear in the count? Where torture is used in war, will its victims figure in the calculus if they
succumb years later from the physical and mental damage that has been inflicted on them? Do infants who are born to brief and
painful lives as a result of exposure to Agent Orange or depleted uranium find a place in the roll call of the dead? If women who have
been raped as part of a military strategy of sexual violence die before their time, will their passing feature in the statistical tables?
There is something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of ‘backward’ peoples While the seeming exactitude
of statistics may be compelling, much of the human cost of war is incalculable . Deaths by
violence are not all equal. It is terrible to die as a conscript in the trenches or a civilian in an aerial bombing campaign, but
to perish from overwork, beating or cold in a labour camp can be a greater evil. It is worse still to be killed as part of a systematic
campaign of extermination as happened to those who were consigned to death camps such as Treblinka. Disregarding these
distinctions, the statistics presented by those who celebrate the arrival of the Long Peace are morally dubious if not meaningless.
The radically contingent nature of the figures is another reason for not taking
them too seriously . (For a critique of Pinker’s statistical methods, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay on the Long Peace.)
If the socialist revolutionary Fanya Kaplan had succeeded in assassinating Lenin in August 1918, violence
would still have raged on in Russia. But the Soviet state might not have survived and could not
have been used by Stalin for slaughter on a huge scale. If a resolute war leader had not unexpectedly come to
power in Britain in May 1940, and the country had been defeated or (worse) made peace with Germany as much of the British
elite wanted at the time, Europe would likely have remained under Nazi rule for generations to come – time in which plans of racial
purification and genocide could have been more fully implemented. Discussing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which
nuclear war was narrowly averted, Pinker dismisses the view that “the de-escalation was purely a stroke of uncanny good luck”.
Instead, he explains the fact that nuclear war was avoided by reference to the superior judgment of Kennedy and Khrushchev, who
had “an intuitive grasp of game theory” – an example of increasing rationality in history, Pinker believes. But a disastrous
escalation in the crisis may in fact have been prevented only by a Soviet submariner, Vasili Arkhipov, who
refused to obey orders from his captain to launch a nuclear torpedo. Had it not been for the accidental presence of a single
courageous human being, a nuclear conflagration could have occurred causing fatalities on a vast scale. A screengrab from a video
released by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram on 13 July 2014. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A screengrab from a
video released by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram on 13 July 2014. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images There is
something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples. Destroying some of the most refined civilisations
that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed were the work of
colonial powers. One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population
by German and Belgian imperialism. Unending war in the Congo has been fuelled by western
demand for the country’s natural resources. If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one
reason may be that they have exported it. Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the
most highly developed countries is questionable. Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the
most advanced society in the world. According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of
incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners
are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many
prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves
continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement,
sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a
type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation
the practice of
may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration,
torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state .
It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced more
traditional types of warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism to include assassination by unaccountable mercenaries
and remote-controlled killing by drones is part of this shift. A metamorphosis in the nature is war is under way,
which is global in reach. With the state of Iraq in ruins as a result of US-led regime change, a third of the country is
controlled by Isis, which is able to inflict genocidal attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with near-
impunity. In Nigeria, the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practise a type of warfare featuring mass killing of civilians, razing of
towns and villages and sexual enslavement of women and children. In Europe, targeted killing of journalists, artists and Jews in
Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to recognise any distinction between combatants and civilians.
Whether they accept the fact or not, advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather
than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred.
Pinker’s figures for poverty ignore extreme poverty, misrepresent the wealth gap,
and discourage progressive change
Robinson 19 (Nathan J., PhD student in Sociology & Social Policy. Nathan is interested in
criminal justice policy, particularly in Louisiana. His research focuses on adult education in U.S.
prisons and on the politics of indigent legal defense. At Yale Law School, he co-directed the
Green Haven Prison Project and worked for the New Orleans public defender and the ACLU's
National Prison Project. “The World’s Most Annoying Man” Foreign Affairs
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man)NFleming **images
and charts omitted**
So here’s what income gains look like if you use percentages: Charts from Jason Hickel based on World Inequality Report But as
Hickel puts it: The elephant graph shows relative gains, with respect to each group’s baseline in 1980. So the poorest 10-20th
percentile gained 82% over this period. That sounds like a lot, on the face of it. But remember that they started from a very low base.
For people earning $2.40 per day in 1980, their incomes grew to no more than $4.36 per day…
over a period of 36 years. So, about 5 cents per year. That’s not much to celebrate, particularly
when these gains don’t come anywhere close to lifting people out of poverty. Remember, the
poorest 60% – the ones depicted as the “winners” in the elephant graph – continue to live under the
poverty line of $7.40 per day (2011 PPP). Here’s what they look like if you care about how much money people have: The
extent of the gap between rich and poor is actually gigantic, but easily obscured —look at this
chart, which misleadingly sizes the gap between $100 and $1,000 identically to the gap between $10,000 and $100,000. All the
celebrations of how people have been “lifted out of extreme poverty” are based on things like:
There are a lot more people living on sums near $5 a day rather than under $2 a day. But go and try
living on $150 a month, or, hell, even $300, and contrast it with the lifestyles on display in the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion
section, and see if you think it’s fair to call this a reasonable distribution of the fruits of the world’s labor. Pinker says that
“eventually, a rising tide lifts all the boats.” My yacht just happens to have been lifted a lot higher than your leaky raft. Actually,
Pinker has made it clear that he doesn’t really care about inequality per se. He insists that it is
“not a fundamental dimension of human well-being” and that an “increase in inequality is
not necessarily bad .” The presence of staggering levels of inequality in our time, then, is not a “counterexample to
human progress.” I have previously addressed Pinker’s inequality arguments. He believes that, because you could make people
equal by making them equally destitute, and both poor people and rich people can simultaneously increase their wealth, it is not
inequality but poverty that matters for “human well-being.” This, however, ignores the way in which wealth is power,
and the relative quantities of it held by different parties determine the degree to which their
“free choices” will be honored in a market system. If I have more wealth than you, my preferences are considered
more valuable than yours, and “minority of the opulent” can override the social preferences of the majority. Pinker is
determined to exonerate the rich for any responsibility they might have for the condition of
the poor. He says that poverty “has no causes” because it’s the natural condition of humankind, criticizing the irrational “blaming
of misfortune on evildoers,” the effort to hold someone responsible for problems that are nobody’s fault: “today, when few people
believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.”
This is wrong, since even accidents and diseases often occur because of “perpetrators,” through negligence and malpractice. But
more importantly, Pinker is avoiding the critical moral question. Yes, we are all born naked, and wealth has to be
produced and distributed. But ifrich people could alleviate poverty, and decline to do so, how are they
not behaving monstrously? If it’s possible to have a more equitable distribution of wealth and
power, then surely the failure to implement the change is “causing” there to be continued poverty
when there doesn’t have to be. Even with “accidents,” you’re supposed to prevent them if you can do so, and the failure to
do that is negligent. Pinker can get very touchy, actually, about those who make fun of his rich friends: “As for sneering at the
bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle
class—personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidances of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy—
are good things, not bad things.” If you think that sounds a bit like he thinks poor people have bad values, you’re onto
something. In Better Angels, Pinker partly explains the post-’60s uptick in U.S. violence by lamenting that people had stopped
emulating their wealthy superiors. As he writes: “As Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became
increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were flattened… People started to address their
friends with first names instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss… The stuffy high-society lady… became a target of ridicule rather than
emulation… Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street.” While he concedes that this wasn’t
entirely bad, it’s very clear where he stands on those who hold “street” values rather than “bourgeois” values. Middle class people are
“devot[ed] to family and neighborhood,” after all.
 AT: REALISM
Realist IR fails – we should move towards an ontology of peace
Dalby 11. Simon Dalby, professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of
Iowa, “Peace and Geopolitics: Imagining Peaceful Geographies,” Paper for presentation to the
University of Newcastle symposium on “Peace in Geography and Politics”, Newcastle, November
15th, 2011, pg. 1

This paper suggests this focus on war and violence has to be read against rapidly shifting
geographies and the recent general trend of reduced violence in human affairs. Whether this is
the promise of the liberal peace, a transitory imperial pax, something more fundamental in
human affairs, or a temporary historical blip remains to be seen, but substantial empirical
analyses do suggest that violence is declining (Human Security Report 2011). This
stands in stark contrast to realist assertions of war as the human condition as well
as to repeated warnings about the supposed dangers to international order of rising
Asian powers. Likewise the remilitarization of Anglo-Saxon culture since 9/11 has
suggested that warring is a routine part of modern life. But the nature of war has
changed in some important ways even if contemporary imperial adventures in peripheral places
look all too familiar to historians. Peace, all this crucially implies, is a matter of social
processes, not a final Telos, a resolution of the tensions of human life, nor a utopia that will
arrive sometime. In Christian terms the aspirational “Kingdom of God” is a work in
progress.
Nick Megoran (2011) in particular has suggested that the geography discipline needs to think
much more carefully about peace making and the possibilities of non-violence as
modes of political action. The key question is focused on in the Megoran’s pointed refusal to
accept the simplistic dismissal of the efficacy of non-violence given the obvious prevalence of
violence. The point of his argument is that non-violence is a political strategy in part to respond
to violence, to initiate political actions in ways that are not hostage to the use of force. In doing
so, especially in his discussion of resistance to Nazi policies in Germany during the war,
Megoran (2011) underplays the important points about legitimacy as part of politics, and
likewise hints at the important contrast between non-violence as a strategic mode of political
action. Implied here is that while war may be politics by other means, to gloss the classic
Clausewitzian formulation, non- violence is politics too. But politics plays in the larger
geopolitical context, and this must not be forgotten in deliberations concerning the possible new
initiatives geographers might take in thinking carefully about disciplinary contributions to peace
research and practice.
Contemporary social theory might point to Michel Foucault, and the argument drawn from his
writings that politics is the extension of war rather than the other way round. Given
the interest in biopolitics and geogovernance within the discipline these matters are obviously
relevant but the connection to peace needs to be thought carefully beyond formulations that
simply assume it as the opposite of wars (Morrissey 2011). This is especially the case given the
changing modes of contemporary warfare and the advocacy of violence as an appropriate policy
in present circumstances. The modes of warfare at the heart of liberalism suggest that the
security of what Reid and Dillon (2009) call the biohuman, the liberal consuming subject,
involves a violent series of practices designed to pacify the world by the
elimination of political alternatives. The tension here suggests an imperial peace,
a forceful imposition of a state of non-war. In George W. Bush’s terms justifying the
war on terror, a long struggle to eliminate tyranny (Dalby 2009a). Peace is, in this
geopolitical understanding, what comes after the elimination of opposition. In late
2011 such formulations dominated discussions of the death of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya.
The dramatic transformation of human affairs in the last couple of generations do
require that would-be peaceful geographers look both to the importance of non-
violence and simultaneously to how global transformations are changing the landscape
of violence and social change, all of it still under the threat of nuclear devastation should major
inter-state war occur once again. The re-emergence of non-violence as an explicit political
strategy, and in particular the use of Gene Sharp’s (1973) ideas of non-violent direct action in
recent events pose these questions very pointedly. Geographers have much to offer in
such re-thinking that may yet play their part in a more global understanding of
how interconnected our fates are becoming and how inappropriate national state
boundaries are as the premise for political action in a rapidly changing biosphere.
But to do so some hard thinking is needed on geopolitics, and on how it works as well as how
peace-full scholarship might foster that which it desires. Linking the practical actions of
non-violence from Tahrir Square to those of the Occupy Wall Street actions,
underway as the first draft of this paper was keyboarded, requires that we think
very carefully about the practices that now are designated in terms of
globalization. Not all this is novel, but the geopolitical scene is shifting in ways that need to
be incorporated into the new thinking within geography about war, peace,
violence and what the discipline might have to say about, and contribute to, non-violence as
well as to contestations of contemporary lawfare (Gregory 2006).
Whether the delegitimization of violence as a mode of rule will be extended further in coming
decades is one of the big questions facing peace researchers. The American reaction
to 9/11 set things back dramatically, an opportunity to respond in terms of response to a
crime and diplomacy was squandered, but the wider social refusal to accept repression and
violence as appropriate modes of rule has interesting potential to constrain the use of military
force. The professionalization of many high technology militaries also reduces their inclination
to involve themselves in repressing social movements, although here Mikhail Gorbachev’s
refusal to use the Red Army against dissidents in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s
remains emblematic of the changes norms of acceptable rule that have been extended in the
last few generations.
A geography discipline seriously interested in peace needs to link the social processes on the
relatively small scale such as the non-violent protests Megoran (2011) highlights, and
the peaceful accompaniment actions that Koopman (2011) documents, to the larger geopolitical
transformations of our times, to make the eminently geographical point that peace activities
vary widely from place to place, but now are an important part of larger contemporary
geopolitical transformations

Realism can’t describe China rise—boom

Hagström and Jerdén, 14—associate professor of political science and senior research fellow
AND research associate, both at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Linus and Björn,
“East Asia’s Power Shift: The Flaws and Hazards of the Debate and How to Avoid Them”, Asian
Perspective 38 (2014), 337–362, dml)

In spite of the widespread interest in the power-shift debate among researchers, the conceptual
refinement of “power” in most of the works cited above is surprisingly meager.
Scholars have typically inferred a power shift more or less based on a perceived change in the
distribution of material capability between China, on the one hand, and the United States and Japan, on
the other. Moreover, the assumption underlying the power-shift thesis is that a definite causal relation
exists between capability and the capacity to produce effects. In short, capability, primarily material
capability, is power. Economic capability, moreover, is destined to be translated into military power,
and economic and military power into political and diplomatic clout. The premise that
power is highly fungible or convertible leads almost inevitably to the conclusion
that Chinese power will grow in more or less all areas.
This understanding of power stems from the fundamental tenets of realism. The finding that
realist ideas steer the debate is not very surprising, since the study of power in IR has largely taken place within the confines of the
realist paradigm (Schmidt 2007). For realists, power typically serves as the independent variable in explanations of both system-
level occurrences, such as war and peace (Waltz 1979), and unit-level ones, such as foreign policies (Rose 1998). In order to use
power as the independent variable, it must be recognizable and measurable, which results in the understanding that capabilities are
synonymous with, or correspond to, power—an approach adopted by nearly all realists (Hagström 2005a; Schmidt 2007) that is
known as “elements of national power” (Baldwin 2012, 274). That approach, moreover, has spilled over into
theories and analytical approaches not necessarily associated with realism, and which do not use
power as an independent variable.
In sum, the literature has assumed the existence of a power shift, with the pretense that the only
relevant scholarly discord concerns how the power shift will affect the regional order and how
states—in particular, the United States—should deal with such changes. This preoccupation
with assessing competing outcomes has typically led to a fairly cursory treatment
of the more primary questions of whether—and, if so, how—a power shift is taking
place.
A Conceptual Critique of the Power-Shift Debate
The realist concept of power has several problems . To begin with, associating economic
resources with discrete state actors is at best complex and at worst theoretically
dubious. In this special issue, Chengxin Pan unpacks the image of monolithic Chinese economic power. He emphasizes
how dependent Chinese capability is on capital and technology emanating from outside of China
and how entangled it is with global production networks. The same is clearly the case with
ideational and normative power. The normative Western order, which in Alexander Bukh’s account is
constraining Japanese soft power, might work to the benefit of the United States, but that does not
mean that the US government controls this order, or even that it was instrumental
in its creation. In fact, many of the order’s features arguably precede the rise of the United States
to global dominance. Therefore, much of the power in the international system cannot be
neatly boxed into discrete and unitary state actors, and the power relations of
states are not always the most meaningful objects for power analysis . Having said that, the
power-shift debate is about the rise and fall of national power, and addressing this debate means focusing on states as the wielders of
power. The degree of correspondence between power and states also varies between contexts; for instance, there seem to be fairly
close fits between states and power in the military and diplomatic fields.
Power as National Capabilities
As noted above, the power-shift debate treats the changing distribution of capabilities between states
as the independent variable, which is then used to explain and predict the structure of regional
interactions. Scholars do this in three ways, two of which are untenable and one of which
is arguably pointless. These objections are not new; in fact, some stretch back well over half a century. The fact
that they have been conspicuously absent from the power-shift debate, however, makes
rehearsing them worthwhile. The first approach asserts that military power is the ultimate
means of influence in international politics (Rothgeb 1994). However, it is unclear how a single
index could be used to compare countries’ military power (Baldwin 2012). How can
disparate indicators, such as the size of standing forces, the number of nuclear weapons, or
effectiveness in nonconventional warfare, be merged into a measure of war-fighting capacity?
The second approach recognizes the existence of distinct bases and instruments of power but
sees them as essentially convertible. Christopher Layne, for instance, writes, “There is a critical linkage between a great
power’s military and economic standing, on the one hand, and its prestige, soft power, and agenda-setting capacity, on the other”
(2012, 22). Power is like money; one form of power can be converted into other forms without
significant translation costs. Critics, however, argue that a useful instrument in one context is
not necessarily useful in another (Baldwin 1989; 2012). Chan’s article in this special issue reminds us that
policy capacity and incentives have an important bearing on whether and how capabilities
translate into power. Despite the conspicuous growth of the Chinese military budget relative to
Japan’s, for instance, Beijing has not gotten its way in the bilateral territorial dispute over the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (Hagström 2012). As Karl Gustafsson shows in this special issue, the Chinese government’s ability
to influence Japan through the use of narratives related to the past actually seems to have decreased in recent years. Moreover, the
conspicuous diffusion of Japanese culture in China and Chinese culture in Japan are often portrayed as soft-power resources
(Otmazgin 2008; Heng 2010), but in neither case has the attraction to cultural artifacts translated into a more general sense of
attraction to the other.
The third approach identifies the existence of distinct bases and instruments of power,
recognizes that they are not easily convertible, but nonetheless maintains the value of ranking
states in terms of overall power. Yan Xuetong, for example, constructs a power index, while arguing that political,
economic, and military power components are all vital to state power and “cannot be converted unconditionally” (2006, 17).
Comparing the comprehensive power of states involves methodological anarchy,
and Chan (2005) demonstrates how commonly used power indexes yield completely
different results—some showing that a global shift is imminent, others that it is quite far
away. However, this approach arguably has an even more fundamental problem. If we recognize
that power is issue-specific and not very convertible, what is the value of ranking countries in an
overall power index? How can we possibly ascribe causal powers to such an independent
variable? Furthermore, if we do not plan to use the index as an independent variable, what is the point of constructing it in the
first place? Such concerns have led Baldwin (2012) to argue that this kind of analytical exercise is
essentially meaningless.
To sum up these criticisms, in the words of Baldwin, “There is no ‘general purpose’ currency that can be used to
exercise political power of generalized scope and domain” (1989, 30). Thus, we cannot identify a
“single monolithic international ‘power structure’” in international politics (Baldwin 1989, 166).
Similarly, no power resource is fundamental in East Asia, and consequently no
single monolithic East Asian power structure exists.

humans can adapt and data is oversimplifed

Busser 6 [“The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International
Relations”, Mark Busser, Master’s Candidate, Department of Political Science, York University,
YCISS Working Paper Number 40, August 2006]

Responding directly to Thayer, Duncan Bell and Paul MacDonald have expressed concern at the
intellectual functionalism inherent in sociobiological explanations, suggesting that too often
analysts choose a specific behaviour and read backwards into evolutionary epochs in an attempt
to rationalize explanations for that behaviour. These arguments, Bell and MacDonald write, often fall
into what Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould have called ‘adaptionism,’ or “the attempt to understand all
physiological and behavioural traits of an organism as evolutionary adaptations.”42 Arguments
such as these are hand-crafted by their makers, and tend to carry forward their assumptions and
biases. In an insightful article, Jason Edwards suggests that sociobiology and its successor,
evolutionary psychology, are fundamentally political because they frame their major questions
in terms of an assumed individualism. Edwards suggests that the main question in both sub-fields is: “given human
nature, how is politics possible?”43 The problem is that the ‘givens’ of human nature are drawn backward
from common knowledges and truths about humans in society, and the game-theory
experiments which seek to prove them are often created with such assumptions in mind. These
arguments are seen by their critics as politicized from the very start. Sociobiology in particular
has been widely interpreted as a conservative politico-scientific tool because of these basic
assumptions, and because of the political writings of many sociobiologists.44 Because
sociobiology naturalizes certain behaviours like conflict, inequality and prejudice, Lewontin et
al. suggest that it “sets the stage for legitimation of things as they are.”45 The danger inherent in
arguments that incorporate sociobiological arguments into examinations of modern political life, the authors say, is that such
arguments naturalize variable behaviours and support discriminatory political structures. Even
if certain behaviours are found to have a biological drives behind them, dismissing those
behaviours as ‘natural’ precludes the possibility that human actors can make choices and can
avoid anti-social, violent, or undesirable action.46 While the attempt to discover a geneticallydetermined human
nature has usually been justified under the argument that knowing humankind’s basic genetic programming will help to solve the
resulting social problems, discourse about human nature seems to generate self-fulfilling prophesies by
putting limits on what is considered politically possible. While sociobiologists tend to distance
themselves from the naturalistic fallacy that ‘what is’ is ‘what should be,’ there is still a problem
with employing adaptionism to ‘explain’ how existing political structures because conclusions
tend to be drawn in terms of conclusions that assert what ‘must be’ because of
biologicallyingrained constraints.47 Too firm a focus on sociobiological arguments about ‘natural
laws’ draws attention away from humanity’s potential for social and political solutions that can
counteract and mediate any inherent biological impulses, whatever they may be. A revived classical realism
based on biological arguments casts biology as destiny in a manner that parallels the neo-realist sentiment that the international
sphere is doomed to everlasting anarchy. Jim George quotes the English School scholar Martin Wight as writing that “hope is not a
political virtue: it is a theological virtue.”48 George questions the practical result of traditional realsist
claims, arguing that the suggestion that fallen man’s sinful state can only be redeemed by a
higher power puts limitations on what is considered politically possible. Thayer’s argument
rejects the religious version of the fallen man for a scientific version, but similar problems
remain with his ‘scientific’ conclusions.
Realism is wrong and causes infinite militarization and extinction
Ahmed 12 (Nafeez Mosaddeq, received an M.A. in contemporary war & peace studies and a
DPhil in international relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, where he
taught for a period in the Department of International Relations, also a journalist at The
Guardian. “The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the
securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society” p. 343-345 https://sci-
hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14781158.2011.601854)NFleming
Unfortunately, orthodox IR approaches are ill-equipped to understand the complexity of these
interconnected global crises and their interdependent impacts on the international system.
Generally, IR scholars have examined global crises as discrete phenomena. Economic and financial crises are
studied within the discipline of International Political Economy, particularly with a view to understanding their
structural causes and trajectories, sometimes including their impact on development, inequality
and poverty. Energy depletion as a global systemic problem is rarely acknowledged in the IR
literature, but when (rarely) acknowledged, it is largely viewed through the lens of energy policy as an arm of ‘national security’.
Similarly, climate change is examined in the context of its strategic implications in exacerbating
vulnerability to violent conflict or scrutinised in the context of the scope for inter-state negotiations and global
governance.54 For the most part, IR as a discipline has not fully acknowledged the real-world scale of
these crises as inherently interdependent phenomena requiring an integrated and holistic theoretical appraisal.
Many traditional neorealist scholars, of course, view environmental factors as of either minimal or negligible significance in
identifying future security threats and explaining past, present or potential inter-state conflicts.55 Yet as evidence of climate change
has become more disturbing, such perspectives have been increasingly contested. While some scholars tend to focus on the role of
natural resource shortages or abundance in engendering conditions of anarchy and violence, others investigate the capacity or
inability of states to negotiate viable cooperative international regulatory frameworks to prevent or respond to crises. As such,
most theorists draw either implicitly or explicitly on neorealist or neoliberal assumptions about
state behaviour in the international system, debilitating their ability to understand these crises
precisely in their global systemic context. 2.2 Neorealism: tragedy as self-fulfilling prophecy In one salient example,
O’Keefe draws extensively on both offensive and defensive variants of neorealist theory, including the work of Jack Snyder, Robert
Jervis and Kenneth Waltz, to argue for realism’s continuing relevance in understanding how the ‘biophysical environment plays a
significant role in triggering and prolonging the structural conditions that result in conflict’. She notes that standard realist concepts
such as ‘anarchy, security dilemmas, and the prisoner’s dilemma’ can be used to explain the emergence of environmental or
resource-based violent conflicts largely within, and occasionally between, the weaker states of the South. ‘Environmental anarchy’
occurs in weak states which lack ‘active government regulation’ of the internal distribution of natural resources, leading to a ‘tragedy
of the commons’. This generates resource scarcities which lead to ‘security dilemmas’ over ownership of resources, often settled by
resort to violence, perpetuated by ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’. 56 Ultimately, this theoretical hypothesis on the causes
of environmental or resource-related conflict is incapable of engaging with the deeper
intersecting global structural conditions generating resource scarcities, independently of
insufficient government management of the internal distribution of resources in weak states. It
simplistically applies the Hobbesian assumption that without a centralised ‘Leviathan’ state
structure, the persistence of anarchy in itself generates conflict over resources. Under the guise of
restoring the significance of the biophysical environment to orthodox IR,
this approach in effect actually occludes
the environment as a meaningful causal factor, reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon of the
dynamics of anarchy in the context of state failure. As a consequence, this approach is theoretically
impotent in grasping the systemic acceleration of global ecological, energy and economic crises as a direct consequence of the
way in which the inter-state system itself exploits the biophysical environment. The same criticism in fact applies to opposing
theories that resource abundance is a major cause of violent conflict. Bannon and Collier, for instance, argue that resource
abundance and greed, rather than resource scarcity and political grievances, generated intra-state conflicts financed by the export of
commodities in regions like Angola and Sierra Leone (diamonds) or West Africa (tropical timber). In other regions, abundance
rather than shortages of oil, drugs and gold fuelled and financed violent secessionist movements in the context of widespread
corruption and poor governance.57 Ultimately, this departs little from the theoretical assumptions 55 David G. Victor, ‘What
Resource Wars?’, The National Interest 92 (November–December 2007): 49, 52; Stephen M. Walt, ‘Revolution and War’, World
Politics 44 (April 1992): 321–68. For an extensive critique of such positions see Mark J. Lacy, Security and Climate Change:
International Relations and the Limits of Realism (London: Routledge, 2005). 56 Meghan O’Keefe, ‘The Tragedy of Anarchy: A
Realist Appraisal of the Environmental Dimensions of Civil Conflict’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 11, no. 4 (Spring
2009): 1–2, http://www.jmss.org/jmss/index.php/jmss/ article/view/60/70. 57 Ian Bannon and Paul Collier, Natural Resources
and Violent Conflict: Options and Actions (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003), 8–16. 344 N.M. Ahmed Downloaded by [Nanyang
Technological University] at 08:38 09 May 2016 above, with weak central state governance still blamed for
generating anarchic conditions conducive to conflict over abundant resources. Furthermore, as Kaldor shows, this
simplistic perspective overlooks the wider context of the global political economy – the
evolution of regional ‘war economies’ was often enabled precisely by the devastating impact of
neoliberal structural adjustment programmes, which eroded state structures and generated
social crises that radicalised identity politics.58 Under traditional neorealist logic, a strategic
response to global environmental crises must involve the expansion of state-military capabilities
in order to strengthen the centralised governance structures whose task is to regulate the
international distribution of natural resources, as well as to ensure that a particular state’s own resource
requirements are protected. Neorealism understands inter-state competition, rivalry and warfare as
inevitable functions of states’ uncertainty about their own survival, arising from the anarchic
structure of the international system. Gains for one state are losses for another, and each state’s attempt to maximise
its power relative to all other states is simply a reflection of its rational pursuit of its own security. The upshot is the
normalisation of political violence in the international system, including practices
such as over-exploitation of energy and the environment, as a ‘rational’ strategy – even though this
ultimately amplifies global systemic insecurity . Inability to cooperate internationally and for mutual
benefit is viewed as an inevitable outcome of the simple, axiomatic existence of multiple states. The problem is that neorealism
cannot explain in the first place the complex interdependence and escalation of global
crises. Unable to situate these crises in the context of an international system that is not simply a set of
states, but a transnational global structure based on a specific exploitative relationship with the biophysical
environment, neorealism can only theorise global crises as ‘new issue areas’ appended to already existing security agendas.59
Yet by the very act of projecting global crises as security threats, neorealism renders itself powerless to prevent or
mitigate them by theorising their root structural causes. In effect, despite its emphasis on the reasons why
states seek security, neorealism’s approach to issues like climate change actually guarantees greater
insecurity by promoting policies which frame these ‘non-traditional’ issues purely as
amplifiers of quite traditional threats. As Susanne Peters argues, the neorealist approach renders the
militarisation of foreign and domestic policy a pragmatic and necessary response to issues such as
resource scarcities – yet, in doing so, it entails the inevitable escalation of ‘resource wars’ in the name
of energy security. Practically, this serves not to increase security for competing state and non-state actors, but to
debilitate international security through the proliferation of violent conflict to access and control
diminishing resources in the context of unpredictable complex emergencies.60 Neorealism thus negates its own theoretical
utility and normative value. For if ‘security’ is the fundamental driver of state foreign policies, then why
are states chronically incapable of effectively ameliorating the global systemic amplifiers of
‘insecurity’, despite the obvious rationale to do so in the name of warding off collective
destruction, if not planetary annihilation?61
 AT: TRANSITION WARS
The alt causes a mass mindset shift which triggers a transition to an agrarian
economy – solves extinction and avoids transition wars
Alexander and Rutherford 14 (r. Samuel, co-director of the Simplicity Institute, is a lecturer
at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia and phd from the
University of Melbourne, and Jonathan, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of
Middlesex)NFleming
Spratt reports growing expert and scientific sentiment for a ‘wartime mobilisation’ to realise the radical goal of climate safety.
Brown’s (2009) Plan B 4.0 makes this case with verve. Stretton (2005) has already observed that wartime resource rationing will be
needed to rein in harmful consumption. One of the dark natalities to emerge in this path is that democracy, greatest of modern
political virtues, may be inhibited temporarily to ensure its survival. The anaemic liberal democracy bequeathed by decades of
neoliberalism might be supplanted by nation states on war footings, joined to common purpose by an emboldened and reauthorised
United Nations. Pusey (2008) sees opportunity here as climate change-induced political change might restore the legitimacy of state
intervention and generate the needed cultural energy for nation-building government. The dangers, however, are obvious. Waiting
in the wings are expert and technocratic rationalities, including the new urban positivism, which may counsel the extinction not
careful circumscription of democracy. The cause of species authority might be sidelined by eruptions of authoritarianism. In the
latter scenario, the chance to use the transition to forge a new human dispensation would almost certainly be lost and the worst
depredations of lethal modernity revisited upon an already weakened and dispirited species. Urry (2011) fears that sudden
catastrophic events – collapses in resource stocks (especially oil or water) or climate-related urban disasters – will
catalyse
the sudden rise of ‘war regimes’ that dispense altogether with democracy and solidarity in
desperate quest for survival of the fittest and favoured. Resort to dystopian warlordism is surely plausible if
species action is delayed to the point where it is catastrophes not human will that provoke response. It is urgent that the
terms of transitional authority be defined and instated before raw power is given a chance to
determine them. To drift further into the emergency without beginning a democratic response
will be to give way to the claims of supremacy. This dark possibility encourages the need for new global governance
for human survival to be forged now, not in the teeth of the worst storm furies. When the storms begin to break from around 2030,
the vulnerable cities and hinterlands of the Global South will house at least 80% of the world’s urban population: much of their
fabric will be woefully unshielded slums. Amin (2013a) is impatient with academic and activist ‘revisionism’ that finds wondrous
adaptive resources within ‘informal’ (i.e. slum) urbanisation. As he points out, cities contain immanent potential for
endurance in the face of external threat, through capacity for social mobilisation and deployment
of ‘machinic infrastructure’. But such possibility has been radically diminished by prolonged neoliberal urbanisation,
especially in the South (Berry 2013). A more fundamental, planned response from reformed global institutions
is needed to repair the defences of developing cities and begin transition to a new model of
resilient urbanisation. This presupposes a massive programme of investment by the Global North in a wholesale
strengthening of the world urban system, beginning with its most susceptible parts. The case for this historic transfer of species
wealth has been well essayed and retailed (e.g. Brown and Eriksen 2011). Indeed the mechanism exists in incipient form. The
Climate Adaptation Fund set up under the Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCCC is a modest and halting start on this work, but proof that
the concept could potentially gain wide human assent. What of governance in an urban age of dangerous transition? All our
ingenuity and resourcefulness must be immediately deployed to the task of fashioning a new
urbanism that will, in order of priority, first, bring us through the tempests of transition and,
second, provide the new settlement pattern that a post-carbon future will necessitate. Presently, and
morbidly, much human urban innovation is directed away from this end, towards the quicksands of the compact city or the absurd
or elitist stage sets of corporate ambition. Emblematic of the latter is Facebook’s new company village, Anton Menlo, which replaces
the progressive idealism of the historical model town with the privilege reserved for the knowledge worker of neoliberalism
(Albergotti 2013). As related earlier, a new progressive urban imaginary is needed, especially directed at
defining city life and functioning in a new postcapitalist modernity that commits to safe co-
evolution of humanity and nature. Without diminishing the need for this act of imaginative and
material creation, a new model of transitional urban governance must be agreed and
implemented immediately to manage dissolution of the ‘second modernity’, the unstable risk- borne age
that has largely replaced industrialism and which is now itself breaking apart (Beck 2009). Transitional
governance is not only about survival as an end in itself but to begin the identification of values and structures
that will, when conditions allow, eventually create a newly stabilised ‘third modernity’. 3.7 A Guardian State
If we accept together with many others that climate change is unmanageable under
capitalism, then it follows that recovery from climate change and response to it will require an end
to modern capitalism, in a radical and contingent transition. The Guardian State is a postcapitalist response.
It is presented here as a ‘logical’
possibility along with speculative ‘transition’ ideas that might be used
to bring policy/governance levers to bear in a mitigative way. The following sketch intention- ally leaves aside
questions about processes of transition and instead focuses on the central concept of crisis management in the war on climate
change. While it brings obvious dangers, it also presents a possibility through which neoliberal urbanism would be
swept away by a new tide of human assertion. In this prospect, the Predator State (Galbraith 2009) that has
protected and advanced the (il)logic of laissez-faire in the face of contradiction and opposition would give way to a
Guardian State that commits to collective welfare in a time of shared endangerment. The central
argument is that, as Gorz puts it, ‘The exit from capitalism will happen : : : one way or another, in either a civilized or barbarous
Preemptive transition to a Guardian State is prospected in such a way that avoids
fashion’ (2010: 27).
the dystopian consequences of waiting for the inevitable and possibly violent end
of neoliberalism and the aforementioned scourge of dystopian warlordism . This state
of progressive transition would guide humanity through a time when ‘normal’ social and economic systems are suspended, some
perhaps abolished. It would enable humans to arrest the lethal monolith of overproduction and
replace it with social coordination of resource allocation as means both to cope with immediate
crisis and to begin transition to a new political economic order. Central to this break with
neoliberal logic is to dispense with faith in markets, technology and ‘behavioural adjustment’ as
means to reset production and consumption within safe environmen- tal and material limits. Resource
usage reduction for sustainable development sits alongside wholesale decarbonisation to
prevent catastrophic climate change. Gorz states the case for a war footing that enables the necessary rationing: De-
growth is:::imperative for our survival. But it presupposes a different economy, a different lifestyle, a different civilization and
different social relations. In the absence of these, collapse could be avoided only through restrictions, rationing and the kind of
authoritarian resource –allocation typical of a war economy. (2010:27, original emphasis)
 AT: UTIL
Util is violent – its linked to sociopathy and its false neutrality is precisely what
makes it damaging
Kahane et. Al 17 (Guy Kahane, Jim A. C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, Lucius Caviola, Nadira S. Faber, Molly J. Crockett, and
Julian Savulescu, all professors at University of Oxford
According to classical utilitarianism, we should always act in the way that would maximize aggregate well-being. Since its
introduction in the 18th century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, this simple idea has
been massively influential—
and massively controversial. Modern-day secular morality can be seen as the gradual expansion
of our circle of moral concern from those who are emotionally close, physically near, or similar
to us, to cover the whole of humanity, and even all sentient life (Singer, 1981; see also Pinker, 2011).
Utilitarians like Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, in our time, Peter Singer, have played a pivotal role in this process, and in
progressive causes more generally. They have been leading figures in the fights against sexism, racism, and ‘speciesism;’ influential
supporters of political and sexual liberty; and key actors in attempts to eradicate poverty in developing countries as well as to
encourage more permissive attitudes to prenatal screening, abortion, and euthanasia. Yet utilitarians have never constituted more
than a tiny minority, and utilitarianism has always faced fierce resistance. Pope John Paul II famously wrote:
“Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of ‘things’ and not of
‘persons,’ a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used ”
(John Paul II, 1995). But it is not only defenders of traditional morality who reject utilitarianism; prominent progressive
thinkers have criticized utilitarianism in similar terms (Rawls, 1971; Williams, 1973), and many continue
to angrily protest the views of utilitarians such as Singer (Schaler, 2009). Clearly, utilitarianism is a distinctive,
influential, and controversial ethical view. Given the influential but controversial reach of utilitarianism in ethics and society,
questions about the psychological basis of utilitarian moral thinking—and why some people are so attracted to it while others are so
repelled— have been of considerable interest to philosophers and psychologists alike. Utilitarians have often answered such
questions by appealing to a contrast between cool logic and misguided intuitions and emotions. They argue that common moral
views have their source in gut reactions and intuitions shaped by discredited religious views or evolutionary pressures, and that
careful reflection should lead us to abandon these views and endorse utilitarianism, a more logical view
based in rational reflection (Singer, 2005). Recognizing that this notion is, in part, a testable hypothesis about human
moral psychology, some advocates of utilitarianism have generated an influential body of empirical
research that has by and large seemed to confirm it. The main approach in this research has been to study
responses to ‘sacrificial’ moral dilemmas (such as the famous ‘trolley’ scenario and its various permutations; see Foot, 1967) which
present a choice between sacrificing one innocent person to save a greater number of people, or doing nothing and letting them die.
In analyzing these responses and relating them to other variables, such as individual difference scores on personality measures or
patterns of brain activity, researchers have tried to uncover the psychological and even neural underpinnings of the dispute between
utilitarians and their opponents— such as defenders of deontological, rights-based views of the kind associated with Immanuel Kant.
In keeping with the ‘cool logic’ versus ‘misguided emotions’ framework, these researchers have made heavy use of a dualprocess
approach to understanding human cognition. Dual process models conceptualize cognition as resulting from the competition
between quick, intuitive, and automatic processes, and slow, deliberative, and controlled processes (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999;
Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Running with this idea, influential research by Greene and
colleagues has applied a dual process lens to our moral judgments to suggest that while
deontological judgments (refusing to sacrifice the one) are based in immediate intuition and emotional
gutreactions, utilitarian judgments (sacrificing one to save a greater number) are uniquely attributable to
effortful reasoning (Greene, 2007; Paxton, Bruni, & Greene, 2014). It has also been suggested that these opposing utilitarian
and deontological forms of decision-making are based in distinct neural systems (Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004).
Despite an abundance of early findings in support of Greene’s account, more recent research has yielded results that are more
difficult to square with its— ultimately flattering— picture of utilitarian thinking. For example, multiple
studies have
reported an association between ‘utilitarian’ responses to sacrificial dilemmas and
psychopathy and, more generally, aggressive and antisocial tendencies including reduced concern
about harm to others (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011; Glenn, Koleva, Iyer, Graham, & Ditto, 2010; Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, &
Savulescu, 2015; Wiech et al., 2013). These findings are puzzling. Utilitarians are supposed to care about the good
of all sentient beings; psychopaths notoriously care only about their own good. So why is
psychopathy one of the traits most consistently associated with what are supposed to be
paradigm cases of utilitarian judgment? The answer to this puzzle may be found by way of illustration. In March 2017,
disability activists outraged by Peter Singer’s support for the infanticide of severely disabled babies prevented him from speaking
(via an Internet link) at an event organized by the Effective Altruism Club of Victoria University in Canada—a club whose founding,
in turn, was inspired by Singer’s advocacy of self-sacrifice in the name of charity (Singer, 2015). This incident—and the two ‘sides’ of
Singer’s views attracting both censure and praise— offers the beginnings of an answer to our question by showing two distinct ways
in which utilitarianism radically departs from commonsense morality. The
first way utilitarianism departs from
such commonsense morality is that it places no constraints whatsoever on the maximization of
aggregate well-being. If killing a severely disabled child would lead to more good overall—as Singer
believes is at least sometimes the case—then utilitarianism, in stark contrast to commonsense morality,
requires that the child be killed . This explains the angry protests at Singer’s talk. But this requirement is just one
aspect of utilitarianism: specifically, it is the negative dimension according to which we are permitted
(and even required) to instrumentally use, severely harm, or even kill innocent people to
promote the greater good. We call this dimension ‘instrumental harm.’
MILITARY ABOLITION ALT
 2NC ALT SOLVENCY
Endorsing grassroots movements to rise and abolish the military is a daunting
task --- but it’s possible and necessary
Shupak 15 (Greg, PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of
Guelph in Toronto, Jacobin, “Abolish the Military,” published 11/11/2015,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/veterans-day-american-military-iraq-war-libya-
vietnam, accessed 6/24/2019, JME.)
Lisa Simpson had the right idea. In a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, the elementary school student tries to impress two college kids
by putting a sticker on her bike that says “US Out of Everywhere.” It is a slogan that should be ubiquitous on the Left. With the string
of disastrous military interventions across the world in recent years, it’s even more apparent that US crimes aren’t isolated — there’s
an underlying structure that produces them. Tackling that underlying structure, though daunting, also
fosters opportunities for unity. Because of the sheer destructiveness of US militarism, and its
vital role in maintaining global capitalism, a reinvigorated antiwar movement could bring
together leftists with a broad range of concerns. So on Veterans Day, here’s how US militarism stands in the way of
a just world — and why the Left should come together to bring it to its knees. 1. US imperialism breeds racism. For
starters, the main victims of the US military have been people of color. Just since World War II,
there are the millions slaughtered in Korea and Indochina, the over one million killed in Iraq,
and the tens of thousands in Afghanistan — all of which have then been affixed with
dehumanizing labels to rationalize the murdering sprees. The bigotry doesn’t stay overseas. Using racist
language to legitimize attacking Arabs or Southeast Asians contributes to the dissemination of racism against minorities in the
United States. There’s also the long-running presence of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis in the American forces and the tacit acceptance of
their presence by officials. As Reuters’ Daniel Trotta reported in 2012, white supremacist groups encourage their followers who join
the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow the “Zionist Occupation Government” that they think is running
America and to prepare for the race war that they see as imminent. Former service members such as Wade Page and James
Burmeister have carried out racist murders on US soil, and a 2008 report commissioned by the Justice Department found that half
of all right-wing extremists in the United States had military experience. 2. The military is anti-feminist. US military actions
also need to be thought of as exercises in mass violence against women. Millions of women in
the Global South have been killed, maimed, assaulted, or traumatized by the United States
military. In just one horrifying example, a set of documents declassified in 2006 shows recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese
— families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and
letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses were not confined to
a few rogue units . . . They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Similarly, activist and scholar Kozue
Akibayashi notes that in Okinawa, Japan a “problem caused by the US military presence is sexual or gender-based violence by US
soldiers,” including “hundreds of cases of sexual assaults against women and children of all ages.” The same problem exists in
Colombia where, according to an April 2015 report, US military soldiers and contractors sexually abused at least fifty-four children
between 2003 and 2007 — and were never held accountable because American military personnel are protected by diplomatic
immunity agreements between the two countries.Still more women around the world have been widowed and left to raise children,
or have been burdened by physically or mentally scarred spouses and family members. Sexual assault is also widespread within the
military’s own ranks. The Journal of International Affairs recently reported that, “according to the US government, in 2012, there
were 26,000 sexual assaults in the US military.” But “only 3,374 were reported” because a “culture of impunity” prevails. In the US
military, it is overwhelmingly women who are subject to sexual violence. A 2010 examination of veterans of Operation Enduring
Freedom in Afghanistan and of Operation Iraqi Freedom found that “of 125,729 veterans who received Veterans Health
Administration primary care or mental health services, 15.1 percent of the women and 0.7 percent of the men reported military
sexual trauma when screened” — though these are likely conservative estimates because sexual violence tends to be underreported.
Many male soldiers, moreover, return from the trauma of war to abuse their families. Veterans are responsible for nearly 21 percent
of domestic violence in the United States, and these instances are statistically more likely to result in death than those perpetrated by
non-veterans. Their ability to function is also compromised, which often forces their wives to provide for the family and take on a
greater share of household tasks. 3. US militarism is bad for American workers and for the planet. US imperialism should
be a major concern for labor organizers if for no other reason than that it’s the US poor and
working class whose lives, bodies, and minds are usually put on the line by and for capitalists. Yet
there are further ways in which the US war machine harms American workers. Extraordinary amounts of resources that could be
used to improve people’s lives in the US and elsewhere are instead diverted to the military. In 2013, the total US military expenditure
was $640 billion, over $400 billion more than second-place China. During the Cold War, overly optimistic liberals and social
democrats looked forward to a “peace dividend” that the American population could enjoy in the event of a permanent thaw in
relations with the Soviet Union or its dissolution. Their mistake was to assume that the existence of the USSR was the main reason
for the US’s obscenely large military budget. However, the US military doesn’t consume the volume of
resources it does because of external threats, but because it is a co-dependent of American
capitalism. The US military is itself a site of accumulation and a force for the protection and
expansion of American capital’s interests worldwide. At times, organized labor has supported weapons
manufacturing on the grounds that it provides Americans with a source of employment that cannot easily be outsourced. It is better,
however, to understand the demilitarization of US society as an opportunity for workers. Productive capacities could be
shifted from bomb-making to the creation of socially necessary goods. Rather than building
instruments of death and environmental degradation, resources could be used to construct the
infrastructure needed to save the planet and provide badly needed social services. America’s
wars also defoliate, pollute bodies of water, corrupt soil, destroy ecosystems, and kill huge
numbers of animals. The Iraq War alone “added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than
60 percent of the world’s nations,” scholar Bruce Johansen reports. An antiwar movement that advocates
redirecting resources from the military toward serving human and ecological needs can be a site
at which organized labor and environmentalists forge alliances. 4. The US military is global capitalism’s
police. Some ostensibly concerned with class politics contend that the military provides workers’ families with decent jobs and
opportunities for personal advancement. But this is incredibly myopic. Building movements that confront capital is
far more effective at improving the lot of the working class. And challenging capitalism
necessitates challenging US imperialism. Capitalism needs certain political conditions in order to operate, such as
stable, enforceable property rights across national borders. Yet, as Perry Anderson points out, international legal regimes for
ensuring these are weak, and “the general task of coordination” of the capitalist system “can be satisfactorily resolved only by the
existence of a superordinate power, capable of imposing discipline on the system as a whole.” That superordinate power is the
United States, and its military is global capitalism’s police force. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue, in managing global
capitalism, the American state rules through other states, and turning them all into “effective”
states for global capitalism is no easy matter. It is the attempt by the American state to address
these problems, especially vis-à-vis what it calls “rogue states” in the third world, that leads
American imperialism today to present itself in an increasingly unconcealed manner. To be sure, the
military is not the only way that the US oversees global capitalism. But because US imperialism is an essential feature of
contemporary global capitalism, any blow to one is a blow to the other. Anticapitalists of all stripes are doomed to failure if they do
not treat building a new antiwar movement as a foremost concern. 5. The military is no humanitarian force. In the post-Cold War
era, few matters have caused as much friction on the Euro-Atlantic left as the question of whether American military might should
be used in the name of human rights across the world. Despite its horrific record, some progressives persist in believing that the US
military can be used to liberate women, build democracy, and protect human rights. NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya is just
another example of the misguided tendency to view the United States military as the armed wing of Amnesty International. In
Slouching Towards Sirte, Maximilian Forte writes of the US’s frustration at Qaddafi’s attempt to obstruct the building of Africa
Command (AFRICOM) bases in Africa, which the US had hoped would help it extract resources throughout Africa. In 2008,
American Vice Admiral Robert Moeller said that one of AFRICOM’s aims was to ensure “the free flow of resources from Africa to the
global market,” and in 2010 he said that one of AFRICOM’s purposes is “to promote American interests.”Similarly, Horace
Campbell’s examination of Wikileaks cables finds that in 2007–08, Western oil companies such as the American firm Occidental
were “compelled to sign new deals with [Libya’s] National Oil Company, on significantly less favorable terms than they had
previously enjoyed.” A January 2010 cable shows that oil companies and the American government were frightened by the Qaddafi
government’s “rhetoric in early 2009 involving the possible nationalization of the oil sector.” There is no doubt that Qaddafi’s
government violated human rights, but the professed humanitarian concerns were only a pretext for American involvement. We
must resist the misconception that the American armed forces can play a neutral role on the world stage to protect victims of rights
violations or to end tyranny. The US military’s purpose is to pursue and protect the interests of the American ruling class. As Doug
Stokes explains, since the end of World War II American foreign policy has been focused on “the maintenance and defense of an
economically open international system conducive to capital penetration and circulation” — and a global strategy to halt any social
or political force that challenges, even mildly, this system. We’ve seen this in in the US military assaults on Cuba, Vietnam, and
Grenada, to say nothing of the innumerable covert or proxy attacks carried out against left-leaning forces around the world for
nearly a century. The US maintains eight hundred military bases outside of its borders — an example of the kind of geopolitical
posturing that allows for US political and economic hegemony across the globe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle
East, where the United States is able to safeguard its commercial interests and enhance its economic opportunities by threatening to
quash any social disturbance that may disrupt the flow of oil or the circulation of petrodollars. Even partially weakening the US war
machine would afford the socialist initiatives outside the US — particularly those in the Global South — the room to flourish. And if
the Left can peel back the humanitarian veneer of American intervention, it will be harder for imperialism to sell its wars to the
domestic population. As distant as it may seem, we can construct real bonds of internationalism rooted in solidarity. Immobilizing
the US war machine would be immensely beneficial to virtually every cause with which leftists are concerned.
A
reinvigorated anti-imperialist, antiwar movement is thus an ideal site for leftists
with disparate priorities to converge in ways that can strengthen us all. We overlook this
opportunity at our own peril.
 AT: ALT NEEDS BLUEPRINT
Requiring any alternative to global neoliberal control to have a specific blueprint
or alternative is precisely the ahistorical and hopeless ideology that capitalists
profer --- and even if they win all the alt does is slow down the smooth operations
of global trade, that’s still sufficient to avoid mass immiseration from inevitable
economic and environmental collapse
Graeber 13 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street who coined the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and associate
professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, teaches anthropology at the London School
of Economics, activist whose direct action campaigns before OWS includes protests against the
3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in
New York City, “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse,” The Baffler, No. 22, April
2013, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse]

It would explain a lot. In most of the world, the

last thirty years has come to be known as the age of
neoliberalism—one dominated by a revival of the long-since-abandoned nineteenth-century
creed that held that free markets and human freedom in general were ultimately the same thing.
Neoliberalism has always been wracked by a central paradox. It declares that economic
imperatives are to take priority over all others. Politics itself is just a matter of creating the conditions for growing
the economy by allowing the magic of the marketplace to do its work. All other hopes and dreams—of equality, of security—are to be
sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity. But global economic performance over the last thirty years has been
decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal
prescriptions), growth
rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned,
state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its
own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse. If,
on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism
as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade
bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a
miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the
world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in
convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have
right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment. How did they pull it off?
The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing
alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort
or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did
during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized
police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist
before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive
climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle
fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American
population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their
fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight. In fact, most of the economic
innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating
guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily
effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No
one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks. It does often seem that, whenever there
is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system,
and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism
means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign
against the human imagination . Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those
things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be
contained strictly in the domain of consumerism , or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In
all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the
imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an
alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one
political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist
system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally
concluded no other system would be possible. Work It Out, Slow It Down Normally, when you
challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the
first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an
alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer
maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence.
Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according
to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance
Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of
how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring
their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves
how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin . This is not to
say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael
Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I
think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which
he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought
experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now
seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even
occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors. The most
obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a
stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in
part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did. This might explain, for instance, why so
many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science
fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the
technological aspect is guesswork. Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have
in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. What might a revolution in
common sense actually look like? I don’t know, but I can think of any number of pieces of conventional
wisdom that surely need challenging if we are to create any sort of viable free society. I’ve already
explored one—the nature of money and debt—in some detail in a recent book. I even suggested a debt jubilee, a general cancellation,
in part just to bring home that money is really just a human product, a set of promises, that by its nature can always be renegotiated.
What would remain is the kind of work only human beings will ever be able to do: those forms of caring and helping labor that are at
the very center of the crisis that brought about Occupy Wall Street to begin with. What would happen if we stopped acting as if the
primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead
started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not
contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we
are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation.Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor
discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most
really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only
when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer
is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier
to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that
technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products
and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely. At
the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines
of productivity . This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis
is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of
reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes
obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series
of global debt crises , which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where
the overall burden of debt — sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is
obviously unsustainable . On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process
of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought,
floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are
the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply
another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and
services in the future than they are creating now. But even
current levels are clearly unsustainable .
They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace . Even those
running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is
inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems
simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by
a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only
save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to
change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be. Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I
were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest
points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the
current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation
would make the perfect revolutionary demand. All this might still seem very distant. At the moment, the
planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of
broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world . But if we are
going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our
accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human
imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously
shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most
deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to
crumble overnight.

Anti-capitalist and anarchist movements against neoliberal international control

have manifested in a collective network of particular struggles that resonate and
reverberate globally --- the alternative accelerates this resistance and attempts to
fabricate new modes of civil disobedience that gradually dismantle state control
Graeber 2 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street who coined the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and associate
professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, teaches anthropology at the London School
of Economics, activist whose direct action campaigns before OWS includes protests against the
3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in
New York City, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13, January-February 2002,
https://newleftreview.org/II/13/david-graeber-the-new-anarchists]
A globalization movement? The phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US media and activists have never felt
comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a movement against anything, it’s against neoliberalism, which can be defined as a kind of
market fundamentalism—or, better, market Stalinism—that holds there is only one possible direction for human historical
development. The map is held by an elite of economists and corporate flacks, to whom must be ceded all power once held by
institutions with any shred of democratic accountability; from now on it will be wielded largely through unelected treaty
organizations like the IMF, WTO or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be possible to say this straight out: ‘We
are a movement against neoliberalism’. But in the US, language is always a problem. The corporate media here is probably the most
politically monolithic on the planet: neoliberalism is all there is to see—the background reality; as a result, the word itself cannot be
used. The issues involved can only be addressed using propaganda terms like ‘free trade’ or ‘the free market’. So American activists
find themselves in a quandary: if one suggests putting ‘the N word’ (as it’s often called) in a pamphlet or press release, alarm bells
immediately go off: one is being exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. There have been all sorts of attempts to frame
alternative expressions—we’re a ‘global justice movement’, we’re a movement ‘against corporate globalization’. None are especially
elegant or quite satisfying and, as a result, it is common in meetings to hear the speakers using ‘globalization movement’ and ‘anti-
globalization movement’ pretty much interchangeably. The phrase ‘globalization movement’, though, is really quite apropos. If one
takes globalization to mean the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it’s pretty clear
that not only is the movement itself a product of globalization, but the majority of groups involved in it—the most radical ones in
particular—are far more supportive of globalization in general than are the IMF or WTO. It was an international network called
People’s Global Action, for example, that put out the first summons for planet-wide days of action such as J18 and N30—the latter
the original call for protest against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its origins to the famous International
Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of rainy-season Chiapas, in
August 1996; and was itself initiated, as Subcomandante Marcos put it, ‘by all the rebels around the world’. People from over 50
countries came streaming into the Zapatista-held village of La Realidad. The vision for an ‘intercontinental network of resistance’
was laid out in the Second Declaration of La Realidad: ‘ We
declare that we will make a collective
network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an intercontinental
network of resistance against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of
resistance for humanity’ : Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power wages on
them. A network of voices that not only speak, but also struggle and resist for humanity and
against neoliberalism. A network that covers the five continents and helps to resist the death that Power promises us. [2]
This, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an organizing structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no central
command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.’ The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya
Basta! groups organized a second encuentro in Spain, where the idea of the network process was taken forward: PGA was born at a
meeting in Geneva in February 1998. From the start, it included not only anarchist groups and radical trade unions in Spain, Britain
and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist farmers’ league in India (the KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan fisherfolk,
the Argentinian teachers’ union, indigenous groups such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian Landless
Workers’ Movement, a network made up of communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America—and any number
of others. For a long time, North America was scarcely represented, save for the Canadian Postal Workers’ Union—which acted as
PGA’s main communications hub, until it was largely replaced by the internet—and a Montreal-based anarchist group called CLAC.
If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its demands. The three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance,
calls for a universally guaranteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement of people across borders, and free
access to new technology—which in practice would mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of
protectionism). The noborder network—their slogan: ‘No One is Illegal’—has organized week-long campsites, laboratories for
creative resistance, on the Polish–German and Ukrainian borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activists have dressed up as
border guards, built boat-bridges across the River Oder and blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to protest
against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of suffocation on Lufthansa and KLM flights). This summer’s camp is
planned for Strasbourg, home of the Schengen Information System, a search-and-control database with tens of thousands of
terminals across Europe, targeting the movements of migrants, activists, anyone they like. More and more, activists have been trying
to draw attention to the fact that the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is pretty much limited to the movement of capital and
commodities, and actually increases barriers against the free flow of people, information and ideas—the size of the US border guard
has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of
people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin
with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when
people talk about the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century
has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. It is precisely this international system of
control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization. These connexions—and the broader links between
neoliberal policies and mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism)—have played a more and more salient role in our
analyses as we ourselves have confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders became a major issue in Europe during the
IMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings in Nice. At the FTAA summit in Quebec City last summer, invisible lines that had
previously been treated as if they didn’t exist (at least for white people) were converted overnight into fortifications against the
movement of would-be global citizens, demanding the right to petition their rulers. The three-kilometre ‘wall’ constructed through
the center of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state junketing inside from any contact with the populace, became the perfect
symbol for what neoliberalism actually means in human terms. The spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters and
grappling hooks, joined by everyone from Steelworkers to Mohawk warriors to tear down the wall, became—for that very reason—
one of the most powerful moments in the movement’s history. [3] There is one striking contrast between this and
earlier internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western organizational
models to the rest of the world; in this, the flow has if anything been the other way around.
Many, perhaps most, of the movement’s signature techniques—including mass nonviolent
civil disobedience itself—were first developed in the global South. In the long run,
this may well prove the single most radical thing about it. Billionaires and clowns In the
corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind of mantra—invariably, repeatedly—
whenever a large action takes place: ‘violent protests’, ‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid headquarters
of violent protesters’, even ‘violent riots’ (there are other kinds?). Such expressions are typically invoked when a
simple, plain-English description of what took place (people throwing paint-bombs, breaking windows of empty storefronts, holding
hands as they blockaded intersections, cops beating them with sticks) might give the impression that the only truly violent parties
were the police. The US media is probably the biggest offender here—and this despite the fact that, after two years of increasingly
militant direct action, it is still impossible to produce a single example of anyone to whom a US activist has caused physical injury. I
would say that what really disturbs the powers-that-be is not the ‘violence’ of the movement but its relative lack of it; governments
simply do not know how to deal with an overtly revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into familiar patterns of armed
resistance. The effort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite self-conscious. Where once it
seemed that the only alternatives to marching along with signs were either Gandhian non-
violent civil disobedience or outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action Network,
Reclaim the Streets, Black Blocs or Tute Bianche have all, in their own ways, been trying to
map out a completely new territory in between. They’re attempting to invent what many call a
‘new language’ of civil disobedience, combining elements of street theatre, festival and what can
only be called non-violent warfare—non-violent in the sense adopted by, say, Black Bloc anarchists,
in that it eschews any direct physical harm to human beings . Ya Basta! for example is famous for
its tute bianche or white-overalls tactics: men and women dressed in elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner
tubes to rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles).
As this mock army pushes its way through police barricades, all the while protecting each other
against injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon
characters—misshapen, ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. The effect is only increased when lines of
costumed figures attack police with balloons and water pistols or, like the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and elsewhere,
dress as fairies and tickle them with feather dusters. At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) dressed in
high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to press wads of fake money into the cops’ pockets, thanking them for repressing
the dissent. None were even slightly hurt—perhaps police are given aversion therapy against hitting anyone in a tuxedo. The
Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their high bicycles, rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by attacking
each other (or the billionaires). They had all the best chants: ‘Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!’, ‘The pizza united can never be defeated’, ‘Hey
ho, hey ho—ha ha, hee hee!’, as well as meta-chants like ‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’ and—everyone’s favourite—‘Three Word
Chant! Three Word Chant!’ In Quebec City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines (with help from the left caucus of the Society
for Creative Anachronism) lobbed soft toys at the FTAA. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to adopt for non-violent but
very militant forms of confrontation: there were peltasts and hoplites (the former mainly from the Prince Edwards Islands, the latter
from Montreal) at Quebec City, and research continues into Roman-style shield walls. Blockading has become an art form: if you
make a huge web of strands of yarn across an intersection, it’s actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped like flies.
The Liberation Puppet with its arms fully extended can block a four-lane highway, while snake-dances can be a form of mobile
blockade. Rebels in London last Mayday planned Monopoly Board actions—Building Hotels on Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of the
Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla Gardening—only partly disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even the most
militant of the militant—eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation Front—scrupulously avoid
doing anything that would cause harm to human beings (or animals, for that matter). It’s this
scrambling of conventional categories that so throws the forces of order and makes them
desperate to bring things back to familiar territory (simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa, of
encouraging fascist hooligans to run riot as an excuse to use overwhelming force against everybody else. One could trace these forms
of action back to the stunts and guerrilla theater of the Yippies or Italian ‘metropolitan Indians’ in the sixties, the squatter battles in
Germany or Italy in the seventies and eighties, even the peasant resistance to the expansion of Tokyo airport. But it seems to me that
here, too, the
really crucial origins lie with the Zapatistas, and other movements in the
global South . In many ways, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) represents an
attempt by people who have always been denied the right to non-violent, civil resistance to seize
it; essentially, to call the bluff of neoliberalism and its pretenses to democratization and yielding
power to ‘civil society’. It is, as its commanders say, an army which aspires not to be an army any more (it’s something of an
open secret that, for the last five years at least, they have not even been carrying real guns). As Marcos explains their conversion
We thought the people would either not pay attention to
from standard tactics of guerrilla war:
us, or come together with us to fight . But they did not react in either of these two
ways. It turned out that all these people, who were thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, did not want to rise up with us but . . .
neither did they want us to be annihilated . They wanted us to dialogue . This completely
broke our scheme and ended up defining zapatismo, the neo-zapatismo. [4] Now the EZLN is the sort of army that
organizes ‘invasions’ of Mexican military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely
unarmed to yell at and try to shame the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the
Landless Workers’ Movement gain an enormous moral authority in Brazil by reoccupying
unused lands entirely non-violently. In either case, it’s pretty clear that if the same people had tried
the same thing twenty years ago, they would simply have been shot .
 AT: DETAILS/POLICY KEY
Debates about what the federal government should do to reform immigration
requires interpretive labor that causes violent statist beliefs to gradually infiltrate
our behaviors and worldviews --- elites maintain power through violently inducing
their subordinates to empathize with them --- this bureaucratic sensibility is a
utopian fantasy that stifles creativity, precludes any remotely useful alternative
use of debate, and calcifies structural violence
Graeber 15 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street credited with coining the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and
associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, Reader in Social Anthropology at
Goldsmiths, University of London, activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the
Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City, The
Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Melville House
printing (Brooklyn, NY): February 2015, p. 201-5]
Let me finish with another example from my own political experience.
Over the last thirty or forty years, anti-authoritarians around the world have been working on creating new, and more effective,
modes of direct democracy-ones that might operate without any need for a bureaucracy of violence to enforce them. I've written
about these efforts extensively elsewhere.
A lot of progress has been made. But those working on such projects often find themselves having to deal with exactly this sort of
horror of "arbitrary" power. Part of the work of developing new forms of consensus process, for
example, is to create institutional forms that encourage, rather than inhibit,
improvisation and creativity. As activists sometimes put it: in most circumstances, if you bring together a crowd of
people, that crowd will, as a group, behave less intelligently, and less creatively, than any single member of the crowd is likely to do if
on their own. Activist
decision-making process is , instead, designed to make that crowd
smarter and more imaginative than any individual participant .
It is indeed possible to do this, but it takes a -lot of work. And the larger the group, the more formal mechanisms have to be put in
place. The single most important essay in this whole activist tradition is called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness;'110 written in the
1970s by Jo Freeman, about organizational crises that occurred in early feminist consciousness-raising circles when those groups
began to attain a certain size. Freeman observed that such groups always started out with a kind of rough-and-ready anarchism, an
assumption that there was no need for any formal, parliamentary rules-of-order type mechanisms at all. People would just sit down
in a sisterly manner and work things out. And this was, indeed, what happened at first. However, as soon as the groups
grew to over, say, twenty people, informal cliques invariably began to emerge, and small groups
of friends or allies began controlling information, setting agendas, and wielding power in all
sorts of subtle ways. Freeman proposed a number of different formal mechanisms that might be employed to counteract this
effect, but for present purposes, the specifics don't really matter. Suffice it to say that what is now referred to as "formal consensus
process" largely emerges from the crisis Freeman described, and the debate her intervention set off.
What I do want to bring attention to is that almost everyone who is not emerging from an explicitly anti-authoritarian position-and
no insignificant number even of those who are-completely misread Freeman's essay, and interpret it not as a plea for formal
mechanisms to ensure equality, but as a plea for more transparent hierarchy. Leninists are notorious for this sort of thing, but
Liberals are just as bad. I can't tell you how many arguments I've had about this. They always go exactly the same way. First,
Freeman's argument about the formation of cliques and invisible power structures is taken as an argument that any group of over
twenty people will always have to have cliques, power structures, and people in authority. The next step is to insist that if you want to
minimize the power of such cliques, or any deleterious effects those power structures might have, the only way to do so is to
institutionalize them: to take the de facto cabal and turn them into a central committee (or, since that term now has a bad history,
usually they say a coordinating committee, or a steering committee, or something of that sort.) One needs to get power out of the
shadows-to formalize the process, make up rules, hold elections, specify exactly what the cabal is allowed to do and what it's not. In
this way, at least, word again. It comes from accountancy procedures.) It won't in any sense be arbitrary.
From a practical, activist perspective, this prescription is obviously ridiculous. It is far easier to
limit the degree to which informal cliques can wield effective power by granting them no formal
status at all, and therefore no legitimacy ; whatever "formal accountability structures" it is imagined will contain
the cliques-now-turned-committees can only be far less effective in this regard, not least because they end up legitimating and hence
massively increasing the differential access to information which allows some in otherwise egalitarian groups to have greater power
to begin with. As I pointed out in the first essay, structures of transparency inevitably, as I've described, begin to
become structures of stupidity as soon as that takes place.
So say one argues this point, and the critic concedes it (which usually they have to because it's pretty much common sense). If so, the
next line of defense is generally aesthetic: the critic will insist it's simply distasteful to have structures of
real power that are not recognized and that can, even if they entirely lack any degree of violent
enforcement, be considered arbitrary. Usually, one's interlocutor won't go so far as actually admitting their objections
are aesthetic. Usually they will frame their arguments in moral terms. But occasionally, you will find some
honest enough to admit that's what's going on. I well remember having an Occupy Wall Street-sponsored debate in Central Park (I'm
sure it's recorded somewhere) with Norman Finkelstein-a brilliant and altogether admirable activist, who had come of age with the
Civil Rights Movement and still saw groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as his inspiration. At this debate,
Finkelstein stated the matter outright. Maybe it's true, he admitted, that the best way to keep such cliques from attaining too much
power is to maintain a principle that they should not exist. But as long as such cliques are allowed to exist without being formally
acknowledged and regulated, you're maintaining a system that says it's okay to be governed, even a tiny bit, from the shadows. It
might not be that much of a practical problem. You might well be right that formally recognizing their existence might actually end
up creating less overall freedom than leaving well enough alone. But in the final analysis, I just find the idea of being governed from
the shadows, in any sense, distasteful.
In such arguments, we are witnessing a direct clash between two different forms of
materialized utopianism : on the one hand, an anti-authoritarianism that, in its emphasis
on creative synthesis and improvisation, sees freedom basically in terms of play , and on
the other, a tacit republicanism that sees freedom ultimately as the ability to reduce
all forms of power to a set of clear and transparent rules.
For the last two hundred years, in Europe and North America- and increasingly, elsewhere- that latter,
bureaucratized notion of freedom has tended to hold sway . New institutional
arrangements that operate by rules so strict and predictable they essentially disappear, so that
one doesn't even know what they are (such as the physical or electronic post offices with which I began) tend to be
put forward as platforms for human freedom that emerge from the very technical contingencies
of running efficient structures of power. These arrangements seem to preserve the positive
elements of play while somehow circumventing its more disturbing potentials.
But time and again, we have seen the same results. Whether motivated by a faith in "rationality" or a fear of
arbitrary power, the end result of this bureaucratized notion of freedom is to move toward
the dream of a world where play has been limited entirely-or, at best, boxed away in some
remote location far from any serious, consequential human endeavor-while every
aspect of life is reduced to some kind of elaborate, rulebound game. It's not that such
a vision lacks appeal. Who hasn't dreamed of a world where everyone knows the rules, everyone
plays by the rules, and-even more-where people who play by the rules can actually still win? The
problem is that this is just as much a utopian fantasy as a world of absolute free play would
be. It will always remain a glimmering illusion that dissolves away as soon as we
touch it .
Such illusions are not always bad things. One could make a case that most of the greatest human accomplishments
were the result of such quixotic pursuits. But in this particular case, and in this larger political-
economic context , where bureaucracy has been the primary means by which a tiny
percentage of the population extracts wealth from the rest of us , they have created a
situation where the pursuit of freedom from arbitrary power simply ends up producing more
arbitrary power, and as a result, regulations choke existence , armed guards and surveillance
cameras appear everywhere, science and creativity are smothered, and all of us end up
finding increasing percentages of our day taken up in the filling out of forms .
 AT: MOVEMENTS FAIL
Global social movements to oppose environmental injustice and inequitable
distributional effects of free markets are coalescing and effective. Scholarly
production of epistemological challenges is a necessary contribution to these
movements.
Martinez-Alier et al 16—Joan Martinez-Alier, Leah Temper, Daniela Del Bene & Arnim
Scheidel (“Is there a global environmental justice movement?” The Journal of Peasant Studies,
Vol. 43, No. 3, pages 731-755)
Ecological distribution conflicts are largely related to growth and changes in the social
metabolism , which is concomitant with economic growth, while other more proximate causes may further
be related, for example, to population density, or land and water scarcity, or to institutional
dimensions such as the particular behavior of different corporations, the property regimes, the
financial speculation in raw materials, the degree of democracy in the country in question, or the
presence of indigenous populations. Further expansion of the EJatlas will allow such causal links to be explored for a
large number of cases.
We claim that there is a global movement for environmental justice , although almost all conflicts in
the EJatlas are local and they target specific local grievances. The
movement is global because such local events
belong to classes of conflicts that appear regularly elsewhere in the world (e.g. on open-cast
copper mining, on oil palm plantations), or because they raise the conflict issue to a global level
through movements’ connections and networks and, by doing so, they actually create and
operate at a global scale (Sikor and Newell 2014 Sikor, T., and P. Newell. 2014. Globalizing environmental justice?
Geoforum 54: 151–7. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.04.009[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). The actors in the
conflicts are similar to some extent (the companies are sometimes the same; also the forms of mobilization are often the same), and
national and international EJOs or networks (such as OCMAL, Oilwatch, WRM, GRAIN) were born from such conflicts. We claim
that there is a global environmental justice movement that shares some common goals, frames
and forms of mobilization , although obviously there is no single united organization in charge, no politbureau or
central committee. This is also the case, for instance, in the global feminist movement.
The gains and losses of the use of the environment are often unjustly distributed not only as
regards other species or future generations of humans, but also among humans living today. There are many local
movements expressing their grievances over such environmental injustices, although environmental injustice does not always lead
to open complaints. Several groups have been producing inventories of ecological distribution
conflicts (by country or by theme), such as OCMAL in Latin America on mining conflicts, or in Brazil Fiocruz and the EJ
movement (Porto de Souza 2012 Porto de Souza, M.F. 2012. Movements and the network of environmental justice in Brazil.
Environmental Justice 5, no. 2: 100–104. doi: 10.1089/env.2011.0012[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Our own contribution has been
to build up the EJatlas at ICTA-UAB with many outside collaborators. Although its coverage is still geographically and thematically
uneven, on reaching 1600 cases by October 2015 we start to see some first trends and recurring dynamics in such conflicts, which
indigenous populations appear to be involved in
need to be pursued further. For instance,
ecological distribution conflicts much more often than one would expect by their share in the population as a
whole, perhaps because accelerated search for resources is increasingly expanding the ‘commodity
frontiers’ to their territories, or because of increasing organization and recognition of
indigenous territorial rights and correspondingly stronger movements.
Social mobilizations over resource extraction, environmental degradation or waste disposal
are not only about the distribution of environmental benefits and costs (expressed in monetary or non-
monetary valuation languages); they are also about participation in decision-making and
recognition of group identities . All such issues appear very regularly in the cases collected in the EJatlas
(Schlosberg 2007 Schlosberg, D. 2007. Defining environmental justice. Theories, movements and nature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]; Walker 2012 Walker, G. 2012. Environmental justice: Concepts, evidence and politics. London:
Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Sikor and Newell 2014 Sikor, T., and P. Newell. 2014. Globalizing environmental justice? Geoforum 54:
151–7. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.04.009[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]; Urkidi and Walter 2011 Urkidi, L.,
and M. Walter. 2011. Dimensions of environmental justice in anti-gold mining movements in Latin America. Geoforum 42, no. 6:
683–695. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.06.003[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). EJ research encompasses issues of
exclusion (Agarwal 2001 Agarwal, B. 2001. Participatory exclusions, community forests and gender: An analysis for South Asia and a
conceptual framework. World Development 29, no. 10: 1623–48. doi: 10.1016/S0305-750X(01)00066-3[Crossref], [Web of Science
®], [Google Scholar]) but also of the potential new leadership of environmental movements by different social actors; for example,
in the environmentalism of the poor as in EJ movements in general, it is crucial to recognize the contribution women make in poor
communities both rural and urban (Agarwal 1992 Agarwal, B. 1992. The gender and environment debate: Lessons from India.
Feminist Studies 18, no. 1: 119–158. doi: 10.2307/3178217[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Since the 1980s, EJOs and their networks
have provided definitions and analyses of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities, and explored the
connections between them. Thus, demands for ‘food sovereignty’ from La Via Campesina fit in with complaints against biopiracy,
land grabbing and tree plantations, and also with climate change issues, as in the slogan ‘traditional peasant agriculture cools down
the Earth’ (Martinez-Alier 2011 Martinez-Alier, J. 2011. The EROI of agriculture and its use by the Via Campesina. Journal of
Peasant Studies 38, 1: 145–160. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2010.538582[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google
Scholar]). The protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and at the World
Social Forums of the 2000s certainly pushed forward the globalization of EJ (for instance, the
ecological debt was featured in the successful alternative meetings to the World Bank (WB) and
International Monetary Fund (IMF) assembly in Prague in 2000). There were earlier underpinnings in the alternative ‘treaties’
signed at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in the 1991 People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit. EJ spread through
organizations like FoE, which, while born in California as a ‘white’ conservationist movement, brought in EJOs which had existed
since the 1980s like Asociación Centro Nacional Salud, Ambiente y Trabajo (CENSAT) in Colombia and Wahana Lingkungan Hidup
Indonesia (WAHLI) in Indonesia. Many other important environmental organizations such as the CSE in Delhi and Acción
Ecológica in Ecuador linked the idea of environmentalism of the poor with wider notions of EJ and climate justice (FOEI 2005 FOEI
(Friends of the Earth International). 2005. Climate debt. Making historical responsibility part of the solution.
http://www.foei.org/en/resources/publications/climate-justiceand-energy/2000-2007/climatedebt.pdf/at_download/file. [Google
Scholar]).
With these activist and social movement roots, the concepts of EJ were then taken up in academic research in political ecology
studying Southern countries. Going beyond case studies, researchers now generate statistics on ecological distribution conflicts
(Özkaynak et al. 2012 Özkaynak, B., Rodriguez-Labajos, B., et al. 2012. Mining conflicts around the world: Common grounds from
an environmental justice perspective. EJOLT Report n. 7. [Google Scholar], 2015b Özkaynak, B., C.I. Aydιn, P. Ertör-Akyazι, and I.
Ertör. 2015a. The Gezi Park resistance from an environmental justice and social metabolism perspective. Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 26, no. 1: 99–114. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2014.999102[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]; Latorre, Farrell, and
Martinez-Alier 2015 Latorre, S., Farrell, K., Martinez-Alier, J. 2015. The commodification of nature and socio-environmental
resistance in Ecuador: An inventory of accumulation by dispossession cases, 1980–2013. Ecological Economics 116: 58–69. doi:
10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.04.016[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) made possible by the EJatlas. The social
sustainability sciences (human ecology, ecological economics, political ecology, environmental law, environmental
sociology, ecological anthropology, environmental history, environmental politics, urban ecology, agroecology, industrial ecology)
have an academic origin , with international societies, academic journals and handbooks, and professorships that go
under such names. Manyconcepts and theories have been produced by these booming fields of
science in the last 30 years. There are also grassroots concepts for sustainability introduced
by EJOs which have been discussed here and which are also objects of academic research. Such
concepts support the global EJ movement ; at the same time they also support local rural
and urban movements protecting territory and defending place-based interests and values
(Escobar 2008 Escobar, A. 2008. Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes. Durham: Duke UP.[Crossref], [Google
Scholar]; Anguelovski and Martinez-Alier 2014 Anguelovski, I., and J. Martinez-Alier. 2014. The ‘environmentalism of the poor’
revisited: Territory and place in disconnected global struggles. Ecological Economics 102: 167–76. doi:
10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.04.005[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]).

Movements against neoliberal international control have manifested in a litany of

local examples that resonate and reverberate globally
Graeber 2 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street who coined the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and associate
professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, teaches anthropology at the London School
of Economics, activist whose direct action campaigns before OWS includes protests against the
3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in
New York City, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13, January-February 2002,
https://newleftreview.org/II/13/david-graeber-the-new-anarchists]

A globalization movement? The phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US media and activists have never felt
comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a movement against anything, it’s against neoliberalism, which can be defined as a kind of
market fundamentalism—or, better, market Stalinism—that holds there is only one possible direction for human historical
development. The map is held by an elite of economists and corporate flacks, to whom must be ceded all power once held by
institutions with any shred of democratic accountability; from now on it will be wielded largely through unelected treaty
organizations like the IMF, WTO or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be possible to say this straight out: ‘We
are a movement against neoliberalism’. But in the US, language is always a problem. The corporate media here is probably the most
politically monolithic on the planet: neoliberalism is all there is to see—the background reality; as a result, the word itself cannot be
used. The issues involved can only be addressed using propaganda terms like ‘free trade’ or ‘the free market’. So American activists
find themselves in a quandary: if one suggests putting ‘the N word’ (as it’s often called) in a pamphlet or press release, alarm bells
immediately go off: one is being exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. There have been all sorts of attempts to frame
alternative expressions—we’re a ‘global justice movement’, we’re a movement ‘against corporate globalization’. None are especially
elegant or quite satisfying and, as a result, it is common in meetings to hear the speakers using ‘globalization movement’ and ‘anti-
globalization movement’ pretty much interchangeably. The phrase ‘globalization movement’, though, is really quite apropos. If one
takes globalization to mean the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it’s pretty clear
that not only is the movement itself a product of globalization, but the majority of groups involved in it—the most radical ones in
particular—are far more supportive of globalization in general than are the IMF or WTO. It was an international network called
People’s Global Action, for example, that put out the first summons for planet-wide days of action such as J18 and N30—the latter
the original call for protest against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its origins to the famous International
Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of rainy-season Chiapas, in
August 1996; and was itself initiated, as Subcomandante Marcos put it, ‘by all the rebels around the world’. People from over 50
countries came streaming into the Zapatista-held village of La Realidad. The vision for an ‘intercontinental network of resistance’
was laid out in the Second Declaration of La Realidad: ‘ We declare that we will make a collective
network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an intercontinental
network of resistance against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of
resistance for humanity’ : Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power wages on
them. A network of voices that not only speak, but also struggle and resist for humanity and against neoliberalism. A network that
covers the five continents and helps to resist the death that Power promises us. [2] This, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an
organizing structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of
us who resist.’ The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya Basta! groups organized a second encuentro in Spain,
where the idea of the network process was taken forward: PGA was born at a meeting in Geneva in February 1998. From the start, it
included not only anarchist groups and radical trade unions in Spain, Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist farmers’ league
in India (the KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan fisherfolk, the Argentinian teachers’ union, indigenous groups such
as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement, a network made up of communities
founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America—and any number of others. For a long time, North America was scarcely
represented, save for the Canadian Postal Workers’ Union—which acted as PGA’s main communications hub, until it was largely
If the movement’s origins are
replaced by the internet—and a Montreal-based anarchist group called CLAC.
internationalist, so are its demands . The three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance,
calls for a universally guaranteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement
of people across borders, and free access to new technology—which in practice would mean
extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism). The noborder network—their slogan:
‘No One is Illegal’—has organized week-long campsites, laboratories for creative resistance, on the Polish–German and Ukrainian
borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activists have dressed up as border guards, built boat-bridges across the River Oder and
blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to protest against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of
suffocation on Lufthansa and KLM flights). This summer’s camp is planned for Strasbourg, home of the Schengen Information
System, a search-and-control database with tens of thousands of terminals across Europe, targeting the movements of migrants,
activists, anyone they like. More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the neoliberal vision
of ‘globalization’ is pretty much limited to the movement of capital and commodities, and
actually increases barriers against the free flow of people, information and ideas—the size of the
US border guard has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA . Hardly surprising: if it were
not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves,
there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given
a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse . This is
another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the
contemporary world: the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the
establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. It is precisely
this international system of control that we are fighting against, in the name of
genuine globalization . These connexions—and the broader links between neoliberal policies and
mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism)—have played a more and more salient role in
our analyses as we ourselves have confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders
became a major issue in Europe during the IMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings in Nice. At the FTAA summit in
Quebec City last summer, invisible lines that had previously been treated as if they didn’t exist (at least for
white people) were converted overnight into fortifications against the movement of would-be global
citizens, demanding the right to petition their rulers. The three-kilometre ‘wall’ constructed through the center
of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state junketing inside from any contact with the populace, became the perfect symbol for what
neoliberalism actually means in human terms. The spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters and grappling hooks, joined
by everyone from Steelworkers to Mohawk warriors to tear down the wall, became—for that very reason—one of the most powerful
moments in the movement’s history. [3] There is one striking contrast between this and earlier
internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western organizational models
to the rest of the world; in this, the flow has if anything been the other way around. Many,
perhaps most, of the movement’s signature techniques—including mass nonviolent civil
disobedience itself—were first developed in the global South. In the long run, this may well
prove the single most radical thing about it. Billionaires and clowns In the corporate media, the
word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind of mantra—invariably, repeatedly—whenever a large action
takes place: ‘violent protests’, ‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid headquarters of violent protesters’,
even ‘violent riots’ (there are other kinds?). Such expressions are typically invoked when a simple, plain-English description
of what took place (people throwing paint-bombs, breaking windows of empty storefronts, holding hands as they blockaded
intersections, cops beating them with sticks) might give the impression that the only truly violent parties were the police. The US
media is probably the biggest offender here—and this despite the fact that, after two years of increasingly militant direct action, it is
still impossible to produce a single example of anyone to whom a US activist has caused physical injury. I would say that what really
disturbs the powers-that-be is not the ‘violence’ of the movement but its relative lack of it; governments simply do not know how to
deal with an overtly revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into familiar patterns of armed resistance. The effort to
destroy existing paradigms is usually quite self-conscious. Where once it seemed that the only
alternatives to marching along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience
or outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action Network, Reclaim the Streets,
Black Blocs or Tute Bianche have all, in their own ways, been trying to map out a completely new
territory in between. They’re attempting to invent what many call a ‘new language’ of civil
disobedience, combining elements of street theatre, festival and what can only be called non-
violent warfare—non-violent in the sense adopted by, say, Black Bloc anarchists, in that it eschews
any direct physical harm to human beings . Ya Basta! for example is famous for its tute bianche or white-
overalls tactics: men and women dressed in elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner tubes to rubber-ducky
flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles). As this mock
army pushes its way through police barricades, all the while protecting each other against injury
or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon characters—misshapen,
ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. The effect is only increased when lines of costumed figures attack
police with balloons and water pistols or, like the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and elsewhere, dress as fairies and tickle them
with feather dusters. At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) dressed in high-camp tuxedos and evening
gowns and tried to press wads of fake money into the cops’ pockets, thanking them for repressing the dissent. None were even
slightly hurt—perhaps police are given aversion therapy against hitting anyone in a tuxedo. The Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc,
with their high bicycles, rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by attacking each other (or the billionaires). They had
all the best chants: ‘Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!’, ‘The pizza united can never be defeated’, ‘Hey ho, hey ho—ha ha, hee hee!’, as well as
meta-chants like ‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’ and—everyone’s favourite—‘Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant!’ In Quebec
City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines (with help from the left caucus of the Society for Creative Anachronism) lobbed soft
toys at the FTAA. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to adopt for non-violent but very militant forms of confrontation:
there were peltasts and hoplites (the former mainly from the Prince Edwards Islands, the latter from Montreal) at Quebec City, and
research continues into Roman-style shield walls. Blockading has become an art form: if you make a huge web of strands of yarn
across an intersection, it’s actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped like flies. The Liberation Puppet with its arms
fully extended can block a four-lane highway, while snake-dances can be a form of mobile blockade. Rebels in London last Mayday
planned Monopoly Board actions—Building Hotels on Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of the Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla
Gardening—only partly disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even the most militant of the militant—
eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation Front—scrupulously avoid doing anything that would
cause harm to human beings (or animals, for that matter). It’s this scrambling of conventional categories
that so throws the forces of order and makes them desperate to bring things back to familiar
territory (simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa, of encouraging fascist hooligans to run riot as an excuse to use
overwhelming force against everybody else. One could trace these forms of action back to the stunts and guerrilla theater of the
Yippies or Italian ‘metropolitan Indians’ in the sixties, the squatter battles in Germany or Italy in the seventies and eighties, even the
peasant resistance to the expansion of Tokyo airport. But it seems to me that here, too, the
really crucial origins lie
with the Zapatistas, and other movements in the global South . In many ways, the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN) represents an attempt by people who have always been
denied the right to non-violent, civil resistance to seize it; essentially, to call the bluff of
neoliberalism and its pretenses to democratization and yielding power to ‘civil society’. It is, as its
commanders say, an army which aspires not to be an army any more (it’s something of an open secret that, for the last five years at
least, they have not even been carrying real guns). As Marcos explains their conversion from standard tactics of guerrilla war: We
thought the people would either not pay attention to us, or come together with us
to fight . But they did not react in either of these two ways. It turned out that all
these people, who were thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions, did not want to rise up with us but . . . neither did they want us
to be annihilated . They wanted us to dialogue . This completely broke our scheme and ended up defining
zapatismo, the neo-zapatismo. [4] Now the EZLN is the sort of army that organizes ‘invasions’ of Mexican
military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely unarmed to yell at and try to shame
the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the Landless Workers’ Movement gain an
enormous moral authority in Brazil by reoccupying unused lands entirely non-violently. In either
case, it’s pretty clear that if the same people had tried the same thing twenty years ago, they would simply have been shot.
 AT: HEGEMONIC TRANSITION WARS
Transition is peaceful – the alt creates new communities that are more compatible
and substitute for unipolarity
Gills and Patomäki 17 (Barry K. Gills, Professor of Development Studies and International
Political Economy at the University of Helskinki, Finland, and Newcastle University, and Heikki,
Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland and supervisor of phD
students, “Trumponomics and the ‘post-hegemonic’ world”
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/182413/GILLS_PATOM_KI_Trumponomics
_and_the_post_hegemonic_world_RWER_final_.pdf?sequence=1]// p. 96-98)NFleming
The assumption underlying HST that a single hegemonic leader is necessary for effective
international cooperation (to uphold the existing international institutions of “order” and ensure the stability of the global
capitalist economic system) was questioned by Keohane in his 1984 book After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in
the World Political Economy. In this book, Keohane (2005) argues, “it might be possible, after the decline of
hegemonic regimes, for most symmetrical patterns of cooperation to evolve after a
transitional period of discord”. Keohane uses game theory to show that spontaneous cooperation can
emerge even among egoists and in the absence of common government , but “the extent of
such cooperation will depend on the existence of international institutions, or international regimes, with particular characteristics”
(2005, p. 13). The possibility of effective international cooperation continuing or even blossoming
“after hegemony” is reinforced by the complementary nature of hegemony and international
regimes. These can both make agreements possible, and facilitate continuing compliance with
the rules established in this system of world order. Keohane thus made it clear that in his analysis there is
no need to expect a serious historical decline in international cooperation in the 1980s,
1990s or beyond, even as the dominance of the US within the system undergoes gradual
decline. The ‘system’ itself will not collapse into a state of chaos or disorder . On the
contrary, there is a real prospect that vital post-war international norms, institutions, and
practices will not only continue, but will even be strengthened. This is a condition he refers to as
“non-hegemonic cooperation” (Keohane, 2005, p. 79). Keohane’s optimistic account of the development and maintenance of co-
operation after hegemony rests, however, on a view of states-as-rational-egoists. He concretely considers instances of international
cooperation in fields such as monetary policy and the oil sector, as an iterated prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game (following Axelrod,
1984). He extends his analysis currency. The fixed exchange rate system could break down, leading to instability. Triffin’s idea was to
create new reserve units. These units would not depend on gold or currencies, but would add to the world’s total liquidity. Creating
such a new reserve would allow the United States to reduce its balance of payments deficits, while still allowing for global economic
expansion. real-world economics review, issue no. 79 subscribe for free 97 to cover the impact of ethics, power, and institutions on
international co-operation. According to Keohane, tit-for-tat is the best strategy in an iterated PD-game. However, a large
number of players, asymmetric information, moral hazard and irresponsibility often complicates
the situation. On the other hand, multiple parallel games in many issue areas, the unequal nature of
inter-state relations (in terms of power: only some states really count), and the existence of established
international organizations can alleviate these problems. “Thus intensive interaction among a few
players helps to substitute for, or to supplement, the actions of a hegemon. As a hegemon’s power erodes, a
gradual shift may take place from hegemonic to non-hegemonic cooperation. Increasingly,
incentives to cooperate will depend not only on the hegemon’s responses but also on those of
other sizeable states. Such a transition may be difficult in practice, since expectations may lag behind reality; but
nothing in rational choice analysis renders it impossible ” (Keohane, 2005, p. 79). Keohane has not
been alone in envisaging the possibility of future international cooperation without a single hegemon. For instance Oran Young
(1989; 1991), although he retains the view of states-as-rational-egoists, has considered various forms of initiative and leadership also
in creating new regimes of cooperation, including intellectual leadership. Peter Haas (1989; 1992) goes beyond the state-economism
of Keohane and many others8 and argues that there are transnational communities of experts, who share
epistemic standpoints, and who are able to take part in the process of interest and identity
formation both within states as well as within the regional or global level, often facilitating
cooperation. Moreover, rules and institutional arrangements are important, because they enable and facilitate learning that can,
and often does, lead to the convergence of the policies of states. For instance, along the lines of this perspective, John Ikenberry
suggests that the origin of the Bretton Woods system should not be seen merely in terms of the “structural” power of the US but also
in terms of an epistemic community of British and US economists and policy specialists, which fostered the Anglo-American
agreement (Ikenberry, 1992). The concept of epistemic community is in some ways similar to that of
world order (or “world order model”; see footnote 3), but more limited. For Braithwaite and Drahos (2000), the world is
already “post-hegemonic” in the sense that while it has been frequently the case that if the US and the EU agree on a particular form
of global cooperation and regulatory change, this change gets fostered. However, under certain circumstances the will and initiatives
of many other states and NGOs and key individuals have made a difference; and the role of transnational networks and epistemic
communities is often decisive. Since Braithwaite and Drahos wrote their book, the role of the BRICS countries has grown, as is
evident from the stalemate of the WTO Doha round. The neo-Gramscians have gone further toward developing
a dialectical account of the development of global institutions of cooperation. Robert Cox (1987; 1996),
in particular has emphasised that there are always different kinds of social forces involving
capabilities for 8 Sonja Amadae (2015) traces the causes of the decline of virtues and common good in
the American political system in the rise of rational choice theory and especially game theory as exemplified
by the Prisoner’s Dilemma model. Game theory was used, among other things, for developing nuclear strategies for the US state
during the Cold War. Thus it is best seen as constitutive of some key state practices rather than as an external explanation of them.
real-world economics review, issue no. 79 subscribe for free 98 production or destruction; institutional arrangements; and collective
understandings.9 Once created, institutional arrangements “take on their own life” and can “become a
battleground for opposing tendencies, or rival institutions may reflect different tendencies”.
New forms of social existence can emerge , made possible by (new) forms of production
but also as a response to the consequences of certain modes and relations of production. Novel
forms of social existence necessarily imply new collective understandings and systems of knowledge that are constitutive of their
these emergent new actors, groups
existence and often articulated by “organic intellectuals”. Consequently,
and collectives can then take part in the struggles within and about certain
institutional arrangements, and also within and about those that have to do with
the governance of global political economy . Systems are open, change is ubiquitous and everything is
historical, although there are patterned processes that enable us to anticipate aspects of the
future.10 The “dialectics of world orders” occurs within existing practical and institutional
settings, but they may also contribute to the transformation of these arrangements and settings.
 AT: HUMAN NATURE IS CAPITALIST
Even if they win that humans are vile, shaping institutions around alternatives can
best contain that vileness for the collective good
Eagleton 11 [Terry, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Why
Marx Was Right, 2011, Yale University: New Haven, CT, p. 87-90]

There is good reason to suspect that there can never be any complete reconciliation between individual and society. The
dream
of an organic unity between them is a generoushearted fantasy. There will always be conflicts
between my fulfillment and yours, or between what is required of me as a citizen and what I
badly want to do. Such outright contradictions are the stuff of tragedy, and only the grave, as opposed to Marxism, can put us
beyond that condition. Marx’s claim in the Communist Manifesto about the free self-development of all can never be fully realised.
Like all the finest ideals it is a goal to aim at, not a state to be literally achieved. Ideals are signposts, not tangible
entities. They point us the way to go. Those who scoff at socialist ideals should remember that the free market can
never be perfectly realized either. Yet this does not stop free-marketeers in their tracks. The fact that there is no flawless democracy
does not lead most of us to settle for tyranny instead. We do not relinquish efforts to feed the hungry of the world because we know
some of them will have perished before we can do so. Some of those who claim that socialism is unworkable are
confident that they can eradicate poverty, solve the global warming crisis, spread liberal
democracy to Afghanistan and resolve world conflicts by United Nations resolutions. All these
daunting tasks are comfortably within the range of the possible. It is only socialism which for some
mysterious reason is out of reach. It is easier to attain Marx’s goal, however, if you do not have to rely on everyone
being morally magnificent all the time. Socialism is not a society which requires resplendent virtue of its
citizens. It does not mean that we have to be wrapped around each other all the time in some
great orgy of togetherness. This is because the mechanisms which would allow Marx’s goal to be approached
would actually be built into social institutions . They would not rely in the first place on the
goodwill of the individual . Take, for example, the idea of a self-governing cooperative, which Marx
seems to have regarded as the key productive unit of the socialist future. One person’s contribution to such an outfit
allows for some kind of self-realisation; but it also contributes to the wellbeing of the others, and
this simply by virtue of the way the place is set up. I do not have to have tender thoughts about my fellow workers,
or whip myself into an altruistic frenzy every two hours. My own self-realisation helps to enhance theirs
simply because of the cooperative, profit-sharing, egalitarian, commonly governed nature of the
unit. It is a structural affair, not a question of personal virtue . It does not demand a race of
Cordelias. For some socialist purposes, then , it does not matter if I am the vilest worm in the
West . In a similar way, it does not matter if I regard my work as a biochemist employed by a private
pharmaceutical company as a glorious contribution to the advance of science and the progress of humanity. The fact
remains that the main point of my work is to create profit for a bunch of unscrupulous
sharks who would probably charge their own toddlers ten dollars for an aspirin.
What I feel is neither here nor there. The meaning of my work is determined by the
institution . One would expect any socialist institution to have its fair share of chancers,
toadies, bullies, cheats, loafers, scroungers, freeloaders, free riders and occasional psychopaths.
Nothing in Marx’s writing suggests that this would not be so. Besides, if communism is about everyone
participating as fully as possible in social life, then one would expect there to be more
conflicts rather than fewer, as more individuals get in on the act. Communism would not spell the end of
human strife. Only the literal end of history would do that. Envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and
competition would still exist. It is just that they could not take the forms they assume under
capitalism —not because of some superior human virtue, but because of a change of institutions . These
vices would no longer be bound up with the exploitation of child labour , colonial violence ,
grotesque social inequalities and cutthroat economic competition . Instead, they would have
to assume some other form. Tribal societies have their fair share of violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot
take the form of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such institutions do not exist among the
Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal
pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have
to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position
to do so. This is not because they would be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or
privately owned media. Shakespeare’s villains had to find outlets for their wickedness
other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees . You cannot be a bullying industrial
magnate if there isn’t any industry around. You just have to settle for bullying slaves, courtiers or your Neolithic
workmates instead.
 AT: TRANSITION WARS
We link turn transition wars --- only democratic action soon solves transition wars
and authoritarian take-over
Gleeson 18 (Brendan James, Prof of Urban Policy Studies @ U of Melbourne and
Director of Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, “A Dangerous Transition to
Hope,” in Urban Sustainability Transitions ed. T. Moore et al., p. 35-49)
Spratt reports growing expert and scientific sentiment for a ‘wartime mobilisation’ to realise the radical goal of climate
safety. Brown’s (2009) Plan B 4.0 makes this case with verve. Stretton (2005) has already observed that wartime resource
rationing will be needed to rein in harmful consumption. One of the dark natalities to emerge in this path is that
democracy , greatest of modern political virtues, may be inhibited temporarily to ensure its
survival. The anaemic liberal democracy bequeathed by decades of neoliberalism might be
supplanted by nation states on war footings, joined to common purpose by an emboldened and reauthorised United Nations.
Pusey (2008) sees opportunity here as climate change-induced political change might restore the
legitimacy of state intervention and generate the needed cultural energy for nation-building government. The
dangers, however, are obvious. Waiting in the wings are expert and technocratic
rationalities , including the new urban positivism, which may counsel the extinction not careful
circumscription of democracy . The cause of species authority might be sidelined by eruptions of
authoritarianism. In the latter scenario, the chance to use the transition to forge a new human dispensation
would almost certainly be lost and the worst depredations of lethal modernity revisited upon an already
weakened and dispirited species. Urry (2011) fears that sudden catastrophic events – collapses in
resource stocks (especially oil or water) or climate-related urban disasters – will catalyse
the sudden rise of ‘war regimes’ that dispense altogether with democracy and solidarity in
desperate quest for survival of the fittest and favoured. Resort to dystopian warlordism is surely
plausible if species action is delayed to the point where it is catastrophes not human
will that provoke response. It is urgent that the terms of transitional authority be
defined and instated before raw power is given a chance to determine them. To drift
further into the emergency without beginning a democratic response will be to give
way to the claims of supremacy. This dark possibility encourages the need for new global
governance for human survival to be forged now, not in the teeth of the worst storm furies.
When the storms begin to break from around 2030 , the vulnerable cities and hinterlands of the Global South will house at
least 80% of the world’s urban population: much of their fabric will be woefully unshielded slums. Amin (2013a) is impatient with
academic and activist ‘revisionism’ that finds wondrous adaptive resources within ‘informal’ (i.e. slum) urbanisation. As he points
out, cities contain immanent potential for endurance in the face of external threat, through capacity for social mobilisation and
deployment of ‘machinic infrastructure’. But such possibility has been radically diminished by prolonged neoliberal urbanisation,
especially in the South (Berry 2013). A more fundamental, planned response from reformed global
institutions is needed to repair the defences of developing cities and begin transition to a new model of resilient
urbanisation. This presupposes a massive programme of investment by the Global North in a wholesale strengthening of the world
urban system, beginning with its most susceptible parts. The case for this historic transfer of species wealth has been well essayed
and retailed (e.g. Brown and Eriksen 2011). Indeed the mechanism exists in incipient form. The Climate Adaptation Fund set up
under the Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCCC is a modest and halting start on this work, but proof that the concept could potentially gain
wide human assent. What of governance in an urban age of dangerous transition? All our ingenuity and
resourcefulness must be immediately deployed to the task of fashioning a new urbanism that will, in order of
priority, first, bring us through the tempests of transition and, second, provide the new settlement pattern that
a post-carbon future will necessitate. Presently, and morbidly, much human urban innovation is directed away from this end,
towards the quicksands of the compact city or the absurd or elitist stage sets of corporate ambition. Emblematic of the latter is
Facebook’s new company village, Anton Menlo, which replaces the progressive idealism of the historical model town with the
privilege reserved for the knowledge worker of neoliberalism (Albergotti 2013). As related earlier, a new progressive urban
imaginary is needed, especially directed at defining city life and functioning in a new postcapitalist modernity that commits to safe
co-evolution of humanity and nature. Without diminishing the need for this act of imaginative and material creation, a new model of
transitional urban governance must be agreed and implemented immediately to manage dissolution of the ‘second modernity’, the
unstable risk- borne age that has largely replaced industrialism and which is now itself breaking apart (Beck 2009). Transitional
governance is not only about survival as an end in itself but to begin the identification of values and structures that will, when
conditions allow, eventually create a newly stabilised ‘third modernity’. 3.7 A Guardian State If we accept together with many
others that climate change is unmanageable under capitalism, then it follows that recovery from
climate change and response to it will require an end to modern capitalism, in a
radical and contingent transition. The Guardian State is a postcapitalist response . It is
presented here as a ‘logical’ possibility along with speculative ‘transition’ ideas that might be used
to bring policy/governance levers to bear in a mitigative way. The following sketch intention- ally
leaves aside questions about processes of transition and instead focuses on the central concept of crisis management in the war on
climate change. While it brings obvious dangers, it also presents a possibility through which neoliberal urbanism would be swept
away by a new tide of human assertion. In this prospect, the Predator State (Galbraith 2009) that has protected and
advanced the (il)logic of laissez-faire in the face of contradiction and opposition would give way
to a Guardian State that commits to collective welfare in a time of shared endangerment. The
central argument is that, as Gorz puts it, ‘The exit from capitalism will happen : : : one way or
another, in either a civilized or barbarous fashion’ (2010: 27). Preemptive transition to
a Guardian State is prospected in such a way that avoids the dystopian consequences of waiting
for the inevitable and possibly violent end of neoliberalism and the aforementioned
scourge of dystopian warlordism. This state of progressive transition would guide
humanity through a time when ‘normal’ social and economic systems are suspended, some
perhaps abolished. It would enable humans to arrest the lethal monolith of overproduction and replace it
with social coordination of resource allocation as means both to cope with immediate
crisis and to begin transition to a new political economic order. Central to this break
with neoliberal logic is to dispense with faith in markets , technology and ‘behavioural adjustment’ as
means to reset production and consumption within safe environmen- tal and material limits. Resource usage reduction for
sustainable development sits alongside wholesale decarbonisation to prevent catastrophic climate
change . Gorz states the case for a war footing that enables the necessary rationing: De-growth is::: imperative for our
survival . But it presupposes a different economy, a different lifestyle, a different civilization and different social
relations. In the absence of these, collapse could be avoided only through restrictions, rationing and the
kind of authoritarian resource –allocation typical of a war economy. (2010:27, original emphasis)

Movements spark a turn away from capitalism that causes mass mindset shift
which facilitates peaceful transition
Avelino et. al. 14 (Flor Avelino, assistant professor and senior researcher in the politics of
sustainability transitions and social innovation at the
Dutch Research Institute for Transitions “The Case of the Economic Crisis and the New
Economy” p. 9-11)NFleming
From a socio-cultural perspective, the economic crisis relates to the way in which the dominant economic model has
impacted on senses of identity and feelings of attachment to place and belonging to a collectivity
(Yuval-Davis 2006). Changes in our feelings of belonging have been traced through history:
Industrialisation, migration or urbanization lead to what Marx refers to as ‘alienation’ and are at the
origin of the classic distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Tönnis, 1940). The economic crisis has
contributed to migration of Europe’s Youth and to the search for new life meanings (other than e.g. having a full-time job, a house
may result in the creation of new communities centred around new
and a family), which
ideals and values (e.g. Occupy movement, or sharing platforms such as e.g. blog.peerby.com). Thus, the economic
crisis can be related to a changing and contested understanding of what constitutes a
community or a place of belonging8. Such socio-cultural perspective can also be extended to the perceived ‘loss of the
sacred’, relating to existential needs of human beings “driven not by material need but by an inner compulsion to understand the
world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position toward it” (Weber 1963, 116-117). Following Emile Durkheim, the ‘sacred’
can be understood as that which is set apart from society and transcends the everyday life, and is opposed to the profane (i.e. the
everyday mundane things and activities). These socio-cultural perspectives on the economic crisis point out a feeling of loss, while at
the same time also opening for potentially new ways. This tension can be associated more fundamentally with a materialist
worldview that has characterised modernity (and so-called post-modernity) and that has historically arisen in close association with
the technological and social transformation of the different stages of the industrial revolution. From this perspective, the
economic crisis can be perceived as being related to a deeper systemic crisis in the culture and
worldview of western societies. 4 Narratives on Change – e.g. ‘A New Social Economy’ We use ‘narratives of change’ as an
accessible and short summary of ‘discourses on change and innovation’. A ‘discourse’ can be defined as “a specific ensemble of ideas,
concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which
meaning is given to physical and social realities” (Hajer 1995: 44). Discourses include various ‘metaphors’ and ‘storylines’: “a
generative sort of narrative that allows actors to draw upon various discursive categories to give meaning to specific physical or
social phenomena. The key function of story-lines is that they suggest unity in the bewildering variety of separate discursive
component parts of a problem” (ibid: 56). We use ‘narratives of change’ to refer to any kind of discourses about innovation or
change9. Our concept of ‘narratives of change’ relates to that of ‘generative paradigms’ as applied in the Open Book of Social
Innovations (Murray et al. 2010), in which sets of ideas and goals that drive 8 Communities that are defined through (everyday)
face-to-face contact, are not replaced completely but integrated with ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) constructed by people
who perceive to be part of this community – more interest-based than geographically-based (McMillan and Chavis 1986). 9
Regarding the distinction between ‘discourse and ‘narrative’, Davies (2002) argues that in narratives “past events are selected and
configured into a plot, which portrays them in a meaningful sequence and schematic whole with beginning, middle, and end” (11)
but that “the boundary between narrative and other forms of discourse is simply not sharply marked off” (10/11) 9 and motivate
social innovation are characterised as ‘generative’. Narratives of change can be considered to co-evolve with such new ‘paradigms’ on
e.g. the economy. In our narratives of change concept, we can distinguish between different types of narratives as proposed by Roe
(1994): policy narratives, non-narratives, counter-narratives and meta-narratives. This also relates to the role of ‘social movements’
and ‘counter-movements’ (Polanyi 1944, Worth 2013). A social (counter-) movement, such as the environmental
movement or the anti-globalisation movement, can be experienced as ‘counter-narratives of
change’ that co-evolve with the development of a new paradigm on how society deals with
the environment or how society approaches processes of globalisation. These social movements
“struggle against pre-existing cultural and institutional narratives and the structures of meaning
and power they convey” ( Davies 2002:25), partly through counter-narratives, which “modify existing
beliefs and symbols and their resonance comes from their appeal to values and expectations that
people already hold” (ibid). Important here is to employ these notions about counter-narratives to unpack any given
discourse under empirical study from different perspectives. This challenges us to expand beyond the hegemonic mainstream
narrative on e.g. ‘the economic crisis’, by including a discussion of counter-narratives around the ‘new economy’. The economic
crisis is generally perceived to have profound impacts on society. The resulting ‘austerity’ measures and
governmental budget cuts put pressure on public sector employment, transfer payments and
social welfare systems, contributing to rising un- and under- employment among young and old and lower
disposable incomes for many in society. There is also a growing dissatisfaction with capitalism leading, among
others, to a rise of responsibility pressures on companies, a lack of trust in financial institutions, and a growing
pressure on democratic political institutions (Castells 2010; Murphy 2011; Hudson 2014; Rifkin 2014; Weaver
2014). These in turn focus attention on the meaning and quality of life which can intensify individuals’ desires to
live in a more responsible and meaningful way as citizens, workers and consumers, which again
are accompanied by an increasing attention to social value creation (based on the attention to these issues
in magazines and business literature). Intertwined with these developments are counter-narratives and movements that propose
alternative visions. From anti-globalisation or occupy movements, we can discern a loss of trust in the dominant
economic model of the growth society and its associated livelihood model where most material
needs are satisfied through impersonal market exchange. This formalised and impersonal market exchange is
questioned, resulting in concepts such as sharing, reciprocity, generalized exchange, or restricted exchange (see Befu 1977, Peebles
2010 for an overview). These are reflected in calls for a more localized or sharing economy, which are now heard increasingly in
many Western countries. While the mainstream discourse is still about how to regain adequate rates of economic growth, and
underlying longer-sighted discourse (i.e. counternarrative) is emerging about what might replace the growth-society model. This
includes (longstanding and more recent) ideas on de-growth (Schumacher 1973, Fournier 2008), green growth (OECD 2013), or
post growth (Jackson 2009). These
(counter-)narratives also question the market logic that
constructs human beings as well as nature as resources and commodities in the
production of goods (Freudenburg et al. 1995). Contemporary discourses on a ‘new economy’ include calls to replace,
complement, or transform the mainstream economic system with alternative paradigms. These include a wide variety of notions, e.g.
‘social economy’, ‘informal economy’, ‘solidary economy’, ‘sharing economy’, the 10 ‘cooperative movement’, ‘the commons’, ‘green
economy’, ‘blue economy’, ‘circular economy’, and so on (e.g. Rifkin, 2014). Many of these narratives and associated ideas are not
necessarily ‘new’ as such. Indeed many have existed for decades (or even centuries), but the ‘game-changing’ economic crisis has
triggered new and revitalised interest in these narratives, thereby translating relatively ‘old’ narratives into a modern narrative on
‘the new, social economy’ as a forwardlooking response to contemporary challenges (ibid). Exactly 70 years ago, Polanyi published
his influential book The Great Transformation, in which he described ‘counter-movements’ as critical responses to the rise of liberal
market economies in the interwar period (1944). Polanyi argued that counter-movements tend to include both
‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ forces, and he related the rise of fascism as part of a ‘double
countermovement’ in reaction to the rise of liberal market economy (Worth 2013). Similarly, contemporary
counter-narratives do not only include ‘progressive’ sustainability-oriented ideas, but also more ‘regressive’ ideas as e.g.
manifested in populist and/or extremist political parties. Moreover, ‘counter-narratives’ and ‘grassroots
movements’ are also not always easily discernable from mainstream discourses. While discourses on e.g. ‘solidarity economy’ can be
constructed as ‘counter-narratives’, they have considerable overlaps with mainstream policy discourses on the ‘Big Society’ (UK) and
‘the participation society’ (The Netherlands). When comparing discourses on the ‘circular economy’ and the ‘sharing economy’, one
can find differences in the former being partly associated with a corporate movement (see e.g. McKinsey and the Ellen McArthur
Foundation) and the latter being more associated with a grassroots social movement (e.g. Peerby), but the narratives involved show
considerable overlaps (e.g. reducing private property and approaching waste as a resource). Different discourses are
intermingled, changing over time, forming ‘double movements’ (Polanyi 1944), or rather multi-
layered narratives of change.
 AT: VAGUE ALTS / MULTI-ACTOR FIAT / ETC
Their theory args perniciously reinforce ideologies that indoctrinate us into
adapting elitist and nationalist values. Given that academic policy suggestions are
woefully incapable of addressing policy, prioritize solvency arguments that
endorse building and reinforcing actually-existing social movements
Graeber 18 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street who coined the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and associate
professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, teaches anthropology at the London School
of Economics, activist whose direct action campaigns before OWS includes protests against the
3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in
New York City, Bullshit Jobs, Simon & Schuster: London, New York (2018), p. 270-1]

Another reason I hesitate to make policy suggestions is that I am suspicious of the very idea of policy .
Policy implies the existence of an elite group—government officials, typically —that
gets to decide on something (“a policy”) that they then arrange to be imposed on
everybody else. There’s a little mental trick we often play on ourselves when
discussing such matters . We say , for instance, “ What are we going to do about the
problem of X ?” as if “we” were society as a whole, somehow acting on ourselves, but, in
fact, unless we happen to be part of that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of the
population whose views actually do affect policy makers, this is all a game of
make-believe; we are identifying with our rulers when, in fact, we’re the ones
being ruled . This is what happens when we watch a politician on television say “What shall we do about the less fortunate?”
even though at least half of us would almost certainly fit that category ourselves. Myself, I find such games
particularly pernicious because I’d prefer not to have policy elites around at all . I’m
personally an anarchist, which means that, not only do I look forward to a day sometime in the future when
governments, corporations, and the rest will be looked at as historical curiosities in the same
way as we now look at the Spanish Inquisition or nomadic invasions, but I prefer solutions to
immediate problems that do not give more power to governments or corporations,
but rather, give people the means to manage their own affairs . It follows that when faced
with a social problem my impulse is not to imagine myself in charge, and ponder what sort of
solutions I would then impose, but to look for a movement already out there, already
trying to address the problem and create its own solutions. The problem of bullshit jobs, though
presents unusual challenges in this regard. There are no anti–bullshit job movements. This is partly because most people don’t
acknowledge the proliferation of bullshit jobs to be a problem, but also because even if they did, it would be difficult to organize a
movement around such a problem. What local initiatives might such a movement propose ? One
could imagine unions or other worker organizations launching anti-bullshit initiatives in their own workplaces, or even across
specific industries—but they would presumably call for the de-bullshitization of real work rather than firing people in unnecessary
positions. It’s notatall clear whata broader campaign against bullshit jobs would even look like. One might try to shorten the working
week and hope things would sort themselves out in response. But it seems unlikely that they would. Even a successful campaign for a
fifteen-hour week would be unlikely to cause the unnecessary jobs and industries to be spontaneously abandoned; at the same time,
calling for a new government bureaucracy to assess the usefulness of jobs would inevitably itself turn into a vast generator of
bullshit.

That elite ideological indoctrination precludes the creative solution-building

necessary to concoct alternative arrangements of global political economy
Graeber 4 [David Graeber, arguably the most important anthropologist of the 21st century,
American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, leading figure in Occupy
Wall Street who coined the phrase “We are the 99 Percent,” assistant professor and associate
professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, teaches anthropology at the London School
of Economics, activist whose direct action campaigns before OWS includes protests against the
3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in
New York City, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press: Chicago, IL
(2004), p. 9-10]

against policy (a tiny manifesto): The notion of “ policy ” presumes a state or governing apparatus which
imposes its will on others. “ Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition
something concocted by some form of elite , which presumes it knows better than
others how their affairs are to be conducted . By participating in policy debates the
very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical
to the idea of people managing their own affairs. So in this case, the question becomes: What sort
of social theory would actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world
in which people are free to govern their own affairs? This is what this pamphlet is mainly about. For starters, I
would say any such theory would have to begin with some initial assumptions. Not many. Probably just two. First, it would
have to proceed from the assumption that , as the Brazilian folk song puts it, “ another world is
possible .” That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are
not inevitable ; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things
would not exist, and that we’d all be better off as a result . To commit oneself to such a principle is
almost an act of faith, since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that
such a world is not possible. But one could also make the argument that it’s this very unavailability of absolute
knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative: Since one cannot know
a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing
to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wrong, we might
well get a lot closer .
ANTIBASING ALT
 1NC ANTIBASE MOVEMENTS ALT
Antibase movements solve
Vine 19 (David Vine, Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington D.C. ,
“No Bases? Assessing the Impact of Social Movements Challenging US Foreign Military Bases”,
Current Anthropology, volume 60, supplement 19,
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/701042)//vl

Examining the history of antibase movements below, I conclude that such movements have had
significant political- economic, military, and sociocultural impact at different scales ranging
from the individual to the global. While different anti- base movements have had different kinds
of effects, with dif- fering degrees of depth and breadth, movements have impacted: (1) people
living in communities affected by foreign bases, in- cluding movement members; (2) other
antibase movements internationally; (3) local, national, and international political- economic
relations; and (4) US basing strategy and military operations. Because military bases are a
powerful material and sym- bolic manifestation of militarization,3 antibase movements are a
useful example of an antimilitarization movement—a social movement that in some way
challenges everyday military oper- ations, the political-economic and sociocultural process of
militarization, and/or ideologies of militarism.4 As the history below will show, antibase
movements have, at times, slowed, checked, and in some cases rolled back militarization at na-
tional, regional, and global levels. While military and civilian leaders have found ways to
circumvent antibase movements, these movements, like other antimilitarization movements,
have challenged militarization materially and ideologically. Antibase Movements It is important
to explain what antibase movements are and what they are not: contrary to some popular
portrayals, most movements challenging US bases overseas are not anti- American in the sense
of being opposed to US citizens and all things from the United States. When the iconic phrase
“Yan- kee go home” is used at protests, it almost always refers to US military personnel and not
to all US citizens. In Vicenza, Italy, and elsewhere, for example, protesters often emphasize that
their opposition is not motivated by anti-Americanism (e.g., Benjamin 2007). Generally
speaking, most antibase movements are also not antimilitary in the sense of being opposed to
soldiers, armies, and all things military. While some movements and parts of movements self-
identify as pacifist, nonviolent, or philosoph- ically opposed to militaries, antibase movements
often have a structural critique that views rank-and-file military personnel as victims of the
same system that subjects people living near foreign bases to their negative effects (Davis 2011).
Antibase movements are not synonymous with antiwar movements, although the lines between
the two often “become blurred” (Holmes 2014:26). In some cases, the term “antibase
movement” is something of a misnomer when movements are not opposed to a base’s existence
or calling for its closure. Many are asking for greater environmental protections, the reduction of
aircraft noise, the return of land, or the account- ability for crimes committed by troops. I use
the term “antibase movement” because it is widely used by movement members and scholars
and because such movements, strictly speaking, are “anti-” in the sense that they are opposed to
some aspect of the life of a base or its personnel.5 Most movements have primarily employed
forms of non- violent protest. Some have employed violent tactics or force. These fall along a
spectrum including breaching base fences, tampering with utilities and other base
infrastructure, destruc- tion of military property, rock throwing, pushing and low-level scuffles
with local police, kidnappings, bombings, and other armed attacks. Some explicitly militant
movements, such as al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab, have declared the removal of a foreign military
presence as a primary goal. The presence of US bases in the Muslim holy lands of Saudi Arabia
was a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed moti- vation
for the September 11, 2001, attacks (Glain 2011). In 2003, US forces officially withdrew from
Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks and the prior attacks dating to 1996. In Iraq,
the removal of US and other occupation forces was the primary aim of the Islamic State’s
predecessor organizations, Jama’at al- Tawhid wa’al-Jihad and al-Qaeda in Iraq (Mapping
Militant Organizations 2017). In Somalia, al-Shabaab has grown into a major militant force in
large part because it has organized op- position to Ethiopian, UN, African Union, and other
occupying foreign forces (Mapping Militant Organizations 2016).

Solves- more examples

Vine 19 (David Vine, Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington D.C. ,
“No Bases? Assessing the Impact of Social Movements Challenging US Foreign Military Bases”,
Current Anthropology, volume 60, supplement 19,
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/701042)//vl

Assessing the significance of the global No Bases movement or any individual movement is
difficult. Numerous cases show that foreign bases can become major national political issues
and shape domestic politics, as in the Philippines, Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Ecuador,
Colombia, and Turkey. In some cases, such as in Okinawa (Davis 2011; McCormack and
Norimatsu 2012; Vine 2015:277–297; Yeo 2011) and Vicenza (Lanaro 2010; Vine 2015:255–275;
Yeo 2011), national govern- ments have fallen in no small part because of their stances on basing
issues. Generally, foreign bases only enter into domestic political debate because of social
movement activism. The antibase movement in Sunagawa, Japan, is an example of how a
movement can also have “fantastically wide ripples” of social and ideological impact across
generations (Wright 2017:137). According to Wright, the “Sunagawa Struggle” became “central
to the social history of a nation.” The thinking of lawyers, scholars, activists, and others has been
shaped to this day by the iconic protests and a related lawsuit challenging the legality of hosting
US bases given the Japanese constitution’s commitment to peace and a nonoffensive military
(Wright 2017).16 Movements have also clearly influenced and inspired one another through the
international network and regional and movement-to-movement relationships (e.g., Davis
2017b; Yeo 2009). Visits by members of antibase movements to other anti- base movements, in
particular, have helped disseminate tactics, educate international audiences about local
struggles, and pro- tect local protesters from police (Davis 2017b:166–168; Lanaro 2010; Wright
2017). Visits to other movements, according to activists in South Korea, Okinawa, Puerto Rico,
Hawai’i, and Guam, also led to “personal transformations” based on “lasting bonds of solidarity”
and the development of a new “critical consciousness” involving an ability to “put their own
militarization in context” (Davis 2017b:165–166, 2017a:114–115). As a result of visits, Davis
writes (and as I heard in my research), activists “felt less alone in their struggles and more likely
to take part in bolder protest actions” (Davis 2017a:114). Movements have also shaped activists’
identities, provided an outlet for creativity and self- and group-expression, and improved daily
life (e.g., Davis 2011:223, 2017b:163–164; Yeo 2009:575, 2011:198–199). Antibase movements
are important if for no other reason than that they “give voice to local res- idents who would
otherwise suffer in silence” (Yeo 2011:198– 199). Resistance “makes everyday life more
tolerable,” Davis notes, while also having “repercussions at other scales” (Davis 2011:223).
Impacts on Basing Strategy and Military Operations While the effects of antibase movements on
national, local, and individual scales are important, movements’ ability to achieve their stated
aims—of closing or blocking a base or restricting base operations—is the fundamental question.
Scholars have reached no clear consensus about the relative power of move- ments in basing
debates, although scholars’ findings are not necessarily inconsistent. Cooley (2008) generally
treats movements as marginal players in “base politics.” Instead, Cooley argues, the most
important factors determining whether US bases abroad close or not are the type of regime
controlling a host nation government and shifts from one regime to an- other. Kawato likewise
concludes that movements “have lim- ited influence on policy-makers.” On the other hand,
Kawato acknowledges that protesters must be part of any analysis, given findings that antibase
movements were able to sway pol- icy makers’ basing decisions in five of 12 cases from Okinawa,
the Philippines, and South Korea (2015:6). Like Kawato, others take something of a middle
ground: Calder (2007) argues that antibase protest plays a significant role in basing politics but
that national politics, government regime shifts, and historical, demographic, and geographic
factors are more important in determining outcomes. Yeo (2011, 2017) finds that antibase
movements are but one factor in basing politics, “although, at times, they exert a powerful
impact on base policy decisions” (2011:196). According to Yeo, host nation elites and their
existing security consensus about national security policy are the most important factor
determining the outcome of debates about US bases. On the other hand, when powerful antibase
movements have created national debates over basing policy, “host governments occa- sionally
provided limited concessions in an effort to quell pro- tests.” However, Yeo writes, concessions
tend to be superficial and come most often when there is a weak elite security con- sensus. In
most cases “a dominant elite consensus favoring a U.S. force presence and strong ties to the
United States func- tioned as a powerful ideological barrier against antibase move- ments” (Yeo
2011:179). By contrast, Sebastian Bitar found that movements in Latin America had more power
to influence basing decisions. Since the late 1990s, when increased democratization spread
through the region, “Latin American domestic opposition groups,” as well as the courts and
national constitutions, have become “im- portant mechanisms to block the establishment [and
mainte- nance] of formal US bases” (Bitar 2016:176). Like Bitar, Amy Holmes (2014) found that
antibase move- ments in Turkey and Germany posed a significant challenge to the US military,
increasing civilian oversight and decreasing the military’s autonomy. Challenging Yeo’s
conclusions, Holmes writes that on the one hand, “protest activities were catalysts for changing
the level of elite consensus within the host gov- ernment,” thus influencing basing outcomes. On
the other hand, host nation elites were not always determinant: “certain pro- test activities had a
direct impact on the U.S. military presence, and essentially circumvented host-nation elites. . . .
At times, U.S. military officials were forced to respond to certain types of unrest and accept
restrictions on their ability to operate” (Holmes 2014:14, emphasis in original). Rather than
defining success as whether a base stays or goes, Holmes usefully counters that a base remaining
in place “does not necessarily represent a complete failure” (Holmes 2014:28; see also Yeo
2011:198–199). Holmes identifies at least six other kinds of movement success, defined as the
ability to “limit the autonomy of the military” or otherwise disrupt its regular operations
(Holmes 2014:29, 30). Success includes: (1) “creating access restrictions or temporary access
denials to either territory, airspace, or certain [military] facilities”; (2) “disrupting access to
infrastructure [e.g., utilities]”; (3) “implementing or enforcing environmental standards that
make certain military activities too costly or diffi- cult to conduct, [thus] preventing military
expansion or construction projects”; (4) “shutting down base operations through strikes of ci-
vilian base employees”; (5) “creating shortages by refusing to supply the base with goods and
services”; and (6) “making the U.S. military accountable for its actions” (Holmes 2014:29). Yeo’s
findings echo Holmes’ sixth form of success and identify another: (7) forcing the United States
and a host government “to modify existing base plans” (2011:198–199).
More ev for antibase protests
Lutz 09 (Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown
University, director of the Watson Institute’s Costs of War study, “US Foreign Military Bases-
The Edge and Essence of Empire”)//vl
The bases have an enormous and deleterious local impact, something that has been documented
and protested by an unprecedented recent global networking of diverse social movements. The
movements have made a variety of arguments against the bases, including environmentalist,
nationalist, religious, pacifist (or conscience-based), and anti-imperialist ones. Some of the most
powerful—and mobilizing 􏰀arguments have focused on the high rates of crimes against girls
and women committed by U.S. soldiers. Feminist antibase activists make the point that these
acts represent war crimes based in patriarchy and/or militarism, whereas other more nationalist
activists tend to interpret this type of violence against women as crimes against national honor
and sovereignty understood as masculine. Antibase protest was muted in the pre-1991 period by
the cultural and political climate of the Cold War’s anticommunism, and by the authori-
tarianism of many of the allied regimes hosting U.S. bases, as in South Korea and the
Philippines. These factors not only violently repressed the development of the movements but
also shaped their focus on what was seen as the prior but interconnected problems of
democratization in South Korea and the Philippines, and of decolonization in Guam. The three
major concentrations of U.S. forces in the Asia Pacific region are in South Korea, with 77
facilities; Guam, with 21, covering a third of the island’s land area; and Japan, with 52, 75
percent of which are concentrated in the Oki- nawa prefecture. U.S. bases were ejected from the
Philippines, a fourth important site, in 1992, but several thousand U.S. soldiers have been
reintroduced through a controversial 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement that was meant to
reestablish a permanent presence of U.S. soldiers, this time with much wider access to the
country as a whole. After September 11, 2001, the United States reinvigorated its efforts to
regain substantial military access to the Philippines via opening what was called “the second
front in the war on terror” in Mindanao. The Pentagon’s strategic reposturing of its forces since
2003 has been to spead troops out from their Cold War positions. Previously, the focuse was on
Europe, Korea, and Japan but it has now shifted to elsewhere in Asia and Africa, where the
Pentagon is concerned about future threats from terrorists and from an ascendant China. Are
These Bases the Edge or Essence of Empire? It is commonly assumed that overseas U.S. military
forces are the edge of em- pire: they are the armed guard of the advancing civilizing mission,
standing at the current limits of “the free world,” whether in policing, state-defensive, or
expeditionary posture. They have been empire’s edge in the additional sense that they stand at
the fuzzy border of the empire’s legitimacy or its control of shipping lanes and its ability to
influence events. This situation is clearest in the case of newly established bases that bring U.S.
hegemony into new, frontier-like areas. They are in areas that were off limits to the United
States during the Cold War, such as the oil pipeline states bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan
and in areas of Latin America and the Caribbean in which the United States has not had military
forces since World War II. “Edginess” also characterizes the political climate, as the processes of
land taking, labor management, and sexual exploitation are most incendiary at their beginnings.
So, large protests have been organized in South Korea as the United States redeploys its troops
from near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) to expanded bases farther south. As the Korean Defense
Ministry began to evict a group of rice farmers from their land near Camp Humphries outside
Pyongtaek in 2006, students, workers, and other farmers descended on the town in a faceoff
with thousands of riot police and soldiers.
 AT: COALITIONS FAIL
Coalitions k2 solve militarism
Sudbury 04 (Julia Sudbury, Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College in Oakland, CA, “A
World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and Empire”, Social
Justice, Volume 31) //vl
In addition, global capitalism is deeply implicated in U.S. and allied military interventions
worldwide, which frequently target strategic economic interests and natural resources. These
interventions are not limited to wars using U.S. troops. From Israel to Bolivia, U.S. funds are
used to pay for military equipment, training, and troops. Women are particularly at risk in the
environment of violence and displacement caused when regimes with poor human rights
records deploy armed forces against civilian or insurgent populations. One outcome of this
vulnerability is the displacement of poor women from traditional forms of survival and their
subsequent engagement in the illicit economies of sex work or the drug trade. Women in
militarized situations are also at risk of criminalization and incarceration when they take up
insurgent positions against repressive regimes. Militarism and globalization thus generate a web
of criminalization that in turn fuels the prison- building boom and generates profits for the
economic interests served by the transnational prison-industrial complex. Penal warehouses for
people of African descent, immigrants, indigenous people, and the global poor, as I have
outlined, A World Without Prisons 27 are central to the new world order. For that reason, even
as “small government” is promoted as a prerequisite for competitiveness in the global market,
“correc- tions” budgets continue to skyrocket. That is also why prison abolition remains of vital
importance in this time of endless war. What does this mean for our research and praxis as
scholars and activists? First, much more work needs to be done to unravel the complex
interconnections between mass incarceration, militarism, and the global economy. As activists
in the heart of empire, our priority should be to make connections between radical social
movements. Bridge-building between the anti-globalization, antiwar, and prison abolitionist
movements provides critical opportunities for sharing strategies. For example, global anti-
sweatshop activism against Wal-Mart and Nike can serve as a model of cross-border activism
that could be deployed to challenge private prison corporations such as Wackenhut and
Sodexho. Such transnational activism might successfully prevent the spread of U.S.-style private
superjails from South Africa through the rest of the continent and from Mexico and Chile
throughout the rest of Latin America. In addition, cross-fertilization between movements will
encourage activists to address wider issues that are not always made visible in issue-based
campaigns. For example, intensified analysis of globalization might encourage prison
abolitionists to consider the need for anti-capitalist economic models as a prerequisite for a
world without prisons. Similarly, an engagement between antiwar activists and analyses of mass
incarceration would generate a deeper understanding of the need to simultaneously challenge
militarism abroad and racialized surveillance and punishment at home. An effective challenge to
the interlocking systems of militarism, incarceration, and globalization demands the
establishment of broad-based, cross-movement coalitions, in the U.S. and internationally. The
World Social Forum (WSF) is an important venue where critiques of, and alternatives to, free
trade, imperialism, and neoliberalism are developed. Prison abolitionists need to infuse the
politics of the WSF with an analysis of the role of the prison-industrial complex in bol- stering
global capitalism. At the same time, the movement to abolish prisons can learn from the
successes of popular movements in the global South such as the Movimento Sim Terra in Brazil
and the Ruta Pacífica in Colombia. These broad- based movements involve organized labor,
women, the homeless, the unemployed, students, rural campesinos, and indigenous
communities. They have developed a sophisticated intersectional analysis of globalization,
imperialism, and milita- rism, as well as race, gender, class, and nation. Most important, they
have been successful in generating mass mobilizations by developing a viable alternative to the
Washington Consensus model, prioritizing people and the environment over corporations and
profits. These broad-based popular movements pay attention to issues of identity while
maintaining a radical analysis of, and opposition to, global capitalism. Activists in the global
North have the advantage of witness- ing firsthand the emergence of the transnational prison-
industrial complex as an 28 SUDBURY important weapon in the armory of global corporate and
political elites. Radical prison abolitionists, especially grass-roots activists of color, have a great
deal to add to the global movement against imperialism and neoliberal capitalism. Our
combined analyses demonstrate that to build un outro mundo (a different world), we must first
envision a world without prisons.
 AT: MOVEMENTS FAIL
Public movements can change government actions—anti-militarism sentiments
need to be fueled into grassroots political movements to be effective
Porter 11 (Gareth, Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies and policy analyst specializing in U.S.
national security policy, Lobe Log, “From Military-Industrial Complex To Permanent War
State,” published 1/17/11, https://lobelog.com/from-military-industrial-complex-to-permanent-
war-state/, accessed 6/24/19, JME.)
Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 speech on the “military-industrial
complex”, that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower
could have imagined. It has become a “Permanent War State”, with the power to keep the
United States at war continuously for the indefinite future. But despite their seeming
invulnerability, the vested interests behind U.S. militarism have been seriously shaken twice in
the past four decades by some combination of public revulsion against a major war, opposition
to high military spending, serious concern about the budget deficit and a change in perception of
the external threat. Today, the Permanent War State faces the first three of those dangers to its power simultaneously — and
in a larger context of the worst economic crisis since the great depression. When Eisenhower warned in this farewell address of the
“potential” for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power,” he was referring to the danger that militarist interests would gain control
over the country’s national security policy. The only reason it didn’t happen on Ike’s watch is that he stood up to the military and its
allies. The Air Force and the Army were so unhappy with his “New Look” military policy that they each waged political campaigns
against it. The Army demanded that Ike reverse his budget cuts and beef up conventional forces. The Air Force twice fabricated
intelligence to support its claim that the Soviet Union was rapidly overtaking the United States in strategic striking power — first in
bombers, later in ballistic missiles. But Ike defied both services, reducing Army manpower by 44 percent from its 1953 level and
refusing to order a crash program for bombers or for missiles. He also rejected military recommendations for war in Indochina,
bombing attacks on China and an ultimatum to the Soviet Union. After Eisenhower, it became clear that the alliance of militarist
interests included not only the military services and their industrial clients but civilian officials in the Pentagon, the CIA’s
Directorate of Operations, top officials at the State Department and the White House national security adviser. During the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations, that militarist alliance succeeded in pushing the White House into a war in Vietnam, despite the
reluctance of both presidents, as documented in my book Perils of Dominance. But just when the power of the
militarist alliance seemed unstoppable in the late 1960s, the public turned decisively against the
VietnamWar, and a long period of public pressure to reduce military spending began. As a
result, military manpower was reduced to below even the Eisenhower era levels. For more than a
decade the alliance of militarist interests was effectively constrained from advocating a more aggressive military posture. Even
during the Reagan era, after a temporary surge in military spending, popular fear of Soviet
Union melted away in response to the rise of Gorbachev, just as the burgeoning federal budget
deficit was becoming yet another threat to militarist bloc. As it became clear that the Cold War
was drawing to a close, the militarist interests faced the likely loss of much of their power and
resources. But in mid-1990 they got an unexpected break when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. George H. W. Bush – a key
figure in the militarist complex as former CIA Director — seized the opportunity to launch a war that would end the “Vietnam
syndrome”. The Bush administration turned a popular clear-cut military victory in the 1991 Gulf War into a rationale for further use
of military force in the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s 1992 military strategy for the next decade said, “We must
be prepared to act decisively in the Middle East/Persian Gulf region as we did in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm if our
vital interests are threatened anew.” The Bush administration pressured the Saudis and other Arab regimes in the Gulf to allow
longer-term bases for the U.S. Air Force, and over the next eight years, U.S. planes flew an annual average of 8,000 sorties in the “no
fly zones” the United States had declared over most of Iraq, drawing frequent anti-aircraft fire. The United States was already in a de
facto state of war with Iraq well before George W. Bush’s presidency. The 9/11 attacks were the biggest single boon to the militarist
alliance. The Bush administration exploited the climate of fear to railroad the country into a war of aggression against Iraq. The
underlying strategy, approved by the military leadership after 9/11, was to use Iraq as a base from which to wage a campaign of
regime change in a long list of countries. That fateful decision only spurred recruitment and greater activism by al Qaeda and other
jihadist groups, which expanded into Iraq and other countries. Instead of reversing the ill-considered use of military force, however,
the same coalition of officials pushed for an even more militarized approach to jihadism. Over the next few years, it gained
unprecedented power over resources and policy at home and further extended its reach abroad: The Special Operations Forces,
which operate in almost complete secrecy, obtained extraordinary authority to track down and kill or capture al Qaeda suspects not
only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in many more countries.The CIA sought and obtained virtually unlimited freedom to carry out
drone strikes in secrecy and without any meaningful oversight by Congress. The Pentagon embraced the idea of the
“long war” – a twenty-year strategy envisioning deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of
countries, and the Army adopted the idea of “the era of persistent warfare” as its rationale for
more budgetary resources. The military budget doubled from 1998 to 2008 in the biggest
explosion of military spending since the early 1950s – and now accounts for 56 percent of
discretionary federal spending. The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S.
forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy
were shown to have been false. Those moves have completed the process of creating a
“Permanent War State” — a set of institutions with the authority to wage largely secret wars
across a vast expanse of the globe for the indefinite future. But the power of this new state
formation is still subject to the same political dynamics that have threatened militarist interests
twice before: popular antipathy to a major war, broad demands for reduced military spending
and the necessity to reduce the Federal budget deficit and debt. The percentage of Americans who believe
the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting has now reached 60 percent for the first time. And as the crisis over the federal debt
reaches it climax, the swollen defense budget should bear the brunt of deep budget cuts. As early as 2005, a Pew Research Center
survey found that, when respondents were given the opportunity to express a preference for budget cuts by major accounts, they
opted to reduce military spending by 31 percent. In another survey by the Pew Center a year ago, 76 percent of respondents,
frustrated by the continued failure of the U.S. economy, wanted the United States to put top priority on its domestic problems.
The only thing missing from this picture is a grassroots political movement organized
specifically to demand an end to the Permanent War State. Such a movement could
establish firm legal restraints on the institutions that threaten American Democratic institutions
through a massive educational and lobbying effort. This is the right historical moment to
harness the latent anti-militarist sentiment in the country to a conscious strategy for political
change.
 AT: REFORMISM
Aff makes the civilian/military divide clearer, allowing more insidious militarism
in the future
Eastwood 18 (James, PhD, lecturer in politics and international relations, Sage Journals,
“Rethinking militarism as ideology: The critique of violence after security,” published February
1st, 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010617730949, pages 49,
accessed 6/26/19, JME.)
First, an ideology critique of militarism identifies a tendency whereby participation in war or military activity acquires an
instrumentality for the subjects involved beyond simply their need to use violence to achieve a political goal. Instead of
representing ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, in the Clausewitzian
formulation (Clausewitz, 2007: 13), war instead becomes bound up with a variety of other functions
that are not implied in this strategic objective. In other words, when these subjects desire military activity, they do
not desire it because it is helping them to achieve a strategic objective, but for some other reason. To take an example, a
soldier may fight in a war to consolidate an identity of military masculinity, rather than because
the war is necessary to achieve a strategic outcome. Again, the purpose of this distinction is not to draw this
boundary with certainty, but rather to point out the ways that – in a situation of militarism – war becomes bound up with an array of
activities and subjectivities not essential for achieving strategic outcomes. The benefits of this approach become clear when we apply
it to the classic case of the civil/military distinction. Militarism often masks and legitimates the pursuit of
organized political violence by manipulating this divide. This could include using the military in
humanitarian work, declaring a use of violence as a police action or indeed framing violence
as an effort to guarantee security (which, as both Grassiani and Rodriguez point out in this issue, often blurs the
civil/military divide). Alternatively, in the terms of the earlier example, militarism might operate through the
claim that military activity is performing a vital civic function: consolidating the
masculinity of citizens. However, the appropriate critical gesture here is not to redraw the
civil/military boundary more definitively, in the hope of confining ‘the military’ to its box. In fact, this would
simply enable similar militarist manoeuvres in future, since any use of organized
political violence beyond these confines would therefore gain legitimacy as ‘civilian’. Rather, the
critical invocation of the civil/military divide is intended to reveal the ideological work that is
being done, through this very distinction, to legitimate violence.

Anti-militarism is exclusive with political violence—you can’t fix the system from
inside
Eastwood 18 (James, PhD, lecturer in politics and international relations, Sage Journals,
“Rethinking militarism as ideology: The critique of violence after security,” published February
1st, 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010617730949, pages 48-49,
accessed 6/26/19, JME.)
*possible perm card
My argument is that this is how we should think of militarism. As a sociological phenomenon, militarism is
inherently rather than contingently ideological: it always includes an ideological legitimation of
violence. It is a structural relationship between military practices and the individuals who
participate in them, which takes effect by interpellating those individuals as subjects who desire
war and military activity. As I have already made clear, this desire need not take the form of an
enthusiastic love. It can be a much more ambivalent, even involuntary or unconscious, phenomenon that manifests itself in a
variety of ways. Existing scholarship in critical military studies has already done a great deal to demonstrate this: militarist subjects
can be made to desire war and military activity through gender relations (e.g. Altınay, 2004; Conway, 2012; Enloe, 2000; Segal,
2008; Sjoberg and Via, 2010), through corporeal activity (e.g. Higate, 2012; McSorley, 2013, 2016; Sasson-Levy, 2008), through the
manipulation of class and/or racial identities (e.g. Basham, 2016; Sasson-Levy, 2003), or even through the eroticization of
submission to the state (Crane-Seeber, 2016). All of these practices are ideological: they perform the function of making war and
military activity desirable to these subjects, and they are no less material or social for that. Moreover, participation in
organized political violence can be broadly conceived here: it of course includes the work of soldiers, but it also
encompasses the contribution of a much wider range of actors in economic, caring or supporting
roles, and can even be extended to passive acceptance or acquiescence in war. In each of
these cases, subjects are formed with personal, economic, social and/or psychic investments in
military activity. What ideology critique can most significantly contribute to existing
approaches, however, is precisely that it foregrounds the task of critique. According to sociological
understandings, militarism describes the penetration by military relations of social relations in general. This can be in greater or
lesser degrees; an advance in this penetration is described as militarization, a retreat as demilitarization (Shaw, 2013: 20). Yet this
generates a question: should all participation in organized political violence therefore be considered
‘militarism’, no matter what its scale or objectives? As shown above, a purely sociological perspective abdicates
from answering this question, considering it too ‘political’. Even if we are comfortable with this abdication, however, what then is the
advantage of ‘militarism’ over the concept of ‘war’ or ‘political violence’? All wars require the penetration of social relations by
military relations, no matter in what degree, as scholars of critical war studies have shown (Barkawi, 2011; Barkawi and Brighton,
2011; Sylvester, 2012). If the term ‘militarism’ is to imply something distinctive, it must surely be describing a particular kind of
penetration by military relations of social relations, one that is not necessarily equally present in all cases. In my view, the
particular kind of penetration being implied by the term ‘militarism’ is an ideological
penetration. Furthermore, the use of the term ‘militarism’ implies a critical ethico-political
intervention, designed to identify this ideological penetration as problematic and to disrupt it.
Challenging militarism cannot be combined with simple changes to military
relations—it has to come from an explicitly anti-military critique
*possible perm card
Eastwood 18 (James, PhD, lecturer in politics and international relations, Sage Journals,
“Rethinking militarism as ideology: The critique of violence after security,” published February
1st, 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010617730949, pages 45-47,
accessed 6/26/19, JME.)
Surveying its place in the discipline of international relations, Stavrianakis and Selby (2013: 11– 16) identify five
possible definitions of the concept of militarism – as ideology, as a behavioural phenomenon, as
military buildup, as a set of institutional relationships and as a sociological process – and argue
that the last of these is the most productive. Following the arguments of Martin Shaw, they claim that ‘it is
reductionist and limiting to essentialize militarism as ideology’, since this risks foreclosing the study of a broader array of non-
ideational phenomena (Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013: 12). There is no doubt that adopting a sociological perspective on militarism
has been an enormously fruitful analytical move (see also Mabee and Vucetic, this issue). It has produced a range of studies showing
the multiple and subtle ways in which militarism pervades social structures and subjectivities, reshaping culture, political economy
and identities. What is less clear, however, is why this should necessarily preclude a definition centred on ideology. One of the
earliest definitions of militarism in ideological terms, still widely cited today, was given by Alfred Vagts in his History of Militarism.
Vagts (1959: 17) defined militarism as follows: Militarism is … not the opposite of pacifism; its true counterpart is civilianism. Love
of war, bellicosity, is a counterpart of the love of peace, pacifism; but militarism is more, and sometimes less, than the love of war. It
covers every system of thinking and valuing in every complex of feelings which rank military institutions and ways above the ways of
civilian life, carrying military mentality and modes of acting and decision into the civilian sphere. 46 Security Dialogue 49(1-2)
Critics of an ideological understanding of militarism often cite this passage as evidence of a narrow definition focused on a set of
ideas favouring war and the military. Shaw (2013: 19), for example, glosses the last sentence to mean belief systems ‘“glorifying”
military power’, even though this is not what Vagts wrote. Reading the full passage, it seems clear that the crux of Vagts’ concept is
that militarism implies not love of war but first and foremost the state of being in thrall to war, of
being influenced by and caught up in military ways. In this view, militarism can be a highly
ambivalent and subtle phenomenon, rather than simply a voluntarist glorification of war . Shaw
also criticizes Vagts for focusing too narrowly on ideas rather than questions of social structure. For Shaw, militarism denotes ‘the
penetration of social relations in general by military relations’ (Shaw, 2013: 20), measuring the ‘influence of military organization
and values on social structure’ (Shaw, 1991: 4–5). Shaw therefore claims to extend Vagts’ original understanding of militarism to a
wider range of social practices. He criticizes an emphasis on ideology and instead prefers Michael Mann’s (1987: 35) definition of
militarism as ‘a set of attitudes and social practices which regards war and the preparation for war as a normal and desirable social
activity’. Shaw (2013: 19–20) writes: It is sociologically unenlightening to restrict the meaning to ideology: the core idea is the
‘carrying’ of military forms into the civilian sphere, and this is not merely a matter of ‘mentality’ or ‘attitudes’ but (as Mann notes) of
‘social practices’. Moreover the military forms which are carried may not necessarily ‘rank military institutions and ways above the
prevailing attitudes of civilian life’, let alone ‘glorify’ war in a simple sense. Valuable as this insistence on the importance of social
practice surely is, it still misrepresents Vagts’ original position. Not only does Shaw once again elide the
important distinction that Vagts made between ‘love of war’ and militarism (by inserting the term
‘glorify’ in inverted commas without a citation), he also ignores the fact that Vagts quite clearly speaks of
‘carrying military mentality and modes of acting into the civilian sphere’ (emphasis added). Furthermore,
it is not clear how Shaw can define militarism as ‘the penetration of social relations in general by
military relations’ without agreeing that this necessitates ‘rank[ing] military institutions
and ways above the prevailing attitudes of civilian life’. Surely the penetration of social relations by
military relations has to imply giving priority to military relations, even if the priority given is not always enthusiastic (something
Vagts never claimed). But, instead, Shaw (1991: 12) has proposed a sharp distinction: The
ideological impact of war-
preparation is only one part of its influence on society. We may distinguish therefore between militarism, in
general, and militarist ideologies, which are belief systems that give a high value to military activities. Yet there is a danger that this
distinction reinstates precisely the separation between ideas and social practice that Shaw wishes to avoid. It risks invoking an
outmoded concept of ideology that reduces it to an epiphenomenal set of beliefs with only a contingent relationship to material
reality. As I argue below, such a characterization is in fact completely inconsistent with the way in which this relationship is
understood by the critique of ideology. It may be, however, that the desire to avoid an ideological critique of militarism is not truly
grounded in an analytic rationale. The political stakes of this distinction between ‘militarism in general’ and ‘militarist ideologies’ are
made clear in Shaw’s (2013: 20) additional reasoning for his position: [An] advantage of this approach is that it pre-empts the
political abuse to which the ideological definition easily lends itself. Invariably, ‘their’ war-making and war-preparation is aggressive,
destructive, glorifies war and is ‘militarist’, ‘ours’ is defensive, humanitarian, does not glorify war and is not ‘militarist’. The deeper
sociological definition removes the simple negative connotation and in principle allows that arguments justifying militarism and
militarization may be plausible, although it retains critical potential. It is possible to use it in a coherent social-scientific manner, in
ways which tie it neither to a particular political critique nor to the analysis of the past. For Shaw, then, describing
something as militarist is neither a value judgment nor a political verdict: ‘Unless … one is a
strict pacifist, militarism is not a matter of good or bad, but of how far military organization and
values (which sometimes may be justified and necessary) impinge on social structure’ (Shaw, 1991:
12). The first problem with this position is that it excludes the possibility of a non-pacifist antimilitarism. Its logical extension is that
one cannot oppose militarism – even its most egregious examples – without endorsing the view that all war and violence is
unjustifiable. While this may accurately describe the perspective of some, and especially some feminist, strains of antimilitarism,
this clearly does not exhaust the possibilities for the critique of political violence (on this point, see Hutchings, 2007). In this article,
by contrast, I begin to outline the possibility of such a non-pacifist anti-militarism. A more major difficulty with Shaw’s stance is that
it abdicates from addressing key ethical and political questions regarding violence at all. This stance is not unique among scholars of
militarism. For example, while they understand much of the work in their edited volume as guided by ‘an implicit anti-militarism’,
Stavrianakis and Selby nevertheless state that ‘the research agenda we propose is fundamentally sociological and analytic, not “anti-
militarist”’ (Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013: 16; see also Skjelsbaek, 1980: 99). It is, however, important to note that
there are scholars, not to mention countless activists, who do consider themselves explicitly
anti-militarist (Cockburn, 2012; Rossdale, 2015). Indeed, I will argue that if scholars are to address
vital ethico-political questions concerning violence, an explicit orientation towards
anti-militarist critique is an important step to take. In fact, I would suggest that one of
the clearest advantages of adopting the concept of militarism is its pejorative,
critical connotation. In marked contrast to ‘security’, which is a language primarily
developed by and borrowed from the state, ‘militarism’ builds on political and rhetorical
resources developed by anti-militarist social movements (see Rossdale, 2010). As a result of these struggles,
whereas many practitioners are quite comfortable being identified as security actors (even if this appellation is used with critical
intent), far fewer are comfortable being identified with militarism.

Militarism =/= security

Eastwood 18 (James, PhD, lecturer in politics and international relations, Sage Journals,
“Rethinking militarism as ideology: The critique of violence after security,” published February
1st, 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010617730949, pages 44-45,
accessed 6/26/19, JME.)
‘Militarism’ is best conceived of as an ideological phenomenon. This is not only the most
coherent way to understand militarism, but also the best way to consolidate the advantages of
the concept over existing approaches to the study of violence that prioritize the notion of
‘security’. Current approaches to militarism tend to be sceptical of definitions that emphasize ideology. This is normally because
of a desire to move beyond studying a narrow realm of ideas artificially separated from wider social practices and beyond
straightforward cases in which violence is overtly glorified. If this is indeed what conceiving of militarism as ideology means, it
should be rightly rejected. In my view, however, such criticisms misrepresent the effects of viewing militarism as ideological and
invoke a caricatured and outmoded concept of ideology that few would defend today. In fact, properly undertaken, the critique of
ideology has a great deal to offer the study of militarism and need not suffer from the shortcomings identified above. By revisiting
Althusser’s classic work on ideology and combining it with more recent scholarship drawing on psychoanalysis, I argue that the
perceived disadvantages of an ideological concept of militarism are illusory. Instead, I show that rethinking militarism
as ideology complements rather than contradicts existing studies of militarism and moreover
can offer a great deal to the wider study of violence. Thus far, the study of violence in international
relations has been dominated by the concept of ‘security’, which – notwithstanding the attempts
of an array of ‘critical’ scholars – continues to suffer from a number of analytical and
political shortcomings. A focus on militarism as ideology can help to surmount these difficulties by re-centring the
task of anti-militarist critique. A
critical concept of militarism forces an examination not just of the
extent to which certain political issues are made military concerns but more precisely of the way
in which participation in war and military activity are made desirable through ideology. This
offers a much surer starting point for an ethico-political critique of violence, including of
justifications for the use of force presented within critical security studies itself.
Cap is the root cause of militarism/arms sales
SLP 81 (Socialist Labor Party of America, “Resolution Against Militarism,” published 1981,
http://www.slp.org/res_state_htm/militarism_res.htmlhttp://www.slp.org/res_state_htm/mil
itarism_res.html, accessed 6/26/19, JME.)
In fact, under the capitalist system, it can be no other way. The tremendous waste of both labor power and
natural resources on the production of weapons reflects the imperatives of the capitalist
economic system. To ensure profit making at home, the ruling class is compelled to export commodities and to secure sources
of raw materials and cheap labor abroad. This requires that U.S. capitalism pursue its economic objectives with sheer military might.
Moreover, in an economy where a fifth or more of the industrial capacity is idle—even with
billions being spent on the production of armaments—military spending constitutes a vital
economic stimulus. Without this stimulus, capitalism would be in even more dire economic
straits than it currently finds itself. This is so because military spending lessens the impact of the instability inherent in
this economic system upon the profits of capitalists. Because weapons production results from government
contracts and is geared to an ever-growing demand, it is free of the usual uncertainties of
production for the open market. It also provides a category of items for lucrative export that
helps to correct the balance of payments. (The U.S., it should be noted, is the world’s largest arms merchant.) And
in exporting arms to repressive regimes allied to U.S. interests around the world, an additional
benefit is gained. Militarism is not a mistaken policy that can be reversed merely by voting into office a different set of
capitalist politicians. It is the established policy of the two parties of monopoly capital which
alternately exercise control over the executive arm of U.S. imperialism. While Ronald Reagan may soon
reinstate the draft, it was Jimmy Carter who initiated draft registration. While the Reagan military budget is nothing less than a
Pentagon wish list, it was Carter who sharply increased military spending. While the Reagan administration has adopted a
dangerously belligerent stance toward the Soviet Union, Carter set the stage for a possible military showdown with the Soviet
bureaucrats. Whether Democratic or Republican, politicians have not hesitated to adopt a militarist stance and to use U.S. military
forces when they have believed it would advance the interests of U.S. imperialism. It is clear that after the setbacks recently suffered
by U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, Angola, Iran and Nicaragua, the capitalist class is determined to check anti-imperialist struggles in
Third World countries and to halt the spread of Soviet imperialist influence in these areas. For example, to make Central America
safe for U.S. imperialism, the Reagan administration has sent military supplies and soldiers—including a number of the notorious
Green Berets—to bolster the blood-drenched Salvadoran regime. In the Middle East, the U.S. is not only arming the Israeli and
conservative Arab regimes to the teeth, it is also deploying more and more of its own military forces in that area. In order to
justify increased military spending in the face of sharp cutbacks in social programs, the
capitalist class has told workers that these military expenditures are necessary to keep the
“peace” and to protect the “national security” of the United States. Every arms race, however, has ended
with a war.
ANARCHY ALT
 1NC ANARCHISM ALT
The alternative is anarchism- anarchism refuses the securitizing impulse of the
state and questions the inevitability of institutions
Rossdale 13 (Dr Chris Rossdale, Teaching Fellow of International Relations at University of
Warwick, holds a PhD from PAIS, was awarded BISA Michael Nicholson Prize for best thesis in
International Studies in 2014,“Anarchism, anti-militarism, and the politics of security”,
University of Warwick)//vl
The first chapter argued that the concept of security must be called into question. Rather than
view security as a value or property (as we see amongst some, e.g., Booth 1991), security was
conceptualised as a mode of governing (Neocleous 2008: 4) or a political technology (Burke
2007: 28), which reveals and promotes particular political logics. Central to such logics has been
the relationship between security and the state; as Dillon argues, the defining maxim of
modern politics has been „no security outside the State; no State without
security‟ (1996: 14). Beyond (and constitutive of) this relationship has been the status of
security as a mode of governmentality, a form of conduct which regulates and manages political
life, in concert with juridical and disciplinary logics (Foucault 2007b: 46-47). The images and
impulses of such governmentality are sustained through security‟ s intimate, dependent
relationship with insecurity, and the metaphysical aspirations revealed through this relationship
and its desire for mastery (Dillon 1996: 14-20). I noted a series of binary logics with which that
of security/insecurity is intertwined; in particular, sovereignty/anarchy, order/chaos,
protector/protectee. Together, they form „a package which tells you what you are as it tells you
what to die for, which tells you what to love as it tells you what to defend (dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori); and which tells you what is right as it tells you what is wrong‟ (Dillon 1996:
33). Particular attention was paid to the nature of security as a discourse reliant upon and
determinative of the subject; as Dillon and Reid write, „the history of security is a history of
what it is to be a political subject and to be politically subject‟ (2001: 51). Der Derian,
mobilising Nietzsche, argues that the „fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown‟
which constitutes the „desire for security‟ constitutes a form of self- enslavement, whereby
„people...are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the “necessities” of security‟ (2009:
156-157). He asserts that the „security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost
of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox – all that makes a free life worthwhile‟ (ibid., 159). Such
subjects are both participatory in their regulation, circulation and obedience, and radically
individuated and depoliticised. Whilst acknowledging that some have proceeded by arguing that
the discourse of security can be reclaimed within a framework of emancipation (McDonald
2012: 50- 51; Nunes 2012), the argument here has avoided such tendencies. The commitment of
much of CSS to a hegemonic ontology of agency suggests that certain totalising imaginaries
pervade attempts to chart routes forward from the critiques of security mobilised throughout the
discipline, and I would suggest that a more cautious stance is necessary if this trap is to be
avoided. The subtleties, depths and intimacies through which the metaphysical-existential
promises of security operate render attempts to capture these discourses likely to reperform
more than they disrupt (Grayson 2008; Neufeld 2004). Instead, I argued that it may be more
productive to mobilise a resistance to the terms of security/insecurity. Such a resistance could
not be classed as an „escape‟ , a move again liable to reperpetuate the logics by which security
structures life. Instead, the discussion emphasised an exploration at the limits of security, a
provocation and politicisation of the terms of security and insecurity (and, indeed, sovereignty
and anarchy, order and chaos, and so forth) which might signal and provoke ways of being and
becoming otherwise. I suggested that an approach which moves neither outside, nor
settles within, the politics and promises of security might offer a new way of
thinking about and responding to such logics. It is on such terms that the argument
turned towards anarchism. In Chapter Two I argued that anarchism can be read as a series
of discourses which promote disobedient and creative subjectivities, prefigurative explorations,
perpetual critique, and an anti-representative ethos which refuses hegemonic and statist
ontologies of agency and which prioritises „direct‟ action. I suggested that together these
features produce a two-stepped disruption of security. In the first, the hegemonic ontology of
agency so central to traditional and many critical approaches to security is displaced; anarchism
prompts a reimagination which sees security performed, conceptualised and negotiated in a
multiplicity of sites and contexts. Whether through direct action to limit the imposition or
continuation of practices and policies which cause insecurity, or through more constructive
relations of mutual aid and solidarity, anarchism envisages an approach to security
which carefully and continually seeks to defer the state form, which refuses the
alienated ontologies of agency which route intervention through traditional
(juridical, sovereign) spaces. The second disruption involves displacing the security/insecurity
binary itself; by refusing the expectations placed on conduct faithful to images of security and
order (e.g., hegemony, lawfulness, representation), and by simultaneously subverting the
corresponding narratives of chaos and insecurity, anarchism questions the naturalness of the
terms, calling their supposed authority into question. In this displacement (which, as the
discussion at the end of Chapter Three made clear, is radically unstable), I suggested that we
glimpse possibilities beyond the terms of security and insecurity as they are understood.
 2NC ANARCHY ALT
Small scale anarchist movements solve
Dupuis-Déri 10 (Francis Dupuis-Déri, professor of political science and a member of the
Institut de recherces et détudes féministes at the Université du Québec à Montréal, “Anarchism
and the politics of affinity groups”, Anarchist studies, 18 (1), pp. 40-61)//vl

Affinity groups offer a concrete model of anarchist experience that breaks not only with rhe logic
of representative 'democracy' of a liberal regime, but also with that of various militant
organisations having elected or co-opted leaders and elected representatives. Thus, the modus
operandi of affinity groups is subversive in that it challenges the traditional decision-making
processes of representative 'democracy' and the power held by representatives in the official
political regime, political parties, or organisations within rhe social movement. The experience
and functioning of affinity groups demonstrate that rhe 'people', or 'multitude', are endowed
with the capacity to organise themselves to deliberate and act collectively in complex situations
of mobilisation and mass action. Hence, the practice of affinity groups can nourish the historical
debate between two attitudes that I have elsewhere designated under the rubrics of political
'agoraphobia and 'agoraphilia. Political agoraphobia is rooted in the certitude that the people are
naturally devoid of political reason, so that, when assembled in the agora to deliberate, they
inevitably fall prey to passions that are manipulated by demagogues and egotistical factions
unconcerned with the 'common good'. Political agoraphobia in the modern era also presupposes
that the sovereign body - the 'nation' - cannot physically gather together, given the constraints of
demographics, geography, and the citizens' commitment to the private sphere (work, leisure,
famdy, friends) in preference to the public sphere. Political agoraphilia, on the other hand,
overturns all of these arguments, emphasising that individuals in positions of power necessarily
develop emotions and interests distinct from those of the 'people', precisely because of their
place in a hierarchical structure. Accordingly, the elite is a faction unto itself, which does not
hesitate to try to convince the people, through demagoguery, that it governs on behalf of the
'common good'. Despite the elite's attempt to limit the people's autonomy, the agoraphiles
remind us that, historically, there have been many communities, including affinity groups, that
have governed themselves directly and without leaders.36 Small-scale political communities -
such as squats, militant associations, gatherings of demonstrators, or affinity groups - are
alternative political spaces where the decision-making process can be egalitarian and can
manifest itself through deliberative assemblies in a hall, an amphitheatre, or even a street,
which, when occupied by demonstrators, may serve as an agora. Through these very
experiences, the people demonstrate that they have indeed the capacity to make rational
decision and to give to themselves some deliberative procedures that may encourage the
rationality of such a process. Moreover, such self-directed groups, able to act together in
coalitions on an ad-hoc basis, call into question the logic of handing over centralised political
power to representatives of a sovereign entity (the nation, the proletariat, civil society, etc.)
endowed with a homogenous core and a common interest.37 Would it be more accurate to speak
of direct democracy or of anarchy when referring to affinity groups ? Though academics and
militants often confuse the two, anarchy is different from (direct) democracy: decisions are
made collectively and by consensus under anarchy, but by majority vote in a democracy.38 The
narratives and testimonies on the subject of affinity groups show that their participants
generally prefer anarchy to direct democracy, whether for moral reasons (democracy is
considered synonymous with the tyranny of the majority) or political reasons (consensus is
believed to foster group cohesion, the spontaneous division of tasks, and a feeling of security).39
 AT: ANARCHY CAUSES WAR
Anarchism prevents war- free association and mutual aid
Noble 14 (Scott Noble, documentary filmmaker, “Anarchy and Near Term Extinction”,
dissidentvoice.org, https://dissidentvoice.org/2014/06/anarchy-and-near-term-extinction/)
When I asked the late historian Howard Zinn what he thought of the word “anarchy” being used
as a synonym for chaos, he suggested that anarchic systems are actually much more
stable than hierarchical systems. Anarchism is based on horizontal principles of free
association and mutual aid, whereas hierarchical systems demand coercion and violence. “Our
political systems are in chaos,” Zinn stated. “International relations are in chaos.”14 In the
desire to dominate others in order to prevent chaos, chaos is the result. It is by no means certain
that chaos is considered undesirable by military strategists, provided it serves to weaken the
opposition. In his “Strategy for Israel in the 1980’s,” Israeli strategic planner Oded Yinon
advocated the fomenting of civil war throughout the entire middle east. Arabs would be turned
against one another on the basis of nation, religion and ethnicity in order to increase Israel’s
relative power.50 In countries like Iraq, Syria and Libya (or indeed Guatemala, El Salvador,
Indonesia and Vietnam) we see the fruits of such strategies. Genocidal violence is not merely an
unfortunate byproduct of well-intentioned plans for regime change but a goal in and of itself. It
weakens competitors, and is therefore deemed justified. Human life has neither a positive nor a
negative value, it is simply irrelevant – another number in the calculus of power. Former
Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, the so-called “architect of the Vietnam war,” was obsessed
with mathematics. “He was so impressed by the logic of statistics that he tried to calculate how
many deaths it would take to bring North Vietnam to the bargaining table.”51 Millions of
Vietnamese people were slaughtered by bullets and bombs, burnt with napalm, poisoned by
Agent Orange; yet for the man who helped design the war, they were little more but numbers on
a chalkboard. McNamara argued that US violence in Vietnam was preferable to the “complete
anarchy” that might otherwise result.14 The psychologist Eric Fromm suggested that the desire
to control and dominate may produce a necrophilous orientation. Such people are “cold, distant,
devotees of ‘law and order’”52 who are excited not by love but death. The necrophilous person is
driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically,
as if all living persons were things… He is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and
uncontrollable by its very nature. To the necrophilous person justice means correct division, and
they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call justice. ‘Law and order’ for them are
idols, and everything that threatens law and order is felt as a satanic attack against their
supreme values. …People are aware of the possibility of nuclear war; they are aware of the
destruction such a war could bring with it – and yet they seemingly make no effort to avoid it.
Most of us are puzzled by this behaviour because we start out from the premise that people love
life and fear death. Perhaps we should be less puzzled if we questioned this premise. Maybe
there are many people who are indifferent to life and many others who do not love life but who
do love death.52 That many of our most beloved military figures had or have a necrophilous
orientation is plainly evident. Observing the corpses and ruined architecture following a battle
during WWII, George Patton remarked, “I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than
my life.”53
Anarchism solves- promotes true democracy
Noble 14 (Scott Noble, documentary filmmaker, “Anarchy and Near Term Extinction”,
dissidentvoice.org, https://dissidentvoice.org/2014/06/anarchy-and-near-term-extinction/)
Now that we have examined what won’t work, we can start imagining real alternatives to the
present system of state competition. As we have seen, the greatest fear of world leaders in
anarchy. Though the term is falsely equated with violent chaos, Anarchy is defined by Noam
Chomsky as “the closest you can get to pure democracy.”14 Chomsky also interprets
anarchism as a “set of principles” rather than an a pure ideology. The word itself
derives from the Greek Anarkos meaning “without rulers.” Rather than electing a politician who
makes decisions for you, anarchists believe that decision-making capacities should lie with the
people affected by those decisions. It is often said that if politicians had to fight in wars, there
would be no more war. By the same measure, if the CEO of a company polluting a water source
was forced to drink that water daily, he or she would presumably be much less likely to dismiss
concerns about water pollution. A key issue is accountability. Under our present system, our
“leaders” have none. Indeed, we have managed to create a system whereby we begrudgingly
elect the most depraved, venal individuals in society to rule over us. In 2012, The Atlantic
published an article entitled, “The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as Psychopaths.”
Noting that “Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic
criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm,
cunning and manipulative behaviour, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among
others,” the article goes on to state that psychopaths may in fact be “particularly well suited” for
careers in politics.75 Debates continue over whether what we call psychopathy is bio-genetic or
culturally programmed (or some combination of the two), but there can be no disputing the fact
that when it comes to the well-being of the majority, our “leaders” are at best disinterested and
very often downright malevolent. This is well understood, even in the United States. Polls
demonstrate that the Congress – which is imagined by orthodox political scientists to be a
“check” on power – has an approval rating roughly on par with cockroaches.76 Instead of
centralized power and competition, anarchists advocate decentralization and cooperation.
Decentralized communities can be federated horizontally, thus ensuring stability through a low
center of gravity rather than the precarious, ever-shifting power configurations of top-down
rule. Anarchism does not demand a “one size fits all” model, and therefore embraces
the organic rather than the mechanical. Above all, anarchism demands equality; human beings
should not be permitted to dominate their fellows. In The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern
Society, Sam Dolgoff writes: Federation is the coordination through free agreement – locally,
regionally, nationally and internationally. A vast coordinated network of voluntary alliances
embracing the totality of social life, in which all the groups and associations reap the benefits of
unity while still exercising autonomy within their own spheres and expanding the range of their
freedom.77 Paradoxically, for some “small a” anarchists, the state itself may be a tool. It can be
used to protect the public against private power, create more equitable social conditions, and
help facilitate horizontal power through participatory democracy. Some Latin American
anarchists have described this process as “expanding the floor of the cage.”78 Other anarchists
want little or nothing to do with the state, and believe in acting outside of official political
channels. This is the traditional tendency amongst anarchists, and requires no explication. The
concepts of anarcho-pluralism and Pan-Secessionism seek “radical localism” and “the simple
territorial withdrawal withdrawal of regions and localities and renunciation of the central state
by secessionists.”79 Though anarcho-X-adjective strategies differ significantly, in common with
all anarchists is a desire to prevent social dominance hierarchies whereby a privileged class is
permitted to oppress the majority. Viewed globally, such oppression takes on the form of
genocide and war. The first step in solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem. For the
majority, the state and its armies are viewed as a necessary evil. They are imagined to be
required, at minimum, to defend populations from aggression by other states. This seemingly
rational belief has produced the irrational consequence of possible near term extinction. Once
we begin – as a global community – to conceive of states, as well as capitalism, as unnecessary
and indeed harmful constructs, we can start to build alternatives from the bottom up. A
pessimist view would regard such radical change as unlikely absent a massive global awakening.
Yet such an awakening is not far-fetched, if for no other reason than current socio-economic
models are unsustainable. Even a fatalist interpretation offers hope – that if humanity survives
the coming calamities, our descendants may not automatically repeat the mistakes of our
hierarchical, violent age. Anarchism will return us to our basic survival mechanisms as a species
– cooperation, equality and peace.
 AT: ANARCHY BAD

The current system doesn’t deliver on its promise of safety- abolition is an

epistemology to help imagine new possibilities outside of our punishment system
Kaba, founder-Project NIA, 17
(Mariame, I am the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to
starting NIA, I worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused
on grantmaking and program evaluation I have co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago
Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa
Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. I have also served on numerous nonprofit
boards. . https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba 11-9-17)
John Duda: How do we break through that? Obviously at an intellectual level, I can read all about prisons, and
their genesis in the 18th century, and I can think about alternative systems at an abstract level. But I’m curious: you’ve
done so much work with very grounded community level activism—what have been the kind of concrete practices or dialogues and
conversations that have really convinced people—not just in their heads, but also, as you’ve said, in their hearts—that there is a
world beyond prison? Mariame Kaba: I don’t know how I want to answer that question; I think I want to maybe shift a little bit
before coming back to it. First, I want to think about how the prison-industrial complex [PIC] actually provides us with the best
opportunity for broad based movement building in this era—and tie that to this notion of what you do in your community. Because
the PIC encompasses and is enabled by multiple “isms,” it means that the movement that we build and our resistance are going to
need to be really, truly intersectional if we’re going to be successful in abolishing the PIC. The work of abolition insists that we
foreground the people who are behind the walls—that we listen to them, that we take their ideas seriously. It insists
that we address things like the surveillance state and economic and environmental
justice. That we have to transform the relationships that we have with each other so
we can really create new forms of safety and justice in our communities . Mainly it insists
that it is necessary that we change everything . It necessitates asking questions of everybody involved about what
can we do instead of prisons and police. In that way, a big part of the abolitionist project that I’ve been involved in now
for over a decade and a half at least, is unleashing people’s imaginations while getting concrete—so that we
have to imagine while we build, always both. For me that’s looked sitting in a church with community members, hashing out a
situation that occurred with a group of young men in the community, who had been responsible for mugging, terrorizing really in
some ways, an older white man in the neighborhood—a man who was now incredibly fearful as a result of what had happened to
him. Figuring out: why would you do that? What led to this? What might we imagine other than turning to the cops in this instance?
How do we resolve both the fear that you’ve now introduced in this person’s life and the pain and dispossession that you’ve been
experiencing in your own? The work of abolition insists that we foreground the people who are behind the walls—that we listen to
them, that we take their ideas seriously. I guess that answer won’t satisfy people who want you to provide
them with a solution, with the solution. Who immediately want to know: “how are we going to deal
with the rapists and the murderers?” This is the question that always gets thrown at anybody who identifies as
abolitionist—and my question back is “what are you doing right now about the rapists
and the murderers?” That’s the first thing: Is what’s happening right now working for you? Are you
feeling safer? Has the current approach ended rape and murder? The vast majority of rapists
never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone get convicted and end up in prison . In
fact , they end up becoming President . So the system you feel so attached to and that you
seem invested in preserving is not delivering what you say you want, which is presumably safety and an
end to violence. Worse than that it is causing inordinate additional harm. The logics of
policing and prisons are not actually addressing the systemic causes and roots of
violence . Really, I want to trouble this question. The question is posed as though the current system is
operating to do the things people say they want—and it’s not. That’s number one. Number two is that I always
say: the answer to the question is a collective project. Your question is a good one in the sense that you’re
thinking about how we might address harm (which is not the same as crime incidentally)—and so let’s figure
out together, across our communities, what would be a just system for adjudicating and evaluating harm. That’s a
very different posture to take. It’s a question that invites people in, that invites people to offer their ideas .
It invites us to argue with each other, to say “this will work better” and “no, this is the best way,” rather than
accepting as permanent and always necessary the current oppressive institutions
that we have . Our current punishment apparatus are sites of terrible and incredible violence.
The sites of policing and imprisonment and containment—Dean Spade says this correctly, he says the prison is a serial
killer and a rapist. So you have to be confronted with your own acceptance that the current model
(a) is either the best we can do and the best we can expect or (b) is doing exactly what you say
you want in the world—providing safety—when it is not, based on every empirical measure. The
logics of policing and prisons are not actually addressing the systemic causes and roots of violence. Let’s work together to think
through something different: that’s what I would say about what the conversations should be in our communities. These are the
conversations I’ve tried over the years to foster in my own community, in the communities that I inhabit. I say this with no sense of
feeling defensive, right? I won’t defend the current punishment system. It’s horrible. I’m also not invested
in evangelizing abolition. I just know that, for myself, abolition is incredibly helpful in
thinking about how to move in the world and it’s really important to me in my
daily practice. It helps me navigate the world and it helps me to prefigure the world in
which I want to live. Abolition is something that I and everyone really, practice daily.
 AT: ALT FAILS

Their alt indicts are a failure of imagination produced by prison amnesia

Kaba, founder-Project NIA, 17
(Mariame, I am the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to
starting NIA, I worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused
on grantmaking and program evaluation I have co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago
Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa
Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. I have also served on numerous nonprofit
boards. . https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba 11-9-17)
John Duda: That kind of shrunken imagination seems to really hold back a lot of people from thinking
about a world without prisons. The modern prison—it’s a historically just not that old of a
phenomenon, maybe a couple of hundred years, maximum. Mass incarceration on the scale that we know it
now—is just a couple of decades old. Yet people seem to be unable to imagine or even think
about a world without prisons. Do you have a sense of why? What’s the source of this blockage? Mariame Kaba: I heard
Patrisse Cullors from the Black Lives Matter Global Network say a while ago that somebody had to actually first
imagine prisons and the police themselves in order to create them. Everything you see in the world—
somebody thought of it first. I think that’s true and I think that’s right. I also think that once things are actualized into
the world and exist, you can’t imagine how the world functioned before it. It’s like we develop
amnesia . You just assume things have always been as they are. I see this in myself—in just my lifetime where I went to college
at a time when there were no computers—this is in the late 80’s. I brought a typewriter with me to college. That’s how I typed all my
papers and did all my work. I struggle to remember how I did that now—and again that was just in the late 80’s-early 90’s. I can’t
imagine it—I don’t even know how I operated in the world without a computer and the internet, right? It feels naturalized in that
way even for somebody who in her own adult lifetime didn’t actually have it. That I can’t imagine a world without the technology I’m
currently living with, says a lot. I can talk about it—but I don’t think I have a strong memory of that time. We abolitionists often say
that—and it’s true—that prisons are relatively new inventions, they really are, worldwide even. But
think of how normalized so many other technologies are in our lives—and they are so very recent
compared to prisons. Once things are actualized into the world and exist, you can’t imagine how the world functioned before
it. The other thing about prisons and police is how they make people— the vast majority of people— feel secure . I
don’t mean safe, I mean secure. Secure means that the scary, awful, monster people are kept at bay
by those institutions. That is the story that gets told and reinforced by media, by our parents, by our culture, that is our
story. That’s our narrative. My comrade Paula Rojas has written that the cops are in our heads and hearts—
that’s the same exact thing. The prison and the police are in our heads and hearts, therefore this system is naturalized
in a way that makes it almost impossible for folks to step back and think that it wasn’t always
like this. How did people manage before? How might we look into the future and imagine something
different? Nothing is really permanent, right? Things are going to transform and change. We see that just in our own life span.
But, again, as I mentioned, I think we can’t underestimate the fact that we think these institutions keep us secure. Security and
safety aren’t the same thing. Security is a function of the weaponized state that is using guns,
weapons, fear and other things to “make us secure,” right? All the horrible things are supposed to be kept at bay
by these tools, even though we know that horrible things continue to happen all the time with these things in place—and that
these very tools and the corresponding institutions are reproducing the violence
and horror they are supposed to contain. All of these things are pretty clear to a whole bunch of people—we
just, I think, don’t want to have to think hard about what else might be possible.
 AT: LINK TURN – USE STATE STRATEGICALLY
Anarchism is never compatible with state action
Epstein 01 (Barbara Epstein, teaches in the history of Consciousness Department at UC Santa
Cruz, “Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement”, New York, Monthly Review, 53 (4),
pp. 1-14)//vl
Many among today's young radical activists, especially those at the center of the anti-
globalization and anti-corporate movements, call themselves anarchists. But the
intellectual/philosophical perspective that holds sway in these circles might be better described
as an anarchist sensibility than as anarchism per se. Unlike the Marxist radicals of the sixties,
who devoured the writings of Lenin and Mao, today's anarchist activists are unlikely to pore over
the works of Bakunin. For contemporary young radical activists, anarchism means a
decentralized organizational structure, based on affinity groups that work together on an ad hoc
basis, and decision-making by consensus. It also means egalitarianism; opposition to all
hierarchies; suspicion of authority, especially that of the state; and commitment to living
according to one's values. Young radical activists, who regard themselves as anarchists, are
likely to be hostile not only to corporations but to capitalism. Many envision a stateless society
based on small, egalitarian communities. For some, however, the society of the future remains
an open question. For them, anarchism is important mainly as an organizational structure and
as a commitment to egalitarianism. It is a form of politics that revolves around the exposure of
the truth rather than strategy. It is a politics decidedly in the moment. Anarchism and Marxism
have a history of antagonism. Bakunin, writing in the late nineteenth century, argued that the
working class could not use state power to emancipate itself but must abolish the state. Later,
anarchists turned to "propaganda of the deed," often engaging in acts of assassination and
terrorism in order to incite mass uprisings. In the early twentieth century, anarcho-syndicalists
believed that militant trade unionism would evolve into revolution as a result of an escalating
logic of class struggle. Marx (and also Lenin) had pointed out that constructing socialism would
require a revolutionary transformation of the state (and ultimately a "withering away" of the
state based on class). Anarchists, however, criticized Marxists for tending in practice to treat the
state as an instrument that could simply be taken over and used for other ends. Anarchists
saw the state not as a tool, but as an instrument of oppression, no matter in whose
hands. The Stalinist experience lent credence to that critique. The anarchist mindset of today's
young activists has relatively little to do with the theoretical debates between anarchists and
Marxists, most of which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has
more to do with an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian perspective. There are versions of
anarchism that are deeply individualistic and incompatible with socialism. But these are not the
forms of anarchism that hold sway in radical activist circles, which have more in common with
the libertarian socialism advocated by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn than with the writings
of Bakunin or Kropotkin. Today's anarchist activists draw upon a current of morally charged and
expressive politics. There is considerable overlap between this contemporary anarchism and
democratic socialism partly because both were shaped by the cultural radicalism of the sixties.
Socialists and contemporary anarchists share a critique of class society and a commitment to
egalitarianism. But the history of antagonism between the two worldviews has also created a
stereotype of anarchism in the minds of many Marxists, making it difficult to see what the two
perspectives have in common. Anarchism's absolute hostility to the state, and its tendency to
adopt a stance of moral purity, limit its usefulness as a basis for a broad movement for
egalitarian social change, let alone for a transition to socialism. Telling the truth to power is or
should be a part of radical politics but it is not a substitute for strategy and planning.
Only anarchism ensures effective organization
Springer 17 (Simon Springer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the
University of Victoria, Canada, “The limits to Marx: David Harvey and the condition of
postfraternity”, Dialogues in Human Geography, 7(3), pp. 280-94)
Yet since horizontal organizational tactics in anarchism are usually part of a broader class
struggle (Solidarity Federation 2012), it is absurd to suggest that there would ever be a time
where anarchists would enter into assembly (federated or otherwise) during a nuclear meltdown
or the complex operation of landing an airplane. Indeed, without a discernable hierarchy to
oppose, “in what possible circumstance would collective struggle be necessary during such risky
periods?” (fkshultze 2013). Nonetheless mutual aid in times of disaster – both natural and
manufactured – is a recurrent human theme, where people regularly come together and
organize themselves effectively around an ensuing crisis in the complete absence of a centralized
authority. We saw this with spectacular effect in the wake of hurricane Katrina, where the state
was more concerned with restoring ‘law and order’ and criminalizing desperate people than it
was with relief and rescue efforts. In response to the state’s failure people instead helped
themselves and each other, particularly through the formation of the Common Ground
Collective. For Kropotkin (1902/2008: 137), the tendency for mutual aid “has so remote an
origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been
maintained… notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history”. The Marxist Cartoonist and the
Anarchist Other: Of Caricature and Insurrection You may not realize it when it happens, but a
kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you. Walt Disney (quoted in Disney
Miller 1959: 89) Some of Harvey’s response is so wilfully misguided that I can’t help but find
significant humour in it. He entirely misses the political implications of reciprocity, active
critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism for authority that rest at the center of both my essay
and anarchist praxis (Springer 2014). Rather than appreciating that what I am speaking to with
my examples of the mundanity of anarchism are principles of mutual aid, voluntary association,
self-management, and direct action, Harvey reduce his argument to silliness. “Perpetually
questioning authority, rules and codes of behavior and disobeying stupid or irrelevant rules is
one thing”, Harvey writes, “disobeying all such mandates on anarchist principle as Springer
proposes is quite another.” Of course I don’t propose any such thing, and the idea of an
anarchist ‘mandate’ is preposterous. The only hard and fast proposition present here is Harvey’s
political imagination, which appears to be cast in ideological stone. Although Harvey says he is
tempted by parody he doesn’t actually resist the urge to dive headfirst into mockery where his
distaste for anarchism becomes palpable. What of polarization and hostility? While disregarding
a posted sign that says “poisonous snakes are in this area” is an amusing analogy, ask Rosa
Parks in 1955 about a sign that said “Negros at the back of the bus” and it isn’t so funny
anymore. Suddenly we become well aware of the emancipatory potential of a single act of
disobedience or personal insurrection. This sentiment isn’t meant as senseless violence, but in
Stirner’s (1993[1845]) etymological sense of insurrection as an act of rebellion, a ‘rising up’
above oppressive socioeconomic and politico-ideological conditions. The point is that anarchism
is a form of politics that compels us to think critically about rules and whose interest they
actually serve. The caricature Harvey perpetuates is that anarchists have no rules at all. Maybe
there is a sensible reason to follow a sign, such as a warning about venomous animals, but if a
“Whites only” sign is posted outside a bathroom there exists a very good reason to challenge it.
While Rosa Parks was just one of many who took such a risk, when refused to sit at the back of
the bus she liberated herself as an act of insurrection. Her defiance was part of a broader
movement, but she didn’t wait for a vanguard to show her how everyone else could be liberated.
She took direct action herself because she was tired of giving in, a moment of remarkable
courage that allowed the rhizomes of emancipation to grow stronger. Harvey finds the assertion
that all authority is illegitimate “ridiculous if not dangerous”, which of course he should, but his
ridicule is misdirected and should be aimed at the cartoon he’s drawn. His caricature of
anarchists’ thinking on authority doesn’t “give anarchism a bad name”, it gives Harvey one, and
if he placed more value on hindsight he might be slightly embarrassed in having attempted to
pin such nonsense on anarchism. There is not a willy-nilly disregard of anything and everything.
We are talking about anarchy, not anomie, which means that there is critical thought about what
rules are silly and what rules work. Anarchism doesn’t mean ‘no rules’. It means ‘no
rulers’. Shouldn’t we be willing to question any set parameters, particularly when they have
been nailed down and codified as sovereign law? When anarchists call the legitimacy of
authority into question this is meant to imply that authority is fundamentally contestable and
any decision to follow must be entered into via one’s own volition, not through force or fraud. As
Bakunin (2010[1882]: 24) affirmed, “[i]f I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow
my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their
indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one,
neither by men nor by God”. Yet it would appear that Harvey resorts to parody because he has
little else to go on.
 AT: PERMS (ANARCHY)
No perms- the state can never be radical
Springer 17 (Simon Springer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the
University of Victoria, Canada, “The limits to Marx: David Harvey and the condition of
postfraternity”, Dialogues in Human Geography, 7(3), pp. 280-94)
In this light, isn’t any view that sees potential in the state ultimately a fetishization that allows
the foundations of capitalism to remain intact? Doesn’t such a position leave us vulnerable to
neoliberalism, particularly if, as Harvey (2014: 27) contends, “some semblance of state power
has to exist in order to sustain the individualised property rights and structures of law that,
according to theoreticians like Friedrich Hayek, guarantee the maximum of noncoercive
individual liberty”? In spite of lifting his title from Bookchin’s essay, the message seems to have
been entirely lost on Harvey who refuses to accept that state power will always operate in the
narrow interests of the few given the hierarchical nature of this form of organization. If
anarchism is susceptible to a neoliberal politics in one way, then Marxism surely is in another.
The difference is that while some Marxists have acknowledged this limit to Marxism and have
responded by moving ever closer to an anarchist line through the development of autonomist
theory (Wright 2002), such a critique of anarchism is only possible through caricature. It is a
willful misreading of anarchism to present it as synonymous with radical
individualism. In a communal spirit, Barker and Pickerill (2012) show us why it is important
for anarchists to understand and learn from indigenous peoples, while Kahnawake Mohawk
scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2005) articulates a case for anarchoindigenism. Yet Harvey attempts to
discredit the communal forms of action advanced by indigenous communities, and championed
by Chomsky (2007) and Scott (2009), by implying that such examples are not real invocations of
anarchist praxis. This insinuation is not only misguided given that harmony (Clark and Martin
2013), mutual aid (Kropotkin 2008[1902]), and a certain sense of spiritualism (Springer 2014c)
are core themes of anarchism, but equally it is indicative of Harvey’s own “non-negotiable
ideological position” that the state can be reformed. Given the deep communal roots of
anarchism, the use of anarchist themes by neoliberals is quite frankly nonsense, and nothing
more or less than the misappropriation of ideas. I’m willing to nonetheless accept that
anarchists need to be vigilant against neoliberal infection, in the same way that Marxists should
be weary of the colonizing potential of the state (Springer 2012). The Khmer Rouge radicalized
the state in Cambodia. We know the result, but here’s the rub: the Communist Party of
Kampuchea’s leadership were also in denial about their vanguardism, and in fact they continue
to be to this day as the ongoing tribunal has made clear. Obviously I’m not accusing Harvey of
secretly harboring genocidal machinations to ensure his Marxist project is seen through, but
genocide was not Pol Pot’s dream either. In my latest book I recount my Khmer language
teacher’s history with Saloth Sar, a man she remembers as gentle and kind (Springer 2015).
Prior to becoming known as Brother Number One, having transformed himself into Pol Pot,
Saloth Sar was her childhood teacher. Here, in its most startling reveal, we find Hannah
Arendt’s (1963) ‘banality of evil’, wherein history’s profoundest moments of malice are seen as
being fulfilled not by sociopaths or fanatics, but by the blinkered recklessness of ordinary
people. Yet we might correct Arendt’s formulation because the banality of evil is not actually
banal at all. Instead, it represents an acceptance of the premises of the state, its
function as the institutionalization of power, and the erasure this brings to our
ability to see the violence it unleashes. Evil is not of the everyday. Pol Pot was not born a
monster. He was once a sweet and innocent baby. Arendt could only view evil as banal because
she failed to notice the banality of the state itself, with its ugly, twisted trawls of codified rules,
vested not in specialization or common good, but in the interests of an elite, a vanguard. The
moment we attempt to crystalize our relations in concrete form and invest them with authority
is the exact same moment that we fail in our radical, revolutionary trajectory. So we see mass
killings as a common feature of Marxism put into practice, not because there is something
wrong with socialist ideas, but rather because the state represents the apotheosis of human
capacity for violence. People are not good or bad. Neither are co-ops, and surely they are only as
good as their members’ desire to make them such. It follows then that organization is not good
or bad, yet states are of an altogether different stripe. They do something to us. They arrange the
circuits of power in such a way that attempts to make it flow in one direction. They render us
cogs in a fixed machine with a self-replicating logic, rather than voluntary associates within a
continually unfolding process. The state can never be radical. It is an abomination that
always serves the few, while demanding blind obedience from the many. Such a demand is
achieved in the best incidents through flags waved and anthems sung, and in the worst through
shots fired and bloodshed.

Only anarchism solves- state policies reproduce the structure of militarism

Hoffman 72 (Robert Hoffman, teaches European intellectual history at the State University of
New York at Albany, “Anti-Military Complex: Anarchist Response to Contemporary Militarism”,
Journal of International Affairs, 26 (1), pp. 87-97)//vl
situation, the problem is the deformation of an originally sound system. Genuine requirements
for security and resistance to communism were incorrectly implemented so that complicated,
expensive technology, and chronic hostilities enlarged the "military-industrial complex" for
more than two decades. Things got out of hand, leading to idiocy in Indochina and to absurd
waste and distortion of national priorities in military planning and procurement. The conclusion
these critics draw is that things must be gotten "in hand" once more. A variety of prescriptions
are offered: in essence they entail curbing the abuse of power in high places and developing
more self-restraint in U.S. foreign policy. Polemics like these are remarkable because,
after exposing the most outrageous conditions, they propose reforms that would just
rearrange the structure and impose some restraints. Some might suppose that so
unsatisfactory a system could not be salvaged and should be dismantled. Those who are thus
disillusioned have the making of good anarchists. Anarchist views are not often thought
realistic. Most people suppose that some means of national defense is necessary, given the
existing imperfect international situation. Perhaps a military system can never be unflawed, they
think, but it is a necessary evil—like government itself—and we must strive to make the best of
it. Most anarchists avoid speaking of the "military-industrial complex" except when holding the
words at arm's length by use of inverted commas.' This is not fastidious distaste for inelegant
jargon. Rather, they balk at the way the term ordinarily connotes a cancer which can be excised
so that only healthy flesh remains; this seems perverse to anarchists. After all the outrages
that have antagonized citizens, it is a powerful mythology that can still hold faith for a
healthy defense system—and to believe in the continuing need for it. People cling to
their myths while attributing calamity to misdeeds of the powers thought to have determined
events. Salvation will be achieved if only these betrayers are thrown out. Just as other troubles
have been blamed on international conspiracies of Reds or Jews, here we have manufactured the
conspiracy of bad militarists and merchants of death; this may be more real than anti-
communist or anti-Semitic paranoia, but the process is all too similar. It helps to have some
"evil' individuals to concentrate blame on—a Lyndon Johnson, a Walt Rostow. a Mendel Rivers,
or a Melvin Laird—but we also extend it to less specific groups and posit the "military-industrial
complex." At the same time we think we can have an officers corps, a civilian bureaucracy, a
defense industry, a Congress, and the rest who will not be wretched militarists like the present
ones.
The permutation fails- alleviates responsibility
Rossdale 13 (Dr Chris Rossdale, Teaching Fellow of International Relations at University of
Warwick, holds a PhD from PAIS, was awarded BISA Michael Nicholson Prize for best thesis in
International Studies in 2014,“Anarchism, anti-militarism, and the politics of security”,
University of Warwick)//vl
Fixed or secure boundaries of coalition can also tend to obscure important spaces of relationality
and responsibility, and enact closures on the subject. Butler argues that attempts to posit
ontological difference obscure the ways in which the subject exists in a co-
constitutive relationship with that outside of itself. The resisting subject (whether individual
or coalition) is never an innocent category; secure ontological differentiations can serve to
obscure engagement with this non-innocence, and alleviate resulting understandings of
responsibility. The logics through which coalitions operate draw ontological boundaries which
presume, at some level, to differentiate that which is interior and that which is exterior (as
superior and inferior). Within a context wherein the subject of resistance is also a subject of
security, militarism, patriarchy, and so forth, such differentiation is deeply problematic,
potentially serving to limit ethico-political reflection and to secure the subject through a process
which „moralizes a self by disavowing commonality with the judged‟ (Butler 2005: 46).
Pertinently Butler cites Adriana Cavarero‟s reflections on the place and function of the pronoun
„we‟; „many revolutionary movements...seem to share a curious linguistic code based on the
intrinsic morality of pronouns. The we is always positive, the plural you is a possible ally, the
they has the face of an antagonist, the I is unseemly, and the you is, of course, superfluous‟
(Cavarero 2000: 90-91, cited in Butler 2005: 32, emphases in original). This sceptical reading
(which, for Cavarero, leads her to advise against the use of the pronoun) renders these
revolutionary movements on strikingly similar grounds to much of traditional IR theory, and
sets the stage for very conventional terms of security. Butler offers some routes forward from
these issues through her conceptualisation of the open coalition. Concerned with the „totalizing
gestures of feminism‟ (2006: 18), Butler acknowledges the tendency for the ...coalitional
theorist [to] inadvertently reinsert herself as sovereign of the process by trying to assert an ideal
form for coalitional structures in advance, one that will effectively guarantee unity as the
outcome. Related efforts to determine what is and is not the true shape of a dialogue, what
constitutes a subject- position, and, more importantly, when “unity” has been reached, can
impede the self-shaping and self-limiting dynamics of coalition (ibid., 20).
The perm is liberal crisis management- we need to establish alternatives
Kaba, founder-Project NIA, 17
(Mariame, I am the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to
starting NIA, I worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused
on grantmaking and program evaluation I have co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago
Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa
Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. I have also served on numerous nonprofit
boards. . https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba 11-9-17)
Mariame Kaba: He also made that point—the point that liberals and the liberal consensus actually had been
enabling all different kinds of forms of human exploitation and oppression—and then that now that
same apparatus is quickly telling people to join in for national unity and reconciliation with the
forces that are basically hell bent on destroying millions of people. That is really something
we can’t do . We have to really focus on mounting a resistance that develops and then fights for
transformational demands. We can’t allow people to become solely fixated on Trump. We can’t get seduced by
the idea that if only we just rebuild the DNC we’ll be fine. We really have to jump in now to shape the narrative.
The starting point—and this is the gift that abolition as an ideology and a practice has given me—is the idea that the
system isn’t actually broken. Right? Because then I’m not preoccupied with trying to fix it .
That’s not my goal. All I want to do is abolish and end it, therefore the imperatives of what I’m
trying to do—the training, the questions, the analysis—all have to be geared towards that, and then this
doesn’t force me to run around in circles plugging my fingers in the dyke everywhere
as the water is just threatening to overwhelm all of us . Also, this allows me to think of
how we can crowd out the current system by building the things that we want to see in the world,
that will promote our well-being.

The aff performs abolitionist identity without understanding abolitionist ideology

Kaba, founder-Project NIA, 17
(Mariame, I am the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Prior to
starting NIA, I worked as a program officer for education and youth development at the Steans Family Foundation where I focused
on grantmaking and program evaluation I have co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including the Chicago
Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa
Alexander and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) among others. I have also served on numerous nonprofit
boards. . https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba 11-9-17)
Mariame Kaba: Absolutely. I am okay with that. In fact, I’m not alone in this. Other abolitionists—people who subscribe to or have
embodied or have cared about abolition as political ideology, goal, horizon and practice—have had conversations over the last year
about what it means that many new organizers and activists are adopting an “abolitionist identity”—using that term. What do
they mean when they identify as “abolitionist”? I would much prefer people wrestle with
questions, some I’ve mentioned here, without necessarily adopting the identity as an abolitionist if
they’re not willing to actually do what abolition demands of you. Somebody wrote an
article a couple of years ago saying there is no contradiction being an abolitionist and calling for
the prosecution and more importantly the imprisonment of killer cops. That’s bonkers. I went off on a
rant a few months ago when several people were making statements like “I’m an abolitionist, I’m not anti-cop, anti-police.” What
does that mean? And please know that I’m not saying this as judgment, not at all. We all come to
consciousness in different ways. We all get radicalized at our own pace in our own time. We come to understanding ideas
in formal and informal settings. I have complete and utter respect for people learning, growing, developing. I’m just
wondering, for those of us who’ve been thinking about, practicing, writing about abolition,
what’s our responsibility is in this moment? [I think we need] to help people understand that there
are, in fact, some things that are just not PIC abolition. Can you say that without being
perceived by people as a gatekeeper? That is not the point though. The point is: words have
meaning . Words correspond to concepts, everything is not everything, right? Because if everything was
everything then nothing is anything. I think we have to push back over like “well, I can have my opinion of that.” And that
all opinions are valid. No, there are some fundamental things you’ve got to subscribe to if you’re
going to adopt or embrace an ideology and a practice. You don’t just get to change those things
randomly because you don’t like them or because you personally decide they don’t make sense.
Again this is a collective project built over decades. You also better do some reading so you have
actual knowledge.
AFF ANSWERS
LINK ANSWERS
 AT: APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC K
Crisis representations are good even though there’s no ideal relationship to the
suffering of others --- encourages an awareness that our relative position in the
world is a matter of luck, and any alternative means we can’t talk about, plan for,
or anticipate catastrophes
Recuber 13 [Timothy, sociologist who teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University,
he studies the representation of death and disaster in mass media and consumer culture,
“Disaster Porn!,” Contexts, Vol 12, Issue 2, May 1, 2013]

The Ethics of Watching

As early as 1993, in his book Distant Suffering, sociologist Luc Boltanski argued that an emerging, Western “crisis of pity” signaled
not only a loss of confidence in the veracity of reportage on global humanitarian issues, but “also relieve[d] the anxiety, loss of self-
esteem and sense of indignity which is often said to be provoked by seeing wounded, imprisoned, tortured, starving or even dead
people, without being able to do anything.”
Prevailing notions of disaster porn today, in which any and every form of disaster-related media is
potentially pornographic, exacerbate this tendency. If documentaries, news reports , filmed
dramatizations of real events, and completely fictional Hollywood blockbusters can all be written off as disaster
porn , we run the risk of ignoring the suffering of others and relieving our own
anxieties about viewing their misfortunes. Those who decry disaster porn no doubt do so to preserve “the
grieving of their privacy and the dead of their dignity,” as Susan Llewelyn Leach wrote in 2005. But the ideal of truly
ethical or authentic spectatorship of disaster may be impossible , given the
inherent inequity of watching the misery of others from a position of relative
comfort .
The dangers of disaster porn—namely, the lack of compassion it is said to engender—have also been overstated.
After all, alongside the increasing visibility of both disaster media and its critics, Americans appear
to have donated more money to victims of disasters than ever before. According to the website Charity
Navigator, Americans gave $1.6 billion to relief efforts for the 2004 South Asian tsunami, contributed $3.3 billion to Hurricane
Katrina relief in 2005, and then in 2010, in the midst of a significant recession, gave $1.4 billion to victims of the Haiti earthquake. If
donations to the Red Cross are a good metric, then Americans gave much more money for disaster relief in
South Asia and Haiti than they had for any previous foreign disasters, especially those—like the
1984-85 Ethiopian famine and the 1985 Mexico City earthquake—that pre-date the term disaster porn itself.
Whatever its deleterious effects, the supposed proliferation of disaster pornography over the last
decade does not seem to have decreased Americans’ sympathy for disaster victims, at least as
measured by their charitable donations.
If mass media is to be a force for good, then journalists, cultural critics, and especially
social scientists should avoid broad-stroke condemnations of the disaster porn
genre . Such condemnations encourage audiences to remain in the relative safety of ironic
detachment—comfortably critical of media processes and effects, rather than struggling with the nature of
their own discomfort over injustice and its potential claims on our emotions.
The Uses of Exposure
To cast something off as disaster porn is, borrowing the language of sociologist C. Wright Mills, to reframe a “public issue” as merely
a “private trouble.” It substitutes aesthetic questions about one’s personal viewing preferences for ethical considerations about one’s
actual ability to help. In the current media landscape, saturated with so-called disaster porn, this has not yet become the norm—as
evidenced by high levels of charitable giving for even very distant disasters. But if graphic scenes of others’ suffering become subject
to a widely held taboo, then viewers may feel absolved of the obligation to think and act on such suffering—or even to pay attention
in the first place.
The desire to turn away from death and disaster is understandable in a media-saturated
world where there is an endless surfeit of tragedies to display. But as sociologist Iain Wilkinson has recently argued, such
moral engagement with the suffering of others, “in all its real-life perplexities,
compromises, and difficulties is…an indispensable component of the quest for social
understanding.”
Disaster porn, then, in all its iterations and for all its flaws, is a vital political terrain in which
publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social significance of the suffering of
others. It connects public issues like war, famine, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks to the
private lives of those they affect, and shows us how disruptions of social structure become disruptions in individual biographies.
This is the case in even the most seemingly stereotypical news reports of suffering in the
developing world, and in even the most outlandish Hollywood disaster epics as well.
True, the focus on individual acts of heroism in films like 2012 often shifts attention away from the suffering multitudes, and for this
they have been rightly criticized. But the seemingly impossible odds that the protagonists of such disaster epics must overcome
also serve to highlight our shared vulnerability to risk. By imagining ourselves in Jackson Curtis’s shoes, we
recognize that we might not be so lucky, and likely not survive at all . Similar sentiments are aroused when we
watch the evening news, or a documentary about survivors of some terrible real-life tragedy. Such sentiment should
be cultivated, not condemned .
In disaster porn, for all its flaws, publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social
significance of the suffering of others.
Encouraging an awareness of the vicissitudes of fate helps to combat the common
tendency to blame victims of chance and inequality for their own misfortunes, and to view one’s
own good fortune as the result of special individual talents unaffected by larger social forces or
privileges. In this way, so-called disaster porn may prove itself to be more of a virtue than a vice.
Apoc rhetoric good
Recuber 11 [Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the
City. University of New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING
CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER"
gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pd]

Perhaps, then, what distant consumers express when they sit glued to the television watching a disaster
replayed over and over, when they buy t-shirts or snow globes, when they mail teddy bears to a memorial, or when they tour a disaster site, is a deep,
maybe subconscious, longing for those age-old forms of community and real human
compassion that emerge in a place when disaster has struck. It is a longing in some ways so
alien to the world we currently live in that it requires catastrophe to call it forth , even in our
imaginations. Nevertheless, the actions of unadulterated goodwill that become commonplace in harrowing
conditions represent the truly authentic form of humanity that all of us , to one degree or another,
chase after in contemporary consumer culture every day. And while it is certainly a bit foolhardy to seek
authentic humanity through disaster-related media and culture, the sheer strength of that
desire has been evident in the public’s response to all the disasters, crises and catastrophes to
hit the United States in the past decade . The millions of television viewers who cried on September 11, or
during Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings, and the thousands upon thousands
who volunteered their time, labor, money, and even their blood, as well as the countless others
who created art, contributed to memorials, or adorned their cars or bodies with disaster-related
paraphernalia— despite the fact that many knew no one who had been personally affected by any of these disasters—all attest to a
desire for real human community and compassion that is woefully unfulfilled by
American life under normal conditions today. In the end, the consumption of disaster doesn’t
make us unable or unwilling to engage with disasters on a communal level, or
towards progressive political ends —it makes us feel as if we already have, simply by consuming. It is ultimately
less a form of political anesthesia than a simulation of politics, a Potemkin village of communal sentiment, that fills
our longing for a more just and humane world with disparate acts of cathartic consumption. Still, the positive political potential
underlying such consumption—the desire for real forms of connection and community—remains
the most redeeming feature of disaster consumerism. Though that desire is frequently warped when various media lenses
refract it, diffuse it, or reframe it to fit a political agenda, its overwhelming strength should nonetheless serve notice
that people want a different world than the one in which we currently live, with a different way
of understanding and responding to disasters. They want a world where risk is not leveraged for profit or political gain, but
sensibly planned for with the needs of all socio-economic groups in mind. They want a world where preemptive
strategies are used to anticipate the real threats posed by global climate change
and global inequality, rather than to invent fears of ethnic others and justify
unnecessary wars . They want a world where people can come together not simply as a
market, but as a public , to exert real agency over the policies made in the name of their safety
and security. And, when disaster does strike, they want a world where the goodwill and compassion
shown by their neighbors, by strangers in their communities, and even by distant spectators and consumers,
will be matched by their own government . Though this vision of the world is
utopian, it is not unreasonable , and if contemporary American culture is ever to give us more than just an illusion of safety, or
empathy, or authenticity, then it is this vision that we must advocate on a daily basis, not only
when disaster strikes.
 AT: HEG K
Decline ensures lash out – precludes resolution to collective action problems
Beckley 12 [“The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Persists and China’s Rise Is
Limited”, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and a U.S. Foreign Policy
and International Security fellow at Dartmouth's Dickey, p. online]

One danger is that declinism could prompt trade conflicts and immigration restrictions. The results of this study
suggest that the United States benefits immensely from the free flow of goods, services, and people around the globe; this is what
allows American corporations to specialize in high--‐value activities, exploit innovations created elsewhere, and lure the brightest
minds to the United States, all while reducing the price of goods for U.S. consumers. Characterizing China’s export expansion as a
loss for the United States is not just bad economics; it blazes a trail for jingoistic and protectionist policies. It would be tragically
ironic if Americans reacted to false prophecies of decline by cutting themselves off from a potentially vital source of American power.
Another danger is that declinism may impair foreign policy decision--‐making. If top government officials come
to believe that China is overtaking the United States, they are likely to react in one of two ways, both of which are potentially
disastrous. The first is that policymakers may imagine the United States faces a closing “window of
opportunity” and should take action “while it still enjoys preponderance and not wait until the diffusion of power has already
made international politics more competitive and unpredictable.”315 This belief may spur positive action, but it also
invites parochial thinking, reckless behavior, and preventive war .316 As Robert 315 Charles A. Kupchan, “Hollow
Hegemony or Stable Multipolarity?” in G. John Ikenberry, ed., America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 68. 316 Jack S. Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motive for War,” World Politics, Vol.
40, No. 1 (October 1987), pp. 82--‐107. Chapter 6 196 Gilpin and others have shown, “hegemonic struggles have most frequently
been triggered by fears of ultimate decline and the perceived erosion of power.”317 By fanning such fears, declinists
may
inadvertently promote the type of violent overreaction that they seek to prevent. The other potential reaction is
retrenchment – the divestment of all foreign policy obligations save those linked to vital interests, defined in a narrow and national
manner. Advocates of retrenchment assume, or hope, that the world will sort itself out on its own; that
whatever replaces American hegemony, whether it be a return to balance--‐of--‐power politics or a
transition to a post--‐power paradise, will naturally maintain international order and prosperity. But
order and prosperity are unnatural. They can never be presumed. When achieved, they are the result of
determined action by powerful actors and, in particular, by the most powerful actor, which is, and will be for some time, the United
States. Arms buildups, insecure sea--‐lanes, and closed markets are only the most obvious risks of
U.S. retrenchment. Less obvious are transnational problems, such as global warming, water
scarcity, and disease, which may fester without a leader to rally collective action . Hegemony,
of course, carries its own risks and costs. In particular, America’s global military presence might tempt policymakers to use force
when they should 317 Gilpin, War and Change, p. 239. See, also, Dale Copeland, Origins of Major War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2000); Charles Doran and Wes Parsons, “War and the Cycle of Relative Power,” American Political Science Review,
Vol. 74, No. 4, (December 1980), pp. 947--‐965. Chapter 6 197 choose diplomacy or inaction. If the United States abuses its power,
however, it is not because it is too engaged with the world, but because its engagement lacks strategic vision. The solution is
better strategy, not retrenchment. The first step toward sound strategy is to recognize that the status quo for the United States
is pretty good: it does not face a hegemonic rival and the trends favor continued American dominance. The overarching goal of U.S.
policy should be to preserve this state of affairs. Declinists claim the United States should “adopt a neomercantilist international
economic policy” and “disengage from current alliance commitments in East Asia and Europe.”318 But the fact that the United
States rose relative to China while propping up the world economy and maintaining a hegemonic presence abroad casts doubt on the
wisdom of such calls for radical policy change.

Data on levels of violence and economic integration aren’t predictive of future

threats. Current stability only exists because of American hegemony – and that
requires constant maintenance against future disorder
Hoffman 13 [Frank, Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Strategic Research, at the
National Defense University, “PLATO WAS DEAD WRONG: EMBRACING OUR BETTER
ANGELS?” 8/20]

Steven Pinker, author of a chaotic book titled The Better Angels of Our Nature, contends that mankind is evolving in a permanent
and linear way. He argues that war (between states) will fade away like other barbaric practices such as
slavery (except it has not vanished – not even close), public executions, and lynching. Pinker is not alone: Bruno Tertrais
boldly asserted last year in The Washington Quarterly, “we are nearing a point of history where it will be possible to say that war
as we know it, long thought to be an inevitable part of the human condition, has disappeared.” Think about the
impact of such a hubristic statement that tosses a few millennia of history and Plato’s most famous quip
into the trash. This kind of thinking brings to mind Pitt’s speech before Parliament early in 1792, during a debate on the
budget: We must not count with certainty on a continuance of our present prosperity during such an interval; but, unquestionably,
there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen
years of peace, than we may at the present moment. Of course, within a year, the Continent plunged into war and revolution lasting,
with one short interval, until 1815. Tertrais concurs with Pinker and believes that organized conflict “is on the verge of becoming a
historical relic.” This recalls the claims of Norman Angell and Ivan Bloch a century ago, comments that were dashed by the tragedy
of World War I. Tertrais claims that they may yet have the last laugh. More likely, Mr. Tertrais will join a long list of infamously bad
prognosticators. Troubled Analysis This hopelessly optimistic contention has been seized upon by advocates of reduced U.S. defense
spending in today’s ongoing political contest. For example, Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen have written in Foreign
Affairs that the
notion that our post–Cold War world “is a treacherous place, full of great uncertainty and
grave risks,” has too strong a hold on our public’s understanding of our security and “is
simply wrong.” They aver that
our country “faces no plausible existential threats, no great-power rival, and no near-term
competition for the role of global hegemon.” There are three problems with this analysis: It is
flat wrong. It misconceives the foundations of contemporary stability. And it perpetuates an
idealistic view of the linear and inevitable progress of mankind. While life expectancies and access to Starbucks
and the internet are high, there are many forms of risk. There are lethal threats. Many of these, such as terrorism, may not be
existential, but the United States should not limit defense or security to only those threats that can eliminate us. Moreover, the
United States does have a great power rival, at a regional level in Asia. China exhibits a belligerence,
condescension to its neighbors, and scorn for international opinion that recalls German
behavior in the decades prior to World War I. Zenko and Cohen’s framework is also warped by its scale. Near-
term competition need not be global to threaten our interests or mandate a substantial reduction in our
defenses. The second omission is the rampant “presentism” in their interpretation of the state of the world. Pinker’s acolytes
think only of the recent past, and fail to account for what the last two generations did to make
the world the more stable place it is today. They ignore the fact that American power is required
to sustain an international system we’ve invested so much to create during the Cold War and since.
By removing that applied hegemonic force, they would open the playing field to other, less
benign forces at the state and sub-state level. They may also inadvertently reduce other
constructive and preventative resources that help dampen violence. Finally, Pinker’s “New Peace”
thesis that is embraced by Tertrais, Zenko and Cohen argues that mankind and history are on an ineluctable path. In doing so,
they ignore longer-term perspectives and potential future trends. The databases they use to
buttress their arguments show that wide fluctuations are normal in the cycle of human conflict.
Zenko and Cohen prefer too narrow a sample so that they can draw their preferred conclusions. They argue
that the world has never been safer. Not true. We’ve been at this level of violence twice in
history, and it has spiked frequently. We need to ask why, not deliberately distort the history to
win policy points. The principal basis for positive and optimistic assessments about war and
human strife comes from databases like those generated by the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute. These indicate that for the past 20 years the number of conflicts has declined substantially. These research
organizations show that the number of ongoing conflicts has dropped forty percent from 53 to 31 between 1992 and 2010. The
statistics also suggest that wars are shorter and less lethal, measuring direct combat deaths and other human casualties. All these
databases show that major interstate warfare is a rare occurrence, but with great fluctuations and dramatic consequences. The data
is not generally contested, but the meaning of these trends is. The observed reduction in both the frequency and violence of human
conflict today confers the appearance of a benign world, one in which states would logically reduce their investments in security.
However, this is a simplistic view of threats and risk. The conflict data is simply a thermometer of the
atmospheric temperature today. It makes no pretense about prediciting the future. These databases
are useful but not more than a record of past levels. Is that the basis for future security planning? It is undoubtedly true that that
the aggregate number of conflicts from 1991 to the 2010 has declined pretty steadily. But one should
not infer that the risk of war tomorrow is reduced or that this trend can continue indefinitely. At
least the prudent strategic planner or even an amateur historian would not make that prediction. The small
print on the bottom of a stock prospectus is more honest: past performance is not proof of future performance. A cursory review of
the last two centuries provides a larger sample to consider. We are at the same level of aggregate numbers of conflicts that the world
faced in 1880 and 1920. It would be interesting to know what conditions helped secure the peace during those eras. It would also be
interesting to know why both these remarkable periods were immediately followed by eras of dramatic violence. It’s scary that policy
commentators are uninterested in those questions, as if they perceive history and trends as being capable of moving in only one
direction. What this long-term analysis indicates is that interstate war is generally a low probability event, and there is great variance
in intrastate or societal conflict. Such a longer-term view accepts where we are today, but recognizes that history is not reversible.
Understanding this history is important, not because it provides a ready answer, but because it helps frame the right questions. Are
these cycles avoidable or unlikely to reoccur? Will those circumstances be more or less likely to come about after 2015 than now?
Can we reduce the likelihood of disruption, discontent and disorder that history suggests are naturally reoccurring? Are there
signposts or other trends we should consider before we turn our swords into ploughshares and keyboards? Signposts of a Darker
Future Signposts in the character of conflict suggest that challenges are not imminent but they are expanding. Nuclear
weapons and other technologies are proliferating, and threats either mutating or growing.
Transnational threats, religious extremism, narco-terrorism, cyber espionage and crime, nuclear
proliferation, and failed states could all present greater cycles of violence and mayhem (not
existential, just disruptive). Geography and history are not prescriptive, but they caution us to think about the emergence of great
powers. While there is no “near term” competition for global hegemon, we certainly have an emergent power rivalry in the Asia-
Pacific theater. China’s economic clout, growing military modernization, and autocratic political authority pose challenges to our
interests and our treaty partners’ interests that warrant consideration. The overall scope of its military spending and modernization
is not inconsistent with its economic clout, but we should be more concerned about its outlandish claims in the South China Sea and
its attendant aggressive behavior. There is little doubt that the Middle Kingdom is striving to employ its growing power at greater
range and with increased ambitions. This is a region where we have core interests at stake, and numerous treaty obligations which
my academic friends tend to gloss over. We must also consider the nascent nuclear programs of the Islamic Republic of
Iran and North Korea. They cannot pose threats to our homeland at present but they appear to be closer to being
able to harm close allies and seriously injure U.S. interests with catastrophic impact. In addition to
the frequency of conflict, the intensity and lethality of conflict can also swing the other way. Given the diffusion of lethal
means to super-empowered networks and the availability of possibly toxic bio- or chemical-
based weapons, one should pause before suggesting that large-scale violence is no longer part of
the human condition. It may not be massed armor formations, but it could be mass violence. Consider the potential for
groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, like the al-Nusra group, to gain access to sarin stocks in Syria. These possibilities distinguish the
mere frequency of conflict in the present tense from its consequences or costs in the future. We cannot base our defense on the
number of conflicts alone. We seek to shape the world to prevent wars or mitigate their impact. Preventing wars via
deterrence is still a critical element of our strategy. We cannot just be reactive: we need to anticipate risks and
consequences. As General Dempsey noted in Joint Force Quarterly, “…less violence does not necessarily mean less danger,
particularly if both the probability and consequences of aggression are on the rise.” It is true that these are not immediate threats at
the existential level, but they do pose clear and present dangers to U.S. allies and interests in key regions of the world. This is not a
distorted or dystopian perspective hopelessly infected by bureaucratic self- interest or unreasonable anxiety. We simply do
not live in a world that is, in Chris Fettweis’ terms, “a remarkably safe and secure place.” For these
reasons, despite contrary assertions about past trends, the overall risk of interstate war is increasing due to
numerous factors. Shifts in power, demographic declines, emergent regional powers, and
technological diffusion portend more problems rather than less. What Mearsheimer called the tragedy
of great power politics has not gone away. Rising powers, failed states, and the political aspirations of many Arab
populations will ensure that our security remains challenged. The greatest threat won’t be our debt. Our principal problem will
derive from the real or perceived decline in U.S. interest and capacity to work with others to preserve the present stable global order.
The National Intelligence Council noted in its most recent long-range assessment that “A declining U.S. ability or
willingness to serve as a global security provider would be a key factor contributing to
instability.” Conclusion We live in a better world right now, one which America’s influence has
helped shape. Continuing the conditions that have been positive trends likely will not be achieved merely by massive cuts in
defense spending or retreating from the world stage. I am on record for smart and substantial defense cuts, but not for retreat or
willful ignorance. The combination of China’s assertiveness, the dawning of revolutions in cognitive, bioscience, and
nanotechnology, and the socio-political eruptions of the Arab world, might make a prudent strategist question any assumptions
about a world in which peace is assumed rather than accepted as the aberration it has always been. These are not reflexive
screeds of “frenetic scaremongering”; merely simple assessments of a plausible future and one
we can shape with the right strategy. We have had a habit of magical thinking and
misunderstanding the world for far too long. That was a luxury we could afford in an area of booming resources and
more chastened rival states. But that era is over. We too often want to sweep aside the unfamiliar or the
undesirable as low probability challenges, a practice fraught with risk. Making that error again
would be a huge mistake and do more to ensure the return of history in short order. We should
be prudent and not overlook strategic history, politics, nationalism, our competitors in Asia, and
the issues posed by Russia’s decline. Nor should we overlook the potential for miscalculation
from misguided policy makers in Iran and North Korea. Finally, we cannot ignore our allies in critical areas of
the world, including Japan and Israel.
 AT: I-LAW K

International law is effective and the aff’s technical approach is the best heuristic
for mediating ethical concerns and legal manipulability
Kalpouzos 7 [Ioannis, Professor of Law at The City Law School, "David Kennedy, Of War and
Law", J Conflict Security Law, (2007) 12 (3): 485-492,
jcsl.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/3/485.full]

It is important, however, not to sweepingly and debilitatingly generalise discontent about the current
situation. The structural disconnects of the legal system do not mean that law and legal language
cannot be part of the solution. Actions and motives are abstracted in logical categories that seem to reflect a normative consensus or a
structural status quo. Admittedly, the intercession of the law-creating process by the structural and conceptual wall of sovereignty differentiates it from
the equivalent process in national legal orders. The
often-described weaknesses of the international system, the absence of a
sovereign to impose formal validity and the often-disheartening problems of enforcement are
very real difficulties that plague international law and, especially, the laws of war. The stakes there may seem higher
and the scrutinising process weaker. Such problems are sometimes intimidating for legal analysis, but should
not be off-putting and they should not lead to disregard of the importance of law as a tool in the
international system. To the extent that war is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means,
and that politics is the interaction between different actors in society, legal regulation of such an
interaction, in peace or war, is possible and, indeed, necessary. The task might be discouragingly
complex but the better the use of legal tools, the more accurate the observation of practice, and
the more legitimate the processes of legal abstraction are, the more the rules will be valid and
effective. Ultimately, Kennedy's diagnosis warrants a prescription. The question that arises is, to which extent
focusing on ‘lawfare’ holds interpretative value in order to address the issues at hand. Although the conflicts within
legal concepts and among legal institutions cannot, of course, be resolved once and for all and although there
will always be room for manipulation and instrumentalisation of the rules, any approach should seek to
clarify the interrelations between concepts and actors. Kennedy does provide interesting insights on this
interrelation, but he does so at a rather macroscopic level. The diagnosis of structural and conceptual
confusion warrants a technical legal approach for dealing with the specific issues that arise from it.
Formal legal thoroughness will never substitute personal moral choices, but it can be an important
tool in the effort to minimise the uncertainty in the use of the rules and the weakness of the
institutional structure. The law or even a formal expert consensus will never substitute the necessary
choices by soldiers on the ground or by politicians deciding to wage war, but legal language provides a formal
platform for claims to be supported and actions to be justified. This will not substitute the important
moral choices, but it can ground them in a legal structure that reflects substantive core values
and provides useful tools to assess them. Furthermore, there is a fear that by focusing on ‘lawfare’ one can come very close to
accept it. Accordingly, the relativisation of the formal validity of legal claims can clear the way for supporting
utterly subjective decisions, allowing more powerful actors to manipulate the loopholes. The structural
and substantive loopholes of the legal system are real enough, and Kennedy is right to point that out, but by accepting the
practice of ‘lawfare’, a degree of unwarranted justification can be attached to the exploitation of these
loopholes. This, arguably, will not work in favour of the cohesiveness of the legal system, especially
in an area as legally contentious as the laws of war. Kennedy's disenchantment with the expert consensus and
its practical use is perhaps understandable, and his exhortation to ‘experience politics as our vocation and responsibility as our fate’ (p.
172) is altogether laudable, but we need more than that. We need to know exactly how to assess decisions
and actions on the ground, and professionalism in ‘lawfare’ and moral exhortations are not
substitutes for legal analysis. Both the strengths and weaknesses of this book reinforce the need for a
clearer understanding of the relevant legal rules, their interaction and the nature of the existing
legal regime.
Belief in the efficacy of international law doesn’t create a new violent Leviathan---
it’s specialized aims ensure flexibility and reflexivity
Jouannet 7 [Emmanuelle, Professor, Universite Paris I - Pantheon Sorbonne, “ESSAY: WHAT
IS THE USE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW? INTERNATIONAL LAW AS A 21ST CENTURY
GUARDIAN OF WELFARE”, 28 Mich. J. Int'l L. 815, Michigan Journal of International Law,
2007, lexis]

The specific welfare-inducing law and bioethical power issues this Essay addresses should not
indicate partisanship or militancy, and do not have the negative meanings that authors such
as Foucault, Hardt, or Negri attribute to them . That is, the development interpreted as
welfare-inducing, interventionist, and bio-political does not necessarily transform contemporary
law into a steel cage that will imprison everything and everyone as a global "Empire" takes its
grip. n36 On the contrary, the terms employed in this essay are less radical, and describe practices which
are infinitely more ambivalent than the above authors suggest. [*829] They aim to convey, in the most
accurate way possible, what flows from the observation of various existing legal practices related
to socialising processes and to illustrate the fact that, contrary to what certain authors have been
contending for a long time - and most notably since the failure of endeavours such as the New International Economic
Order in the 1970s - that international law not only transports liberal values, but also welfare-
inducing and interventionist practices and values. n37 Liberal welfare-inducing law thus represents a
new legal, political and economic configuration at the international level, and not merely a
liberal configuration. C. Instrumental Logic and Common Principles: Internalization, Fragmentation and
Constitutionalization The principal role of international law does still consist, of course, of liberal regulation of conduct and of the
resolution of conflict, aimed at promoting coexistence of sovereign liberties. But besides its original prescriptive and organizational
roles, international law also fulfils a substantive, interventionist role. It governs domestic situations, reconstructs States, promotes
democracy, and addresses collective interests pertaining to the environment, health, and culture. The result has been one of the most
important developments in contemporary international law: the regulation not only of interstate relations, but also of domestic
situations. The fact that rules of international origin increasingly penetrate into domestic systems is testimony to a post-1945 desire
to regulate the conduct of private individuals or the conduct of States vis-a-vis their subjects in addition to regulating relations that
are strictly interstate. Although this decisive aspect no longer commands as much of international lawyers' attention as it used to, the
internalization of international law has long-term implications for the definition of international law, as well as its relationship with
domestic law and the re-designation of our field of study, as has been demonstrated by Jean Combacau. n38 Moreover, as
emphasised by Gunther Teubner, Jean-Guy Belley, and Charles-Albert Morand, n39 it is [*830] used for the attainment of specific
objectives and to re-equilibrate economic, political, and social imbalances. The predominant economic system is obviously not
indifferent to this development since it is based on a functionalist rationale, as are the ongoing commercialization and legalization of
the social relationships that are collateral to economic and financial transactions. The market and political economics therefore play
an important role in this context, but the way in which legal rationale is evolving is neither a consequence nor an implication of these
factors. The international legal order has a natural tendency to decentralize and divide itself in accordance with the various different
social and economic activities it overarches. Another part of the explanation lies in the materialization of the new initiators and co-
creators of law together with whom the former Secretary General of the United Nations aimed at formulating a Global Compact, but
it lies also in the emergence of that famous "involuntary community of risks" referred to earlier. Law is resorted to in reaction to
risks and new threats, and often the available remedy is not of a general nature, but a specific response. The propensity to seek legal
remedies has led to a legal regime that is attaining specificity and poignancy in a variety of sectors (the environment, crime,
bioethics, etc.). International society has become a society of law characterized not by a shift toward world statehood, but by the
emergence of different "pools of law." n40 Also, the law has become a "social technique" through which a
number of profitable (economic) activities and environmental, investment, trade, interstate, and
individual rights-related problems are defined, managed, and channelled in as coherent a way as
possible. Some observers have also remarked that international and transnational rules appear to be becoming a lot more mobile,
variable, alterable. They have become the immediate transposition of various substantive, cultural, social, and economic objectives
set by States and international institutions as well as private operators. They convey a social consensus achieved by these actors at a
given moment in response to a given social and political situation. In other words, what was formerly merely a pragmatist and anti-
conceptualist conception of law attributed to a strong Anglo-American movement has actually become a reality of international law.
It thus comes as no surprise that the international legal structure is now undergoing the same development that once characterized
domestic [*831] systems: namely, that of a proliferation of legal aims and functions. This follows an inflation of rules of hard law or
soft law, of the bureaucratization of international relations by international institutions, and of the increasingly technical nature of
certain branches of international law, the aims of which are very particular and precise. n41 In international law, however, more so
than in domestic law, legal rules proliferate because existing texts are rarely abrogated. One convention, directive, resolution or
declaration follows the next, yet the formation of new rules does not entail the disappearance of the old ones. Much uncertainty still
surrounds the concepts of desuetude and caducity, wherefore the amount of legal rules does not cease to increase. It is also revealing
that the texts are becoming ever longer, as they are now more exhaustive and technical. They are also increasingly numerated. The
greater complexity and detail of current rules derives from their sector-related specificity. Correspondingly, the legal prescriptions of
rules now weigh more heavily. New goals are emerging that are characteristic of a welfare-inducing society, backed by rules that are
prospective and that act as an incitation rather than a sanction. The impressive development by firms of codes of best practice is a
perfect example of this. n42 Finally, there has been a noticeable change in the sources of law, as all that is practical, bilateral, or
singular is preferred to what is multilateral, and to modes of creation that are too formal. The increased number of sources and
specificity of international law lead to fragmentation, creating a multitude of specialized or regional sub-systems. Conventions and
legal texts are more and more often specialized or regional in nature, sometimes extremely technical, and aim to regulate social
reality with the largest possible efficacy. In fact, a characteristic aspect of this welfare-inducing development has been an anarchic
proliferation of rules destined to regulate many areas of social life. This proliferation also produces incomplete and instable rules.
Each legal subsystem provides for its own particular responses and functions in ways that satisfy very specific needs. The solutions
offered by these subsystems most often do not take into account common connections with other fields. The subsystems are
set up by conventions that have a limited sphere of application, calibrated to the pursuit of a
precise substantive result. This makes them easier to conclude, and they are necessary in
that they enable international law to achieve its various concrete, specialized, and
technical aims that rely on the constant increase [*832] in legal rules in international society. But
they favour segmentation of certain substantive areas to the detriment of the sum total, since specialized rules are directed at the
pursuit of immediate and particular aims and not of general objectives. They thereby create the impression that international law is
structured in a fragmented and disorderly manner, focussing on very particular economic, financial, environmental, social, or other
aims. There is nothing novel in illustrating the effects of this rationale. Substantive results are achieved in a functionalist manner
and in ways that satisfy immediate interests, by trumping the law that is deemed formal and without due consideration for the
general collective interest, with the consequence that the values to which these interests should be naturally subordinate are ignored.
International law is thus marked by a new positivity and corresponds to a logic of efficiency. This
extension has been brought about by a welfare-inducing international society which, although not a State, has its own somewhat
uncoordinated and uncontrolled way of dealing with technological developments, the surge of capitalism, bureaucratic
specialization, new adjacent security challenge, and the various new and social objectives defined by international society itself.
This new law is effective because it does not allow for overly rigid or dogmatic
conceptions of law, but rather is concrete, specialized and regionalized, adapted to
particular objectives and particular contexts. Further, the elaboration and application of the law flows from the
consensus of all the various actors involved, and not merely of States. The success of a specialized response lends credence to the
idea of a purely instrumental conception of internationalism, where international law is merely a vehicle for the interests of certain
groups of actors in international society. This has prompted some to assume that international rules have
become irreversibly dispersed or pluralized. However, while it is true that international law has
acquired an instrumental and systemic function, it is not limited to this function. International
law has thus far not become entirely instrumental. Research into the constitutionalization and unification of
international law as well as the idea of communal law remains relevant as an analytical instrument, on the condition that such
research is not taken to provide fail-safe and all-inclusive descriptions of reality. Not only do they reflect a certain
regulatory ideal inherent in internationalist mentality, but they also find confirmation in
pragmatist research into the positivist elements of common and unifying principles. n43 A
universalizing approach to certain principles of international [*833] law is quite
defensible, as is the underlying ideological dimension, since the aim of universalization is the
"sharing of a wider sense." n44
 AT: PROLIF K
Prolif impacts outweigh the K and flip ethics
Ford 11 [Chris Ford, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He previously
served as U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State, and General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
1/10/11, Havea and Have-Nots: "Unfairness in nuclear Weapons possession,"
www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=658]
First, however, let’s provide some context. As I noted above, it is fascinating that in the long history of military technological have/have not dynamics,
the international politics of nuclear weaponry has acquired such a strong flavor of moral critique. To my knowledge, after all, one did not see Xiongnu
politics emphasizing how darned unfair it was of those nasty Chinese Emperors to monopolize the presumed secrets of China’s bingjia strategic
literature. Nor does the unfairness of Byzantine efforts to control the recipe for Greek Fire seem to have become a prevalent trope of Frankish or
Persian diplomacy. “Have
nots” have surely always coveted powerful tools possessed by the “haves,” or at
least wished that the “haves” did not possess them. It seems pretty unusual, however, for non-possessors
to articulate such understandable envy and resentment in the moral language of “unfairness,” and to
assume that this presumed injustice should motivate the “haves” to change their behavior. This
argument seems to be a curiously modern phenomenon.¶ One might respond that the very specialness of nuclear weapons makes such a position
appropriate. After all, while a local monopoly on iron swords may have given the Vikings some advantage in skirmishes with Native Americans in what
the Norsemen called Vinland, such technological asymmetry was not strategically decisive. (Indeed, the Vikings seem ultimately to have been pushed
out of the New World entirely.) If iron had threatened to offer the Vikings an insuperable advantage, would the Skraelings have been justified in
developing a moral language of “have/have not” resentment that demanded either the sharing of iron weaponry or Viking disarmament in the name of
achieving a global “iron zero”? I’m skeptical, but for the sake of argument let’s say “maybe.” ¶ The
argument that nuclear weapons
are “special,” however, is a two-edged sword. Perhaps they are indeed so peculiarly potent and militarily advantageous that
their asymmetric possession is sufficiently “unfair” to compel sharing or disarmament. Such an argument, however, sits only
awkwardly – to say the least – with the simultaneous claim by many advocates of the “have/have not” critique that nuclear weapons have no real
utility in the modern world and can therefore safely be abandoned by their possessors. After all, it is hard to paint nuclear
weapons as being strategically decisive and useless at the same time. (If they are indeed useless,
the conclusion of “unfairness” hardly sounds very compelling. If they aren’t useless, however, it may
be appropriately hard to abolish them.)¶ More importantly, any argument about the destructively
“special” character of nuclear weaponry cuts against the “unfairness critique” in that it is this very
specialness that seems to rob the “have/have not” issue of its moral relevance. Unlike iron swords, the bingjia
literature, Greek Fire, or essentially all other past military technologies the introduction of which produced global control/acquisition dynamics,
nuclear weapons have introduced existential questions about the future of human civilization
which utterly swamp the conventional playground morality of unfair “have/have not”
competition. No prior technology held the potential to destroy humanity, making nuclear
weapons – with the possible exception of certain techniques of biological weaponry – a sui generis case to which the
conventional “unfairness” critique simply does not very persuasively apply.¶ III. Implications¶ Let me be
clear about this. The moral critique of nuclear weapons possession may yet speak to the issue of whether
anyone should have them. (This is not the place for a discussion of the feasibility of the remedies proposed by the disarmament
community, but let us at least acknowledge the existence of a real moral issue.) But this matter has nothing to do with
“unfairness” per se – and to the extent that it purports to, one should give it little credence. If
indeed nuclear weapons do menace the survival of humanity, it is essentially irrelevant whether
their possession is “unfairly” distributed – and it is certainly no solution to make the global balance
of weaponry more “fair” by allowing more countries to have them. (Disarmament advocates hope to address the
fairness problem by eliminating nuclear weapons, of course, but this is just icing. Disarmament is almost never articulated as being driven primarily by
fairness; the critical part of that argument is instead consequentialist, stressing the dangers that any nuclear weapons are said to present.) As a moral
critique, in other words, the
fair/unfair dichotomy fails to speak intelligibly to the world’s nuclear
dilemma. It isn’t really about “fairness” at all.¶ Given the entanglement of nuclear weapons issues with quasi-
existential questions potentially affecting the survival of millions or perhaps even billions of people, moreover, it
stands to reason that an “unfair” outcome that nonetheless staves off such horrors is a
perfectly good solution . On this scale, one might say, non-catastrophe entirely trumps accusations of
“unfairness.” Questions of stability are far more important than issues of asymmetric
distribution.¶ This, of course, has powerful implications for nonproliferation policy, because pointing out the hollowness of
the “unfairness” argument as applied to nuclear weapons suggests the moral sustainability of
nonproliferation even if complete nuclear disarmament cannot be achieved and the world
continues to be characterized by inequalities in weapons possession. We forget this at our
collective peril.¶ Don’t get me wrong. “Unfairness” arguments will presumably continue to have a political impact upon the diplomacy of
nuclear nonproliferation, either as a consequence of genuine resentment or as a cynical rationalization for the destabilizing pursuit of dangerous
capabilities. (Indeed, one might even go so far as to suspect that the emergence of the “unfairness” critique in modern diplomatic discourse is in some
sense partly the result of how morally compelling nonproliferation is, in this context, irrespective of the “fairness” of “have/have not” outcomes.
Precisely because the moral case for nonproliferation-driven inequality is so obvious and so compelling if
such imbalance serves the interests of strategic stability, perhaps it was necessary to develop a new rationale of “fairness”
to help make proliferation aspirations seem more legitimate. Skraelings, one imagines, did not need an elaborate philosophy
of “fairness” in order to justify trying to steal iron weapons; the desirability of such tools was simply obvious, and any
effort to obtain them unsurprising and not in itself condemnable.) But even in this democratic and egalitarian age, merely to incant the mantra of
“unfairness” – or to inveigh against the existence of “haves” when there also exist “have nots” – is not the same thing as having a compelling moral
argument. Indeed, I would submit that we
lose our moral bearings if we allow “unfairness” arguments to
distract us from what is really important here: substantive outcomes in the global security
environment.¶ “Unfairness,” in other words, is an overrated critique, and “fairness” is an overrated destination. At least
where nuclear weapons are concerned, there are more important considerations in play. Let us not
forget this.

Prolif exacerbates inequality—turns the K

Biswas 1 [Shampa Biswas, Whitman College Politics Professor, December 2001, “Nuclear
apartheid" as political position: race as a postcolonial resource?, Alternatives 26.4]
At one level, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out, the concept of apartheid relates to a discourse about "democracy." (49) To use
apartheid to designate the unequal distribution of nuclear resources then is also simultaneously to draw attention to the
undemocratic character of international relations--or, more literally, the exclusion of a group of people from some kind of legitimate
and just entitlement. More specifically, to talk in terms of nuclear haves and have-nots is to talk in terms of
a concept of democratic justice based on the "possession" (or lack thereof) of something. "Apartheid," as Sumit Sarkar
points out, "implies as its valorised Other a notion of equal rights." (50) But that this something is "nuclear
weapons" complicates the issue a great deal. If the vision of democracy that is implicit in the concept of
nuclear apartheid implies a world of "equal possession" of nuclear weapons, a position implied in the
Indian decision to test, that is a frightening thought indeed. Yet surely even India does not subscribe to that vision of
democracy. "Would India," asks Sarkar, "welcome a nuclearised Nepal or Bangladesh?" (51) If Jaswant Singh is serious that "the
country"s national security in a world of nuclear proliferation lies either in global disarmament or in exercise of the principle of
equal and legitimate security for all," (52) then it should indeed support the "equal and legitimate" nuclearization of its neighbors,
which is extremely unlikely given its own demonstrated hegemonic aspirations in the South Asian region. (53) Further, if India does
indeed now sign the NPT and the CTBT, and sign them in the garb of a nuclear power as it wants to do, what does that say about its
commitment to nuclear democracy? Even if India and Pakistan were to be included in the treaties as NWSs, all
that would do is expand the size of the categories, not delegitimize the unequal privileges and
burdens written into the categories themselves. ¶ Indian military scientists claim that India has now accumulated
enough data for reliable future weaponization without explosive testing, and Indian leaders have, since the tests, indicated more
willingness to sign the CTBT. India has already voluntarily accepted restraints on the exports of nuclear-related materials, as
required by the NPT. According to an Indian strategic analyst with respect to negotiation of the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, the
next major arms-control treaty to be discussed in the Conference on Disarmament, "The key question in relation to the FMCT is not
if it is global and nondiscriminatory. It is whether India has sufficient nuclear material at hand to maintain a credible nuclear
deterrent." (54) If all India ever wanted was to move from the side of the discriminated to the side of
the discriminators, so much for speaking for democratic ideals through the symbol of nuclear
apartheid. (55) ¶ There are several troublesome issues here with respect to the concept of "nuclear
democracy." On the one hand, it seems clear that the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons sits ill at
ease with any notion of democratic entitlement. It seems that rather than equalizing the possession
of nuclear weapons, it would be equalizing the dispossession of nuclear weapons that
entails a more compelling democratic logic. (56) On the other hand, there is also the question of the
fundamentally undemocratic nature of nuclear weapons themselves. At one level, the sheer scope of such
weapons to kill and destroy indiscriminately (a democratic logic here?) renders any laws of 'just war"
moot. As Braful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik point out, the very use of nuclear weapons would be to break the principle of
proportionate use of force, and such weapons clearly cannot be made to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants as
required in the just conduct of war. (57) ¶ In this context, it might be worth pointing to the 1996 ruling by the International Court of
Justice at the Hague that stipulated that the "the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of
international law applicable in armed conflict and, in particular, the principles and rules of humanitarian law." (58) If the
regulation of war can be considered a democratic exercise, then nuclear weapons by their very
nature make that exercise futile. At another level is the secrecy that has historically and perhaps necessarily
accompanied the development of nuclear-weapons programs, relegated to an aspect of the national-security state that is immunized
from democratic scrutiny. Chatterjee argues that nuclear weapons involve a technology that is intrinsically
undemocratic -- both domestically and internationally -- since the enormous destructive potential that they
embody requires a great deal of secrecy and inaccessibility. (59) Itty Abraham's excellent analysis shows how
the intertwined emergence of the independent Indian state and the atomic-energy establishment legally foreclosed the democratic
and institutional oversight of the entire atomic-energy enterprise because of its proximity to national security. In other words, the
state sponsorship and control of nuclear science, and indeed its constitution in and through nuclear science, makes both science and
the state susceptible to undemocratic governance. (60)

Their alt is political grandstanding- no progress towards disarmament will occur

until we alter the security calculations that drive weapons development --- de
Arajau ev that wanting to be nicer doesn’t alter the security pressures that drive
state decision-making supports this as well
DR. LAWRENCE SCHEINMAN, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR NONPROLIFERATION AND REGIONAL ARMS CONTROL, 3-13-96
http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/acda/speeches/schein/scheiott.htm
The 1995 NPT Conference decisions reflect the strong interest on the part of NPT non-nuclear-weapon states to see greater
progress made toward full implementation of NPT Article VI and, in particular, the achievement of nuclear disarmament.
Following the 1995 NPT Conference, the small minority of countries (both within and without the NPT regime) that were not
satisfied with the NPT Conference outcome began to agitate publicly for those measures not agreed by the 1995 NPT Review and
Extension Conference. They began selectively to reinterpret the Conference decisions and to demand the establishment
of certain arms control measures. In a direct challenge to the agenda set forth at the 1995 NPT Conference, these states have
called for creation of linkage between important and internationally agreed initiatives, such as a FMCT, and rhetorical and unagreed
initiatives, such as creating a time-bound framework for nuclear disarmament. The actions of these few states, including some not
party to the NPT, belie the very real cooperative atmosphere that resulted in the agreement to the 1995 NPT Conference decisions as
well as the growing de-emphasis on "bloc politics" in favor of national or regional security perspectives. Their actions have
undermined efforts to move forward constructively on important arms control initiatives, including the CTBT and FMCT.
It has also run counter to stated interest in continuing the constructive dialogue that flourished during the 1995 NPT
Conference process. If continued progress is to be made toward mutually shared arms control objectives, such as those outlined in
the "Principles and Objectives" decision, it will be essential for these few states to stand down from the kind of approach that has
characterized their participation in the arms control debate over the past eight months. Allow me, if you will, to take this point a bit
further. Disarmament on demand or timetable disarmament is not a tenable proposition -- rather, it is political
grandstanding that blocks out of consideration whether and to what extent the security environment in which
disarmament is to take place is conducive to such measures. We live today, and will for some time to come, in a period
of transition between a world anchored on two relatively well disciplined superpower alliances which defined the
international security order, and a future that is unknown and difficult to map with confidence and which is more
likely than not to be characterized by forms of complex multipolarity in which local, regional and transnationalist
forces weigh heavily. Building down one security order requires a commensurate building up of alternative orders if
stability is to be safeguarded. The goal of the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons must take this consideration
into account. What is critically important at this stage is to engage in a process that moves us inexorably toward that goal
but avoids the error of generating expectations that cannot be met, thus feeding the flames of disillusionment and
frustration and reinforcing those who would argue against changing the nuclear status quo. This debate over nuclear
disarmament presents a continuous challenge, and one that is not easily addressed. The insistence on the part of non-nuclear
weapon states for "disarmament on demand" must be reconciled with the reality that achievement of nuclear
disarmament will not happen unless and until the international security situation evolves to the point where, in effect,
nuclear weapons can be written out of our national security doctrine and strategies. Certainly the international security
situation has changed dramatically from the days of the Cold War; U.S. strategic doctrine has evolved in response to this changed
security environment and, as we announced in completing our Nuclear Posture Review, nuclear weapons today play a smaller role in
U.S. military planning than at any time in the past. The reality, however, is that while much improved, the security situation today
continues to present significant threats to the United States and its allies, and to global stability overall.Many states appear
unwilling to accept the fact that, in spite of the commitment of the United States and other nuclear weapon states to the
elimination of nuclear weapons -- commitments that have been repeatedly reaffirmed and reinforced through the continued
progress in nuclear arms reduction -- nuclear disarmament cannot and will not be achieved overnight. Our long experience
illustrates the fact that nuclear arms reduction and elimination is a tedious process -- necessarily so. Like it or not, the fact is
that the implementation schedule for START I and II -- agreements that already have been negotiated -- will take many years to
fulfill. Without getting into a detailed discussion of what this audience already well knows concerning U.S.-Russian nuclear arms
control and disarmament measures, let me just say that now that the U.S. Senate has provided its advice and consent to START II
our primary concern is achieving consent to ratification by the Russian Duma. Following this, we intend to work with Russia on the
deactivation of START II forces. During their September 1994 summit meeting, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin committed to
consider further reductions of, and limitations on, remaining nuclear forces once START II was ratified. In the meantime,
implementation of START I is running several years ahead of schedule.
Alt will be co-opted to support nationalist and exclusionary politics—India proves
Biswas 1 [Shampa Biswas, Whitman College Politics Professor, December 2001, “Nuclear
apartheid" as political position: race as a postcolonial resource?, Alternatives 26.4]

The enunciation of the nuclear-apartheid argument by Indian political leaders in the name of a discriminated India raises another
set of issues. Herein is a question about identity and interests. As argued earlier with respect to the performative aspects of
foreign/security policy, to speak in the name of India is also simultaneously to produce India as a coherent and
bounded entity. But scripting India in this fashion means erasing the hierarchies, the exclusions, the
differences that mark the space called India. Indeed, to imagine this entity called India as a "community" requires not just an act of
collective will, but also and always a "will to power." In other words, the question of "whose imagined community?" is rendered coherent and bounded,
and what interests are served by that will-to-power cannot be neglected. (61) When Indian leaders
use the nuclear-apartheid
argument and make the claims to certain democratic entitlements in using that argument, they
will into being an India that is in itself neither coherent nor bounded, and hence render invisible
the incoherences and contradictions that threaten that body politic. It is here that the question of Hindu
nationalism becomes particularly salient because implicit in this production of India is the
establishment of a certain hegemonic vision of India (Hindu, male, upper-caste/upper-class) that serves various specific
interests. In other words, the success of Hindu nationalism depends on the ability to interpellate Indians as "Hindus," a boundary-making exercise with
its own racialized, exclusionary implications. That a significant amount of political labor is expended by the BJP in claiming Hindus as the "natural
inhabitants" of India and on drawing the boundaries around the "Hindu self" reveals how unstable and problematic this boundary-making exercise is. I
will investigate this process a little more closely. There
is an implicit claim in the Hindu nationalist discourse about
who "belongs" to India and who is an "outsider." First, this requires establishing Hindus as the "natural" or "original" inhabitants
of India through erasing the history of Aryan conquest and settlement in India. There has been a proliferation of literature that attempts to rewrite this
history by demonstrating the indigenous roots of Hinduism. Hindu militant organizations, like the RSS, have been working among the tribal and hills
people in India and attempting to bring them into the fold of Hinduism. The labeling of such groups as vanvasis (forest dwellers) rather than adivasis
(original dwellers) suggests a conscious attempt to erase the association of Hinduism with "alien" Aryan roots. (62) This is always accompanied by the
attempt to project Muslims as "foreigners" (Babar ki aulad, or progeny of Babar), (63) as invaders and conquerors, much like the British (only worse).
(64) The second assumption about who belongs to the Hindu community is even more problematic and has had a much longer history of contestation.
There have been at least two sources of resistance to the Hindu nationalist definition of the Hindu community. Romila Thapar's work has done much to
problematize the very conceptualization of a Hindu religion or a Hindu community. She claims that it was orientalist scholarship that attempted to
reconstruct the various parallel systems, practices, and religious beliefs that existed in India (better called Hindu religions, in the plural) into a coherent
and rational faith called Hinduism, and this was done from the familiar perspective of Semitic religions. (65) Even more importantly, the construct of
the "Hindu community" that Hindu nationalists draw on is a particularistic Brahmanical Hinduism that has been maintained through caste hierarchy.
Groups now designated as "untouchables" have sometimes been considered as "outcastes" by upper-caste Hindus, and hence not really Hindus. Many
such groups have themselves often resisted being included within a generalized, monolithic Hindu political community. (66) Much of the current BJP
support comes from upper-caste, middle-class, urban, northern India, even though the party has attempted with some limited success to broaden
considerably its support structure. (67) This upper-caste orientation of the party was to some extent revealed in the reaction to the Mandal
Commission's recommendation, when it was charged that this would result in "apartheid, Indian style," dividing the Hindus as a community. (68)
Similarly, the politics of the political parties representing lower-caste interests is attributed a "sinister design in undermining the very fabric of Indian
society." (69) Hence, the grassroots work conducted by the BJP, RSS, and other affiliated organizations who feel it necessary repeatedly to assert that
Dalit groups are "part and parcel of Hindu society." (70) There are also other religious groups who, although they are claimed by Hindu nationalists to
be part of the Hindu ambit, have rejected and continue to reject such an incorporation. This includes Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and various Bhakti sects
such as Kabirpanthis and Vallabhacharya, all of whom the BJP considers as offshoots of Hinduism but who have always resisted such inclusion. For
instance, the construction and consolidation of a singular, well-defined Sikh identity had itself come from the earlier resistance of the Singh Sabha
movement to the assimilationist attempts of the Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj at "purification" and "reconversion" in the late nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries. (71) The Sikh demands that led to the Punjab crisis are seen by the BJP as a creation of a pseudosecularist politics in which groups
claim a minority status to use the state for its own interests. This attempt to appropriate Sikh identity erases the legitimacy of many of the genuine
political demands of Sikhs t hat continue to be ignored. The point is that since the days of Hindu ideologue Savarkar's Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? there
has been an explicit attempt to fix the meaning of Hinduism by appropriating and assimilating within its fold various groups, many of whose self-
identities have been staked in opposition to Hinduism. (72) In Savarkar's work there is also an explicit attempt to construct this Hindu nation as a
"race." It is quite common to see the category of "race" invoked in the writings of many of the early Hindu nationalists. Many such writers borrowed
from Western racial theory to conceptualize religious communities as distinct "races." (73) It is interesting to see that even though important
ideologues like Savarkar and Golwalkar attempt to define race at least partially in biological terms, (74) the thrust of the argument is on cultural
variables. Hence a Hindu in Savarkar's discourse is one "who has inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race as expressed chiefly in their
common classical language Sanskrit and re presented by a common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, rites and
rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs and festivals." (75) Race, in Golwalkar's writing, is defined as "a hereditary society having common customs,
common language, common memories of glory or disaster; in short, it is a population with a common origin under one culture," (76) and it is on this
basis that the "Hindu race" is defined. In such an analysis, race and culture are both constituted through the category of religion. (77) It is typical also of
the Hindu communal discourse, as Purushottam Agarwal points out, that various ethnic groups owing allegiance to Islam are transformed into one
single race, the Muslim. (78) But unlike the category of "the nation," it is very rare to find the category of "race" explicitly invoked in the contemporary
Hindu nationalist discourse. Yet even though the BJP does not explicitly invoke the category of race very much (affiliated organizations like the VHP
and the RSS still refer to race occasionally), these early formulations inform the BJP construction of Hindu identity and non-Hindu others. Hence,
not only are Muslims homogenized into one monolithic community, but also associated with a
range of essentialized negative characteristics such as "dirt," "excessive libidinal energies" or "animal sexuality," "backward
cultural norms," and so on. Prominent here is the phenomenal procreative power attributed to the racialized community that is a trademark of racial
discourse almost everywhere. VHP propaganda stresses both the practice of polygamy and the virility of the Muslim male as contributing to fertility
rates that would lead to the Muslim population eventually outnumbering the Hindus. To quote a VHP leader, "Muslims follow a more insidious path to
conversion--seduction and then marriage with innocent Hindu girls." (79) A VHP pamphlet states that the Muslim family-planning motto is, "Hum
paanch, hamare pacchis" ("We are five"; i.e., one Muslim man and his four wives, and we have twenty-five children). (80) Similarly, Muslim migrants
from Bangladesh are attributed with animal sexuality, dirt, and undesirable social behavior, which includes in particular the rape of Hindu women. n
other words, to hail Indians as Hindus is also an attempt to appropriate many non-Hindus as Hindus, while simultaneously rejecting Muslims from the
Indian nation. This is what makes the definition of the Hindu nation within BJP discourse both
problematically broad and dangerously narrow. Hence, if the invocation of "race" through the
nuclear-apartheid position by the BJP produces India as a particular kind of nation, one must ask who
is racially excluded through this boundary-making exercise, and with what implications. The
claim of Hindu nationalists to represent a homogenous Hindu community with pregiven interests in the
construction of a Hindu India is a hegemonic project that serves particular caste and class interests. Here the question of India's
poverty also becomes more relevant when it is understood that this particular hegemonic vision of (nuclear) India makes
possible the redistribution of state resources to a nuclear program that does not have uniform
effects across the Indian spectrum. (81) If the threat of economic sanctions was unable to deter Indian and Pakistani
nuclearization, one wonders how much of that was a result of the unequal distribution of the burdens of
sanctions within a political body and apathy toward the plight of those most adversely affected by
such sanctions (i.e., the marginalized groups in society).
 AT: TERRORISM K
Their critique is incoherent – it mischaracterizes orthodox terrorism studies,
lacks any political relevance, and is so overbroad it’s meaningless
Jones and Smith, 9 - * University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia AND ** King's
College, University of London, London, UK (David and M.L.R.,“We're All Terrorists Now:
Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 32,
Issue 4 April 2009 , pages 292 – 302, Taylor and Francis)

At the core of this critical, ethicist, relativism therefore lies a syllogism that holds all violence is
terror: Western states use violence, therefore, Western states are terrorist. Further, the greater
terrorist uses the greater violence: Western governments exercise the greater violence.
Therefore, it is the liberal democracies rather than Al Qaeda that are the greater terrorists.
In its desire to empathize with the transformative ends, if not the means of terrorism generally and Islamist terror in particular,
critical theory reveals itself as a form of Marxist unmasking. Thus, for Booth “terror has multiple forms” (original italics) and the
real terror is economic, the product it would seem of “global capitalism” (p. 75). Only the engagee intellectual academic finding in
deconstructive criticism the philosophical weapons that reveal the illiberal neo-conservative purpose informing the conventional
study of terrorism and the democratic state's prosecution of counterterrorism can identify the real terror lurking behind the
“manipulation of the politics of fear” (p. 75).
Moreover, the resolution of this condition of escalating violence requires not any strategic solution that creates security as the basis
for development whether in London or Kabul. Instead, Booth, Burke, and the editors contend that the only
solution to “the world-historical crisis that is facing human society globally” (p. 76) is universal
human “emancipation.” This, according to Burke, is “the normative end” that critical theory pursues. Following Jurgen
Habermas, the godfather of critical theory, terrorism is really a form of distorted communication. The solution to this problem of
failed communication resides not only in the improvement of living conditions, and “the political taming of unbounded capitalism,”
but also in “the telos of mutual understanding.” Only through this telos with its “strong normative bias towards non violence” (p. 43)
can a universal condition of peace and justice transform the globe. In other words, the only ethical solution to
terrorism is conversation: sitting around an un-coerced table presided over by Kofi Annan,
along with Ken Booth, Osama bin Laden, President Obama, and some European Union pacifist
sandalista, a transcendental communicative reason will emerge to promulgate norms of
transformative justice. As Burke enunciates, the panacea of un-coerced communication would establish “a secularism that
might create an enduring architecture of basic shared values” (p. 46).
In the end, un-coerced norm projection is not concerned with the world as it is, but how it ought to
be. This not only compounds the logical errors that permeate critical theory, it advances an
ultimately utopian agenda under the guise of soi-disant cosmopolitanism where one somewhat
vaguely recognizes the “human interconnection and mutual vulnerability to nature, the cosmos
and each other” (p. 47) and no doubt bursts into spontaneous chanting of Kumbaya.
In analogous visionary terms, Booth defines real security as emancipation in a way that denies any definitional rigor to either term.
The struggle against terrorism is, then, a struggle for emancipation from the oppression of political violence everywhere.
Consequently, in this Manichean struggle for global emancipation against the real terror of Western democracy, Booth further
maintains that universities have a crucial role to play. This also is something of a concern for
those who do not share the critical vision, as university international relations departments are
not now, it would seem, in business to pursue dispassionate analysis but instead are to serve as
cheerleaders for this critically inspired vision.
Overall, the journal's fallacious commitment to emancipation undermines any ostensible claim to pluralism and diversity. Over
determined by this transformative approach to world politics, it necessarily denies the
possibility of a realist or prudential appreciation of politics and the promotion not of universal
solutions but pragmatic ones that accept the best that may be achieved in the circumstances.
Ultimately, to present the world how it ought to be rather than as it is conceals a deep intolerance
notable in the contempt with which many of the contributors to the journal appear to hold
Western politicians and the Western media.6
It is the exploitation of this oughtistic style of thinking that leads the critic into a Humpty
Dumpty world where words mean exactly what the critical theorist “chooses them to mean—
neither more nor less.” However, in order to justify their disciplinary niche they have to insist on
the failure of established modes of terrorism study. Having identified a source of government grants and
academic perquisites, critical studies in fact does not deal with the notion of terrorism as such, but instead the manner in which the
Western liberal democratic state has supposedly manipulated the use of violence by non-state actors in order to “other” minority
communities and create a politics of fear.
Critical Studies and Strategic Theory—A Missed Opportunity
Of course, the doubtful contribution of critical theory by no means implies that all is well with what one might call conventional
terrorism studies. The subject area has in the past produced superficial assessments that have done little to contribute to an
informed understanding of conflict. This is a point readily conceded by John Horgan and Michael Boyle who put “A Case Against
'Critical Terrorism Studies'” (pp. 51-74). Although they do not seek to challenge the agenda, assumptions, and contradictions
inherent in the critical approach, their contribution to the new journal distinguishes itself by actually having a well-organized and
well-supported argument. The authors' willingness to acknowledge deficiencies in some terrorism research shows that critical
self-reflection is already present in existing terrorism studies. It is ironic, in fact, that the most clearly
reflective, original, and critical contribution in the first edition should come from established terrorism researchers who critique the
critical position.
Interestingly, the specter haunting both conventional and critical terrorism studies is that both assume that terrorism is an
existential phenomenon, and thus has causes and solutions. Burke makes this explicit: “The inauguration of this journal,” he
declares, “indeed suggests broad agreement that there is a phenomenon called terrorism” (p. 39). Yet this is not the only way of
looking at terrorism. For a strategic theorist the notion of terrorism does not exist as an independent phenomenon. It is an abstract
noun. More precisely, it is merely a tactic—the creation of fear for political ends—that can be employed by any social actor, be it state
or non-state, in any context, without any necessary moral value being involved.
Ironically, then, strategic theory offers a far more “critical perspective on terrorism” than do the
perspectives advanced in this journal. Guelke, for example, propounds a curiously orthodox standpoint when he
asserts: “to describe an act as one of terrorism, without the qualification of quotation marks to indicate the author's distance from
such a judgement, is to condemn it as absolutely illegitimate” (p. 19). If you are a strategic theorist this is an invalid claim.
Terrorism is simply a method to achieve an end. Any moral judgment on the act is entirely
separate. To fuse the two is a category mistake. In strategic theory, which Guelke ignores, terrorism does not, ipso
facto, denote “absolutely illegitimate violence.”
Intriguingly, Stohl, Booth, and Burke also imply that a strategic understanding forms part of their critical viewpoint. Booth, for
instance, argues in one of his commandments that terrorism should be seen as a conscious human choice. Few strategic theorists
would disagree. Similarly, Burke feels that there does “appear to be a consensus” that terrorism is a “form of instrumental political
violence” (p. 38). The problem for the contributors to this volume is that they cannot emancipate themselves from the very orthodox
assumption that the word terrorism is pejorative. That may be the popular understanding of the term, but inherently terrorism
conveys no necessary connotation of moral condemnation. “Is terrorism a form of warfare, insurgency, struggle, resistance, coercion,
atrocity, or great political crime,” Burke asks rhetorically. But once more he misses the point. All violence is instrumental.
Grading it according to whether it is insurgency, resistance, or atrocity is irrelevant. Any
strategic actor may practice forms of warfare. For this reason Burke's further claim that existing
definitions of terrorism have “specifically excluded states as possible perpetrators and privilege
them as targets,” is wholly inaccurate (p. 38). Strategic theory has never excluded state-directed terrorism as an object
of study, and neither for that matter, as Horgan and Boyle point out, have more conventional studies of terrorism.
Yet, Burke offers—as a critical revelation—that “the strategic intent behind the US bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, Israel's
bombing of Lebanon, or the sanctions against Iraq is also terrorist.” He continues: “My point is not to remind us that states practise
terror, but to show how mainstream strategic doctrines are terrorist in these terms and undermine any prospect of achieving the
normative consensus if such terrorism is to be reduced and eventually eliminated” (original italics) (p. 41). This is not merely
confused, it displays remarkable nescience on the part of one engaged in teaching the next generation of graduates from the
Australian Defence Force Academy. Strategic theory conventionally recognizes that actions on the part of state or non-state actors
that aim to create fear (such as the allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II or the nuclear deterrent posture of Mutually
Assured Destruction) can be terroristic in nature.7 The problem for critical analysts like Burke is that they impute their own moral
valuations to the term terror. Strategic theorists do not. Moreover, the statement that this undermines any prospect that terrorism
can be eliminated is illogical: you can never eliminate an abstract noun.
Consequently, those interested in a truly “critical” approach to the subject should perhaps turn to
strategic theory for some relief from the strictures that have traditionally governed the study of
terrorism, not to self-proclaimed critical theorists who only replicate the flawed understandings
of those whom they criticize. Horgan and Boyle conclude their thoughtful article by claiming that critical terrorism studies
has more in common with traditional terrorism research than critical theorists would possibly like to admit. These reviewers agree:
they are two sides of the same coin.
Conclusion
In the looking glass world of critical terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-
reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast, critical theory's ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive gaze reveals that we are all
terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors who have recourse to violence for whatever motive. Despite their
intolerable othering by media and governments, terrorists are really no different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the
weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state. Terrorists therefore deserve empathy and they must be
discursively engaged.
At the core of this understanding sits a radical pacifism and an idealism that requires not the
status quo but communication and “human emancipation.” Until this radical post-national
utopia arrives both force and the discourse of evil must be abandoned and instead therapy and
un-coerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama Boston Legal Judge Brown
perennially referred to the vague, irrelevant, jargon-ridden statements of lawyers as “jibber
jabber.” The Aberystwyth-based school of critical internationalist utopianism that increasingly
dominates the study of international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order
incoherence that may be termed Aber jabber. The pages of the journal of Critical Studies on
Terrorism are its natural home.
 AT: THREAT CONSTRUCTION LINKS
Threat reps don’t come first
Thierry Balzacq 5, Professor of Political Science and IR @ Namar University, “The Three Faces
of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context” European Journal of International
Relations, London: Jun 2005, Volume 11, Issue 2
However, despite important insights, this position remains highly disputable. The reason behind this qualification is not hard to
understand. With great trepidation my contention is that one of the main distinctions we need to take into account while examining
securitization is that between 'institutional' and 'brute' threats. In its attempts to follow a more radical approach to security
problems wherein threats are institutional, that is, mere products of communicative relations between agents, the CS has neglected
the importance of 'external or brute threats', that is, threats that do
not depend on language mediation to be
what they are - hazards for human life. In methodological terms, however, any framework over-emphasizing either
institutional or brute threat risks losing sight of important aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, securitization, as
suggested earlier, is successful when the securitizing agent and the audience reach a common structured perception of an ominous
development. In this scheme, there is no security problem except through the language game. Therefore, how problems are
'out there' is exclusively contingent upon how we linguistically depict them. This is not always
true . For one, language does not construct reality; at best, it shapes our perception of it.
Moreover, it is not theoretically useful nor is it empirically credible to hold that what we say
about a problem would determine its essence. For instance, what I say about a typhoon
would not change it s essence. The consequence of this position, which would require a deeper articulation, is that some
security problems are the attribute of the development itself. In short, threats are not only institutional; some of them
can actually wreck entire political communities regardless of the use of language . Analyzing
security problems then becomes a matter of understanding how external contexts, including external objective
developments, affect securitization. Thus, far from being a departure from constructivist approaches to security,
external developments are central to it.

No impact to threat con

Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule 3, law profs at Chicago and Harvard, Accommodating
Emergencies, September, http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/48.eap-av.emergency.pdf
Against the view that panicked government officials overreact to an emergency, and unnecessarily curtail civil liberties, we suggest a more constructive
theory of the role of fear. Before
the emergency, government officials are complacent. They do not think
clearly or vigorously about the potential threats faced by the nation. After the terrorist attack or
military intervention, their complacency is replaced by fear. Fear stimulates them to action. Action
may be based on good decisions or bad: fear might cause officials to exaggerate future threats, but it also might arouse them to threats that they would
It is impossible to say in the abstract whether decisions and actions
otherwise not perceive.

provoked by fear are likely to be better than decisions and actions made in a state
of calm . But our limited point is that there is no reason to think that the fear-inspired decisions are likely
to be worse. For that reason, the existence of fear during emergencies does not support the
antiaccommodation theory that the Constitution should be enforced as strictly during emergencies as
during non-emergencies. C. The Influence of Fear during Emergencies Suppose now that the simple view of fear is correct, and that it is
an unambiguously negative influence on government decisionmaking. Critics of accommodation argue that this negative influence of fear justifies
skepticism about emergency policies and strict enforcement of the Constitution. However, this argument is implausible. It
is doubtful that
fear, so understood, has more influence on decisionmaking during emergencies than decisionmaking
during non-emergencies. The panic thesis, implicit in much scholarship though rarely discussed in detail, holds that citizens and officials
respond to terrorism and war in the same way that an individual in the jungle responds to a tiger or snake. The national response to emergency,
because it is a standard fear response, is characterized by the same circumvention of ordinary deliberative processes: thus, (i) the response is instinctive
rather than reasoned, and thus subject to error; and (ii) the error will be biased in the direction of overreaction. While the flight reaction was a good
evolutionary strategy on the savannah, in a complex modern society the flight response is not suitable and can only interfere with judgment. Its
advantage—speed—has minimal value for social decisionmaking. No national emergency requires an immediate reaction—except by trained
professionals who execute policies established earlier—but instead over days, months, or years people make complex judgments about the appropriate
institutional response. And the asymmetrical nature of fear guarantees that people will, during a national emergency, overweight the threat and
underweight other things that people value, such as civil liberties. But if decisionmakers rarely act immediately, then the tiger story cannot bear the
metaphoric weight that is placed on it. Indeed, the flight response has nothing to do with the political response to
the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the attack on September 11. The people who were there—the citizens
and soldiers beneath the bombs, the office workers in the World Trade Center—no doubt felt fear, and most of them probably responded in
the classic way. They experienced the standard physiological effects, and (with the exception of trained soldiers and security officials) fled without
stopping to think. It is also true that in the days and weeks after the attacks, many people felt fear, although not the sort that produces a irresistible urge
to flee. But this kind of fear is not the kind in which cognition shuts down . (Some people did
have more severe mental reactions and, for example, shut themselves in their houses, but these reactions were rare.) The fear is probably better
described as a general anxiety or jumpiness, an anxiety that was probably shared by government officials as well as ordinary citizens.53 While, as we
have noted, there is psychological research suggesting that normal cognition partly shuts down in response to an immediate threat, we
are
aware of no research suggesting that people who feel anxious about a non-immediate threat are
incapable of thinking, or thinking properly, or systematically overweight the threat relative to
other values. Indeed, it would be surprising to find research that clearly distinguished “anxious
thinking” and “calm thinking,” given that anxiety is a pervasive aspect of life. People are anxious about their
children; about their health; about their job prospects; about their vacation arrangements; about walking home at night. No one argues that people’s
anxiety about their health causes them to take too many precautions—to get too much exercise, to diet too aggressively, to go to the doctor too
frequently—and to undervalue other things like leisure. So it
is hard to see why anxiety about more remote threats,
from terrorists or unfriendly countries with nuclear weapons, should cause the public, or elected
officials, to place more emphasis on security than is justified, and to sacrifice civil liberties. Fear
generated by immediate threats, then, causes instinctive responses that are not rational in the cognitive sense, not always desirable, and not a good
basis for public policy, but it
is not this kind of fear that leads to restrictions of civil liberties during
wartime. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II may have been due to racial animus, or
to a mistaken assessment of the risks; it was not the direct result of panic; indeed there was a delay of weeks
before the policy was seriously considered.54 Post-9/11 curtailments of civil liberties, aside from
immediate detentions, came after a significant delay and much deliberation. The civil libertarians’
argument that fear produces bad policy trades on the ambiguity of the word “panic,” which
refers both to real fear that undermines rationality, and to collectively harmful outcomes that
are driven by rational decisions, such as a bank run, where it is rational for all depositors to
withdraw funds if they believe that enough other depositors are withdrawing funds. Once we eliminate
the false concern about fear, it becomes clear that the panic thesis is indistinguishable from the argument that during an emergency people are likely to
make mistakes. But if the only concern is that during emergencies people make mistakes, there would be no reason for demanding that the constitution
be enforced normally during emergencies. Political errors occur during emergencies and nonemergencies, but the stakes are higher during
emergencies, and that is the conventional reason why constitutional constraints should be relaxed.

Threat inflation would get our authors fired

Earl C. Ravenal 9, distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies @ Cato, is professor
emeritus of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He is an expert on NATO,
defense strategy, and the defense budget. He is the author of Designing Defense for a New
World Order. What's Empire Got to Do with It? The Derivation of America's Foreign
Policy.” Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society 21.1 (2009) 21-75
The underlying notion of “the security bureaucracies . . . looking for new enemies” is a
threadbare concept that has somehow taken hold across the political spectrum, from the radical left (viz. Michael Klare [1981], who
refers to a “threat bank”), to the liberal center (viz. Robert H. Johnson [1997], who dismisses most alleged “threats” as “improbable dangers”), to
libertarians (viz. Ted Galen Carpenter [1992], Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy of the Cato Institute, who wrote a book entitled A Search
for Enemies). What
is missing from most analysts’ claims of “threat inflation,” however, is a convincing
theory of why , say, the American government significantly(not merely in excusable rhetoric) might magnify and even
invent threats (and, more seriously, act on such inflated threat estimates). In a few places, Eland (2004, 185) suggests that such behavior might
stem from military or national security bureaucrats’ attempts to enhance their personal status and organizational budgets, or even from the influence
and dominance of “the military-industrial complex”; viz.: “Maintaining the empire and retaliating for the blowback from that empire keeps what
President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex fat and happy.” Or, in the same section:¶ In the nation’s capital, vested interests, such as
the law enforcement bureaucracies . . . routinely take advantage of “crises”to satisfy parochial desires. Similarly, many corporations use crises to get pet
projects— a.k.a. pork—funded by the government. And national security crises, because of people’s fears, are especially ripe opportunities to grab
largesse. (Ibid., 182)¶ Thus, “bureaucratic-politics” theory, which once made several reputa- tions (such as those of Richard Neustadt,
Morton Halperin, and Graham Allison) in defense-intellectual circles, and spawned an entire sub-industry within the field of international relations,5
is put into the service of dismissing putative security threats as imaginary. So, too, can a surprisingly cognate
theory, “public choice,”6 which can be considered the right-wing analog of the “bureaucratic-politics” model, and is a preferred interpretation of
governmental decision- making among libertarian observers. As Eland (2004, 203) summarizes:¶ Public-choice theory argues [that] the government
itself can develop sepa- rate interests from its citizens. The government reflects the interests of powerful pressure groups and the interests of the
bureaucracies and the bureaucrats in them. Although this problem occurs in both foreign and domestic policy, it may be more severe in foreign policy
because citizens pay less attention to policies that affect them less directly.¶ There is, in this statement of public-choice theory, a certain ambiguity, and
a certain degree of contradiction: Bureaucrats are supposedly, at the same time, subservient to societal interest groups and autonomous from society in
general.¶ This journal has pioneered the argument that state autonomy is a likely consequence of the public’s ignorance of most areas of state activity
(e.g., Somin 1998; DeCanio 2000a, 2000b, 2006, 2007; Ravenal 2000a). But state autonomy does not necessarily mean that bureaucrats substitute
their own interests for those of what could be called the “national society” that they ostensibly serve. I have argued (Ravenal 2000a) that, precisely
because of the public-ignorance and elite-expertise factors, and especially because the opportunities—at least for bureaucrats (a few notable post-
government lobbyist cases nonwithstanding)—for lucrative self-dealing are stringently fewer in the defense and diplomatic areas of government than
they are in some of the contract-dispensing and more under-the-radar-screen agencies of government, the “public-choice” imputation of self-dealing,
rather than working toward the national interest (which, however may not be synonymous with the interests, perceived or expressed, of citizens!) is less
likely to hold. In short, state autonomy is likely to mean, in the derivation of foreign policy, that “state elites” are using rational judgment, in insulation
from self-promoting interest groups—about what strategies, forces, and weapons are required for national defense.¶ Ironically, “public choice”—not
even a species of economics, but rather a kind of political interpretation—is not even about “public” choice, since, like the bureaucratic-politics model, it
repudiates the very notion that bureaucrats make truly “public” choices; rather, they are held, axiomatically, to exhibit “rent-seeking” behavior, wherein
they abuse their public positions in order to amass private gains, or at least to build personal empires within their ostensibly official niches. Such sub-
rational models actually explain very little of what they purport to observe. Of course, there is some truth in them, regarding the “behavior” of some
people, at some times, in some circumstances, under some conditions of incentive and motivation. But the factors that they posit operate mostly as
constraints on the otherwise rational optimization of objectives that, if for no other reason than the playing out of official roles, transcends merely
personal or parochial imperatives.¶ My treatment of “role” differs from that of the bureaucratic-politics theorists, whose model of the derivation of
foreign policy depends heavily, and acknowledgedly, on a narrow and specific identification of the role- playing of organizationally situated individuals
in a partly conflictual “pulling and hauling” process that “results in” some policy outcome. Even here, bureaucratic-politics theorists Graham Allison
and Philip Zelikow (1999, 311) allow that “some players are not able to articulate [sic] the governmental politics game because their conception of their
job does not legitimate such activity.” This is a crucial admission, and one that points— empirically—to the need for a broader and generic treatment of
role.¶ Roles (all theorists state) give rise to “expectations” of performance. My point is that virtually every governmental role, and
especially national-security roles, and particularly the roles of the uniformed mili- tary, embody
expectations of devotion to the “national interest”; rational- ity in the derivation of policy at every functional level; and objectivity in the
treatment of parameters, especially external parameters such as “threats” and the power and
capabilities of other nations.¶ Sub-rational models (such as “public choice”) fail to take into account even a
partial dedication to the “national” interest (or even the possibility that the national interest may
be honestly misconceived in more paro- chial terms). In contrast, an official’s role connects the
individual to the (state-level) process, and moderates the (perhaps otherwise) self-seeking impulses of
the individual. Role-derived behavior tends to be formalized and codified; relatively transparent
and at least peer-reviewed, so as to be consistent with expectations; surviving the particular
individual and trans- mitted to successors and ancillaries; measured against a standard and thus
corrigible; defined in terms of the performed function and therefore derived from the state
function; and uncorrrupt, because personal cheating and even egregious aggrandizement are
conspicuously discouraged.¶ My own direct observation suggests that defense decision-makers attempt to
“frame” the structure of the problems that they try to solve on the basis of the most accurate
intelligence. They make it their business to know where the threats come from. Thus,
threats are not “socially constructed” (even though, of course, some values are).¶ A major reason for the rationality, and
the objectivity, of the process is that much security planning is done, not in vaguely undefined circum- stances that offer scope for idiosyncratic,
subjective behavior, but rather in structured and reviewed organizational frameworks. Non-rationalities (which are bad for understanding and
People are fired for presenting skewed analysis and for making
prediction) tend to get filtered out.
bad predictions. This is because something important is riding on the causal analysis and the
contingent prediction. For these reasons, “public choice” does not have the “feel” of reality to many
critics who have participated in the structure of defense decision-making. In that structure, obvious,
and even not-so-obvious,“rent-seeking” would not only be shameful; it would present a severe risk of
career termination. And, as mentioned, the defense bureaucracy is hardly a productive place for truly talented rent-seekers to
operatecompared to opportunities for personal profit in the commercial world. A bureaucrat’s very self-placement in these reaches of government testi-
fies either to a sincere commitment to the national interest or to a lack of sufficient imagination to exploit opportunities for personal profit.
IMPACT TURNS / ANSWERS
 2AC CAP INEVITABLE
No alt to neolib --- cap inevitable
Kliman 4 – PhD, Professor of Economics at Pace University (Andrew, Andrew Kliman’s Writings, “Alternatives to Capitalism:
What Happens After the Revolution?” http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/)
Have we faced the harsh reality that, unless th[e] inseparability between the dialectics of thought and of revolution
does exist, any
country that does succeed in its revolution may retrogress, since the world
revolution cannot occur at one stroke everywhere and world capitalism continues to exist? …
[Lenin’s] practice of the dialectic of thought as well as of revolution underlined his call for a Third International. Raya
Dunayevskaya, “Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1985-86” I. Concretizing the Vision of a New Human Society We live
at a
moment in which it is harder than ever to articulate a liberatory alternative to capitalism. As
we all know, the collapse of state-capitalist regimes that called themselves “Communist,” as well as
the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society, have given rise to a widespread acceptance of
Margaret Thatcher’s TINA – the belief that “there is no alternative.” Yet the difficulty in articulating a
liberatory alternative is not mostly the product of these events. It is an inheritance from the past. To what extent has such an
alternative ever been articulated? There has been a lot of progress – in theory and especially in practice – on the problem of forms of
organization – but new organizational forms by themselves are not yet an alternative. A great many
leftists, even revolutionaries, did of course regard nationalized property and the State Plan,
under the control of the “vanguard” Party, as socialism, or at least as the basis for a transition to
socialism. But even before events refuted this notion, it represented, at best, an evasion of the
problem. It was largely a matter of leftists with authoritarian personalities subordinating
themselves and others to institutions and power with a blind faith that substituted for thought.
How such institutions and such power would result in human liberation was never made clear.
Vague references to “transition” were used to wave the problem away. Yet as Marxist-Humanism has
stressed for more than a decade, the anti-Stalinist left is also partly responsible for the crisis in thought. It, too, failed to articulate a
liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little more than what Hegel (Science of Logic, Miller trans.,
pp. 841-42) called “the empty negative … a presumed absolute”: The impatience that insists merely on getting beyond the
determinate … and finding itself immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the empty negative, the abstract
infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute, that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it can only be through
the mediation of cognition … . The question that confronts us nowadays is whether we can do better. Is it
possible to make the vision of a new human society more concrete and determinate than it now
is, through the mediation of cognition? According to a long-standing view in the movement, it is
not possible. The character of the new society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the
course of trying to remake society. Yet if this is true, we are faced with a vicious circle from
which there seems to be no escape, because acceptance of TINA is creating barriers in practice. In
the perceived absence of an alternative, practical struggles have proven to be self-limiting at best. They stop
short of even trying to remake society totally – and for good reason. As Bertell Ollman has noted
(Introduction to Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, Routledge, 1998, p. 1), “People who believe [that there
is no alternative] will put up with almost any degree of suffering. Why bother to struggle for
a change that cannot be? … people [need to] have a good reason for choosing one path into
the future rather than another.”
 2AC CAP/GROWTH SUSTAINABLE
Long term trends are driving decoupling– no reason this can’t continue, their
limits to growth arguments are empirically unsupported
Brook, et al, 15—professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania
(Barry, with John Asafu-Adjaye, University of Queensland, Linus Blomqvist, Breakthrough
Institute, Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation, Ruth DeFries, Columbia Univeristy, Erle Ellis,
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Christopher Foreman, University of Maryland
School of Public Policy, David Keith, Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences, Martin Lewis, Stanford University, Mark Lynas, Cornell University, Ted Nordhaus,
Breakthrough Institute, Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado, Boulder, Rachel Pritzker,
Pritzker Innovation Fund, Joyashree Roy, Jadavpur University, Mark Sagoff, George Mason
University, Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute, Robert Stone, Filmmaker, and Peter
Teague, Breakthrough Institute, “AN ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO,”
http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto/, dml)
Intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and
settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key
to decoupling human development from environmental impacts. These socioeconomic and
technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection.
Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate
global poverty. Although we have to date written separately, our views are increasingly
discussed as a whole. We call ourselves ecopragmatists and ecomodernists. We offer this
statement to affirm and to clarify our views and to describe our vision for putting humankind’s
extraordinary powers in the service of creating a good Anthropocene. 1. Humanity has
flourished over the past two centuries. Average life expectancy has increased from 30 to
70 years, resulting in a large and growing population able to live in many different
environments. Humanity has made extraordinary progress in reducing the incidence and
impacts of infectious diseases, and it has become more resilient to extreme weather and
other natural disasters. Violence in all forms has declined significantly and is probably at the
lowest per capita level ever experienced by the human species, the horrors of the 20th
century and present-day terrorism notwithstanding. Globally, human beings have moved from
autocratic government toward liberal democracy characterized by the rule of law and increased
freedom. Personal, economic, and political liberties have spread worldwide and are today largely
accepted as universal values. Modernization liberates women from traditional gender roles,
increasing their control of their fertility. Historically large numbers of humans — both in
percentage and in absolute terms — are free from insecurity, penury, and servitude. At the same
time, human flourishing has taken a serious toll on natural, nonhuman environments and
wildlife. Humans use about half of the planet’s ice-free land, mostly for pasture, crops, and
production forestry. Of the land once covered by forests, 20 percent has been converted to
human use. Populations of many mammals, amphibians, and birds have declined by more than
50 percent in the past 40 years alone. More than 100 species from those groups went extinct in
the 20th century, and about 785 since 1500. As we write, only four northern white rhinos are
confirmed to exist. Given that humans are completely dependent on the living biosphere, how is
it possible that people are doing so much damage to natural systems without doing more harm
to themselves? The role that technology plays in reducing humanity’s dependence on nature
explains this paradox. Human technologies, from those that first enabled agriculture to replace
hunting and gathering, to those that drive today’s globalized economy, have made humans less
reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same
ecosystems have often been left deeply damaged. Despite frequent assertions starting in the
1970s of fundamental “limits to growth,” there is still remarkably little evidence that human
population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical
material resources in the foreseeable future. To the degree to which there are fixed physical
boundaries to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally
irrelevant. The amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth, for instance, is ultimately finite
but represents no meaningful constraint upon human endeavors. Human civilization can
flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium
fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. With proper management, humans are at no
risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food. Given plentiful land and unlimited
energy, substitutes for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those
inputs become scarce or expensive. There remain, however, serious long-term environmental
threats to human well-being, such as anthropogenic climate change, stratospheric ozone
depletion, and ocean acidification. While these risks are difficult to quantify, the evidence is
clear today that they could cause significant risk of catastrophic impacts on societies and
ecosystems. Even gradual, non-catastrophic outcomes associated with these threats are likely to
result in significant human and economic costs as well as rising ecological losses. Much of the
world’s population still suffers from more-immediate local environmental health risks. Indoor
and outdoor air pollution continue to bring premature death and illness to millions annually.
Water pollution and water-borne illness due to pollution and degradation of watersheds cause
similar suffering. 2. Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a
range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being
from environmental impacts. Decoupling occurs in both relative and absolute terms. Relative
decoupling means that human environmental impacts rise at a slower rate than overall
economic growth. Thus, for each unit of economic output, less environmental impact (e.g.,
deforestation, defaunation, pollution) results. Overall impacts may still increase, just at a slower
rate than would otherwise be the case. Absolute decoupling occurs when total environmental
impacts — impacts in the aggregate — peak and begin to decline, even as the economy continues
to grow. Decoupling can be driven by both technological and demographic trends and usually
results from a combination of the two. The growth rate of the human population has already
peaked. Today’s population growth rate is one percent per year, down from its high point of
2.1 percent in the 1970s. Fertility rates in countries containing more than half of the global
population are now below replacement level. Population growth today is primarily driven by
longer life spans and lower infant mortality, not by rising fertility rates. Given current trends, it
is very possible that the size of the human population will peak this century and then start to
decline. Trends in population are inextricably linked to other demographic and economic
dynamics. For the first time in human history, over half the global population lives in cities. By
2050, 70 percent are expected to dwell in cities, a number that could rise to 80 percent or more
by the century’s end. Cities are characterized by both dense populations and low fertility rates.
Cities occupy just 1 to 3 percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion
people. As such, cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature,
performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while
reducing environmental impacts. The growth of cities along with the economic and ecological
benefits that come with them are inseparable from improvements in agricultural productivity.
As agriculture has become more land and labor efficient, rural populations have left the
countryside for the cities. Roughly half the US population worked the land in 1880. Today, less
than 2 percent does. As human lives have been liberated from hard agricultural labor, enormous
human resources have been freed up for other endeavors. Cities, as people know them today,
could not exist without radical changes in farming. In contrast, modernization is not possible
in a subsistence agrarian economy. These improvements have resulted not only in lower
labor requirements per unit of agricultural output but also in lower land requirements. This is
not a new trend: rising harvest yields have for millennia reduced the amount of land required to
feed the average person. The average per-capita use of land today is vastly lower than it was
5,000 years ago, despite the fact that modern people enjoy a far richer diet. Thanks to
technological improvements in agriculture, during the half-century starting in the mid-
1960s, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed for the average person
declined by one-half. Agricultural intensification, along with the move away from the
use of wood as fuel, has allowed many parts of the world to experience net reforestation.
About 80 percent of New England is today forested, compared with about 50 percent at the end
of the 19th century. Over the past 20 years, the amount of land dedicated to production forest
worldwide declined by 50 million hectares, an area the size of France. The “forest transition”
from net deforestation to net reforestation seems to be as resilient a feature of development as
the demographic transition that reduces human birth rates as poverty declines. Human use of
many other resources is similarly peaking. The amount of water needed for the average diet
has declined by nearly 25 percent over the past half-century. Nitrogen pollution continues to
cause eutrophication and large dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico. While the total
amount of nitrogen pollution is rising, the amount used per unit of production has declined
significantly in developed nations. Indeed, in contradiction to the often-expressed fear of
infinite growth colliding with a finite planet, demand for many material goods may be
saturating as societies grow wealthier. Meat consumption, for instance, has peaked in many
wealthy nations and has shifted away from beef toward protein sources that are less land
intensive. As demand for material goods is met, developed economies see higher levels of
spending directed to materially less-intensive service and knowledge sectors, which account for
an increasing share of economic activity. This dynamic might be even more pronounced in
today’s developing economies, which may benefit from being late adopters of resource-efficient
technologies. Taken together, these trends mean that the total human impact on the
environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and
decline this century. By understanding and promoting these emergent processes,
humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing
countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends. 3. The processes of
decoupling described above challenge the idea that early human societies lived more lightly on
the land than do modern societies. Insofar as past societies had less impact upon the
environment, it was because those societies supported vastly smaller populations. In fact, early
human populations with much less advanced technologies had far larger individual land
footprints than societies have today. Consider that a population of no more than one or two
million North Americans hunted most of the continent’s large mammals into extinction in the
late Pleistocene, while burning and clearing forests across the continent in the process.
Extensive human transformations of the environment continued throughout the Holocene
period: as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial
Revolution. The technologies that humankind’s ancestors used to meet their needs supported
much lower living standards with much higher per-capita impacts on the environment. Absent a
massive human die-off, any large-scale attempt at recoupling human societies to nature using
these technologies would result in an unmitigated ecological and human disaster. Ecosystems
around the world are threatened today because people over-rely on them: people who depend on
firewood and charcoal for fuel cut down and degrade forests; people who eat bush meat for food
hunt mammal species to local extirpation. Whether it’s a local indigenous community or a
foreign corporation that benefits, it is the continued dependence of humans on natural
environments that is the problem for the conservation of nature. Conversely, modern
technologies, by using natural ecosystem flows and services more efficiently, offer a real
chance of reducing the totality of human impacts on the biosphere. To embrace these
technologies is to find paths to a good Anthropocene. The modernization processes that have
increasingly liberated humanity from nature are, of course, double-edged, since they have also
degraded the natural environment. Fossil fuels, mechanization and manufacturing, synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides, electrification and modern transportation and communication
technologies, have made larger human populations and greater consumption possible in the first
place. Had technologies not improved since the Dark Ages, no doubt the human population
would not have grown much either. It is also true that large, increasingly affluent urban
populations have placed greater demands upon ecosystems in distant places –– the extraction of
natural resources has been globalized. But those same technologies have also made it possible
for people to secure food, shelter, heat, light, and mobility through means that are vastly more
resource- and land-efficient than at any previous time in human history. Decoupling human
well-being from the destruction of nature requires the conscious acceleration of emergent
decoupling processes. In some cases, the objective is the development of technological
substitutes. Reducing deforestation and indoor air pollution requires the substitution of wood
and charcoal with modern energy. In other cases, humanity’s goal should be to use resources
more productively. For example, increasing agricultural yields can reduce the conversion of
forests and grasslands to farms. Humans should seek to liberate the environment from the
economy. Urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and
desalination are all processes with a demonstrated potential to reduce human
demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species. Suburbanization,
low-yield farming, and many forms of renewable energy production, in contrast, generally
require more land and resources and leave less room for nature. These patterns suggest that humans are as likely to spare nature
because it is not needed to meet their needs as they are to spare it for explicit aesthetic and spiritual reasons. The parts of the planet that people have not yet profoundly transformed have mostly been spared
because they have not yet found an economic use for them — mountains, deserts, boreal forests, and other “marginal” lands. Decoupling raises the possibility that societies might achieve peak human impact
without intruding much further on relatively untouched areas. Nature unused is nature spared. 4. Plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling
development from nature. The availability of inexpensive energy allows poor people around the world to stop using forests for fuel. It allows humans to grow more food on less land, thanks to energy-heavy inputs
such as fertilizer and tractors. Energy allows humans to recycle waste water and desalinate sea water in order to spare rivers and aquifers. It allows humans to cheaply recycle metal and plastic rather than to mine
and refine these minerals. Looking forward, modern energy may allow the capture of carbon from the atmosphere to reduce the accumulated carbon that drives global warming. However, for at least the past three
centuries, rising energy production globally has been matched by rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Nations have also been slowly decarbonizing — that is, reducing the carbon intensity of their
economies — over that same time period. But they have not been doing so at a rate consistent with keeping cumulative carbon emissions low enough to reliably stay below the international target of less than 2
degrees Centigrade of global warming. Significant climate mitigation, therefore, will require that humans rapidly accelerate existing processes of decarbonization. There remains much confusion, however, as to
how this might be accomplished. In developing countries, rising energy consumption is tightly correlated with rising incomes and improving living standards. Although the use of many other material resource
inputs such as nitrogen, timber, and land are beginning to peak, the centrality of energy in human development and its many uses as a substitute for material and human resources suggest that energy
consumption will continue to rise through much if not all of the 21st century. For that reason, any conflict between climate mitigation and the continuing development process through which billions of people
around the world are achieving modern living standards will continue to be resolved resoundingly in favor of the latter. Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate
concerns for the majority of the world's people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives. For millions
living without light and forced to burn dung to cook their food, electricity and modern fuels, no matter the source, offer a pathway to a better life, even as they also bring new environmental challenges.

Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge. By this we mean

that even dramatic limits to per capita global consumption would be insufficient to achieve
significant climate mitigation. Absent profound technological change there is no
credible path to meaningful climate mitigation . While advocates differ in
the particular mix of technologies they favor, we are aware of no quantified climate mitigation
scenario in which technological change is not responsible for the vast majority of emissions cuts.
The specific technological paths that people might take toward climate mitigation remain deeply
contested. Theoretical scenarios for climate mitigation typically reflect their creators’
technological preferences and analytical assumptions while all too often failing to account for
the cost, rate, and scale at which low-carbon energy technologies can be deployed. The history of
energy transitions, however, suggests that there have been consistent patterns associated with
the ways that societies move toward cleaner sources of energy. Substituting higher-quality (i.e.,
less carbon-intensive, higher-density) fuels for lower-quality (i.e., more carbon-intensive, lower-
density) ones is how virtually all societies have decarbonized, and points the way toward
accelerated decarbonization in the future. Transitioning to a world powered by zero-carbon
energy sources will require energy technologies that are power dense and capable of scaling to
many tens of terawatts to power a growing human economy. Most forms of renewable energy are, unfortunately, incapable of doing so. The
scale of land use and other environmental impacts necessary to power the world on biofuels or many other renewables are such that we doubt they provide a sound pathway to a zero-carbon low-footprint future.
High-efficiency solar cells produced from earth-abundant materials are an exception and have the potential to provide many tens of terawatts on a few percent of the Earth’s surface. Present-day solar technologies
will require substantial innovation to meet this standard and the development of cheap energy storage technologies that are capable of dealing with highly variable energy generation at large scales. Nuclear fission
today represents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy. However, a variety of social, economic, and
institutional challenges make deployment of present-day nuclear technologies at scales necessary to achieve significant climate mitigation unlikely. A new generation of nuclear technologies that are safer and

In the long run, next-generation solar,

cheaper will likely be necessary for nuclear energy to meet its full potential as a critical climate mitigation technology.

advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the
joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature. If the history
of energy transitions is any guide, however, that transition will take time. During that transition,
other energy technologies can provide important social and environmental benefits.
Hydroelectric dams, for example, may be a cheap source of low-carbon power for poor nations
even though their land and water footprint is relatively large. Fossil fuels with carbon capture
and storage can likewise provide substantial environmental benefits over current fossil or
biomass energies. The ethical and pragmatic path toward a just and sustainable global energy
economy requires that human beings transition as rapidly as possible to energy sources
that are cheap, clean, dense, and abundant. Such a path will require sustained public
support for the development and deployment of clean energy technologies, both within nations
and between them, though international collaboration and competition, and within a broader
framework for global modernization and development. 5. We write this document out of deep
love and emotional connection to the natural world. By appreciating, exploring, seeking to
understand, and cultivating nature, many people get outside themselves. They connect with
their deep evolutionary history. Even when people never experience these wild natures directly,
they affirm their existence as important for their psychological and spiritual well-being. Humans
will always materially depend on nature to some degree. Even if a fully synthetic world
were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than
human sustenance and technologies require. What decoupling offers is the possibility that
humanity’s material dependence upon nature might be less destructive. The case for a more active, conscious, and
accelerated decoupling to spare nature draws more on spiritual or aesthetic than on material or utilitarian arguments. Current and future generations could survive and prosper materially on a planet with much
less biodiversity and wild nature. But this is not a world we want nor, if humans embrace decoupling processes, need to accept. What we are here calling nature, or even wild nature, encompasses landscapes,
seascapes, biomes and ecosystems that have, in more cases than not, been regularly altered by human influences over centuries and millennia. Conservation science, and the concepts of biodiversity, complexity,
and indigeneity are useful, but alone cannot determine which landscapes to preserve, or how. In most cases, there is no single baseline prior to human modification to which nature might be returned. For
example, efforts to restore landscapes to more closely resemble earlier states (“indigeneity”) may involve removing recently arrived species (“invasives”) and thus require a net reduction in local biodiversity. In
other circumstances, communities may decide to sacrifice indigeneity for novelty and biodiversity. Explicit efforts to preserve landscapes for their non-utilitarian value are inevitably anthropogenic choices. For
this reason, all conservation efforts are fundamentally anthropogenic. The setting aside of wild nature is no less a human choice, in service of human preferences, than bulldozing it. Humans will save wild places
and landscapes by convincing our fellow citizens that these places, and the creatures that occupy them, are worth protecting. People may choose to have some services — like water purification and flood protection
— provided for by natural systems, such as forested watersheds, reefs, marshes, and wetlands, even if those natural systems are more expensive than simply building water treatment plants, seawalls, and levees.
There will be no one-size-fits-all solution. Environments will be shaped by different local, historical, and cultural preferences. While we believe that agricultural intensification for land-sparing is key to protecting
wild nature, we recognize that many communities will continue to opt for land-sharing, seeking to conserve wildlife within agricultural landscapes, for example, rather than allowing it to revert to wild nature in the
form of grasslands, scrub, and forests. Where decoupling reduces pressure on landscapes and ecosystems to meet basic human needs, landowners, communities, and governments still must decide to what
aesthetic or economic purpose they wish to dedicate those lands. Accelerated decoupling alone will not be enough to ensure more wild nature. There must still be a conservation politics and a wilderness movement
to demand more wild nature for aesthetic and spiritual reasons. Along with decoupling humankind’s material needs from nature, establishing an enduring commitment to preserve wilderness, biodiversity, and a

We affirm the need and human capacity for

mosaic of beautiful landscapes will require a deeper emotional connection to them. 6.

accelerated, active, and conscious decoupling. Technological progress is not inevitable.

Decoupling environmental impacts from economic outputs is not simply a function of market-
driven innovation and efficient response to scarcity. The long arc of human transformation of
natural environments through technologies began well before there existed anything resembling
a market or a price signal. Thanks to rising demand, scarcity, inspiration, and serendipity,
humans have remade the world for millennia. Technological solutions to environmental
problems must also be considered within a broader social, economic, and political context. We
think it is counterproductive for nations like Germany and Japan, and states like California, to
shutter nuclear power plants, recarbonize their energy sectors, and recouple their economies to
fossil fuels and biomass. However, such examples underscore clearly that technological choices
will not be determined by remote international bodies but rather by national and local
institutions and cultures. Too often, modernization is conflated, both by its defenders and
critics, with capitalism, corporate power, and laissez-faire economic policies. We reject
such reductions. What we refer to when we speak of modernization is the long-term
evolution of social, economic, political, and technological arrangements in human
societies toward vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity,
economic integration, shared infrastructure, and personal freedom. Modernization has
liberated ever more people from lives of poverty and hard agricultural labor, women from
chattel status, children and ethnic minorities from oppression, and societies from capricious and
arbitrary governance. Greater resource productivity associated with modern socio-
technological systems has allowed human societies to meet human needs with fewer
resource inputs and less impact on the environment. More-productive economies are
wealthier economies, capable of better meeting human needs while committing more of their
economic surplus to non-economic amenities, including better human health, greater human
freedom and opportunity, arts, culture, and the conservation of nature. Modernizing processes
are far from complete, even in advanced developed economies. Material consumption has
only just begun to peak in the wealthiest societies. Decoupling of human welfare from
environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress
and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those
changes. Accelerated technological progress will require the active, assertive, and
aggressive participation of private sector entrepreneurs, markets, civil society, and
the state. While we reject the planning fallacy of the 1950s, we continue to embrace a strong
public role in addressing environmental problems and accelerating technological
innovation, including research to develop better technologies, subsidies, and other
measures to help bring them to market, and regulations to mitigate environmental
hazards. And international collaboration on technological innovation and technology transfer is
essential in the areas of agriculture and energy.

Cap is sustainable and self-correcting

Kaletsky 10 (Anatole, Masters in Economics from Harvard, Honour-Degree Graduate at King’s
College and Cambrdige, editor-at-large of The Times of London, founding partner and chief
economist of GaveKal Capital, [he/she] is on the governing board of the New York– based
Institute for New Economic Theory (INET), a nonprofit created after the 2007– 2009 crisis to
promote and finance academic research in economics outside the orthodoxy of “efficient
markets.” From 1976 to 1990, Kaletsky was New York bureau chief and Washington
correspondent of the Financial Times and a business writer on The Economist)
The world did not end. Despite all the forebodings of disaster in the 2007– 09 financial crisis, the first decade of

the twenty-first century passed rather uneventfully into the second. The riots, soup kitchens, and bankruptcies
predicted by many of the world’s most respected economists did not materialize— and no one any
longer expects the global capitalist system to collapse, whatever that emotive word might mean. Yet the capitalist system’s survival does
not mean that the precrisis faith in the wisdom of financial markets and the efficiency of free enterprise will ever again be what it was before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers
on September 15, 2008. A return to decent economic growth and normal financial conditions is likely by the middle of 2010, but will this imply a return to business as usual for
Although globalization will continue and many parts of the world will
politicians, economists, and financiers?

regain their prosperity of the precrisis period, the traumatic effects of 2007– 09 will not be quickly
gradually

forgotten. And the economic costs will linger for decades in the debts squeezing taxpayers and government budgets, the disrupted lives of the jobless, and the vanished
dreams of homeowners and investors around the world. For what collapsed on September 15, 2008, was not just a bank or a financial system. What fell apart that day was an
entire political philosophy and economic system, a way of thinking about and living in the world. The question now is what will replace the global capitalism that crumbled in the
autumn of 2008. The central argument of this book is that global capitalism will be replaced by nothing other
than global capitalism. The traumatic events of 2007– 09 will neither destroy nor diminish the
fundamental human urges that have always powered the capitalist system— ambition, initiative,
individualism, the competitive spirit. These natural human qualities will instead be redirected and reenergized to

create a new version of capitalism that will ultimately be even more successful and
productive than the system it replaced. To explain this process of renewal, and identify some of the most important features of the
reinvigorated capitalist system, is the ambition of this book. This transformation will take many years to complete, but some of its

consequences can already be discerned. With the benefit of even a year’s hindsight, it is clear that these consequences will be different from the
nihilistic predictions from both ends of the political spectrum at the height of the crisis. On the Left, anticapitalist ideologues seemed honestly

to believe that a few weeks of financial chaos could bring about the disintegration of a politico-
economic system that had survived two hundred years of revolutions, depressions, and world wars. On the
Right, free-market zealots insisted that private enterprise would be destroyed by government interventions that were clearly necessary to save the system— and many continue
A balanced reassessment
to believe that the crisis could have been resolved much better if governments had simply allowed financial institutions to collapse.

of the crisis must challenge both left-wing hysteria and right-wing hubris. Rather than blaming the meltdown of the
global financial system on greedy bankers, incompetent regulators, gullible homeowners, or foolish Chinese bureaucrats, this book puts what happened into historical and
ideological perspective. It reinterprets the crisis in the context of the economic reforms and geopolitical upheavals that have repeatedly transformed the nature of capitalism
capitalism has never been a
since the late eighteenth century, most recently in the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of 1979– 89. The central argument is that

static system that follows a fixed set of rules, characterized by a permanent division of responsibilities between private enterprise and governments. Contrary to the
teachings of modern economic theory, no immutable laws govern the behavior of a capitalist economy. Instead, capitalism is an adaptive social

system that mutates and evolves in response to a changing environment. When capitalism is
seriously threatened by a systemic crisis, a new version emerges that is better
suited to the changing environment and replaces the previously dominant form. Once
we recognize that capitalism is not a static set of institutions, but an evolutionary system that reinvents and reinvigorates itself through crises, we can see the events of 2007– 09
in another light: as the catalyst for the fourth systemic transformation of capitalism, comparable to the transformations triggered by the crises of the 1970s, the crises of the
1930s, and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803– 15. Hence the title of this book.
 AT: FINANCIALIZATION
Financialization impact empirically denied – growth sustainable
Kaplan 17 [Steven N., Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the
University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “Are U.S. Companies Too Short-Term
Oriented? Some Thoughts,” May 2017,
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2972117]

U.S. companies are frequently criticized for focusing too much on the short run and not enough on the
long run. For example, Laurence Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, one of the largest money managers, wrote that “the effects of the
short-termist phenomenon are troubling . . . more and more corporate
leaders have responded with actions that
can deliver immediate returns to shareholders, such as buybacks or dividend increases, while
underinvesting in innovation, skilled workforces or essential capital expenditures necessary to sustain
long-term growth.”1 The Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity (co-chaired by Larry Summers) similarly weighed
in, “An additional reason for the absence of inclusive prosperity is the changing nature of corporate behavior. Business leaders,
government officials and academics have pointed out that corporations have shifted their traditional focus on long-term profit
maximization to maximizing short-term stock-market valuations. One reason that economists have advanced for this transition to
corporate short- termism is the overwhelming shift to stock-market-based compensation for CEOs and other highly compensated
executives at publicly traded corporations.”2 In other words, these critics argue that US companies as a group
destroy value by not investing for the long run. More formally, the short-term argument can be summarized as
follows. U.S companies as a group underinvest in capital expenditures as well as research and development. According to the
argument, this benefits the companies in the short- term, but harms the companies in the long run where the short-term is usually
defined as the current quarter or, perhaps, current year or two, while the long-term would be more than five years out. Poor
corporate governance and overly generous pay plans for CEOs that reward short-term behavior
are often cited as accomplices to short-termism.3 The critics also point to empirical evidence to support their
positions. For example, Graham et al. (2005) survey 401 financial executives and find that 78 percent would sacrifice long-term
value to smooth earnings. Others point to corporate dividends and buybacks. Lazonick (2014) shows that S&P 500
companies paid out over 90% of their net income in dividends and share repurchases, leaving little available for investment in the
long-term. Lazonick and others contend that companies buy back their own stock to boost their share prices in the short run,
regardless of the long-term impact. These criticisms, however, are not new. They have been raised,
prominently, in some form or another since the late 1970s. In this paper, I present those historical criticisms. I then consider
the implications of sustained short-termism for corporate profits, venture capital investment and returns, private equity investment
and returns, and corporate valuations. In fact, there
is very little long-term evidence that is consistent
with the predictions of the short-term critics.4 1. Some Short-termist History The criticism that US companies are
plagued by short-termism and poor governance has a long history. In 1980, Harvard Business School’s Robert H. Hayes and William
J. Abernathy wrote an influential article criticizing American companies for being too short-term oriented: “By their preference for
servicing existing markets rather than creating new ones and by their devotion to short-term returns and management by the
numbers, many of them have effectively forsworn long-term technological superiority as a competitive weapon. In consequence, they
have abdicated their strategic responsibilities.” Similarly, Marty Lipton wrote in 1979: “It would not be unfair to pose the policy issue
as: Whether the long-term interests of the nation’s corporate system and economy should be jeopardized in order to benefit
speculators interested . . . only in a quick profit . . . ?” In 1992, Harvard’s Michael E. Porter repeated the argument: “The U.S. system
of allocating investment capital is failing, putting American companies at a serious disadvantage and threatening the long-term
growth of the nation's economy… Many American companies invest too little, particularly in those intangible assets and capabilities
required for competitiveness – R&D, employee training and skills development … The U.S. system, first and foremost advances the
goals of shareholders at the expense of the long-term performance of American companies. In global competition, where investment
increasingly determines a company's capacity to upgrade and innovate, the U.S. system does not measure up.” And the short-term
argument is being repeated today by the likes of Laurence Fink and Larry Summers. While some, like Fink, focus on public
companies, the arguments of Abernathy and Hayes, Porter, Summers refer to the overall U.S. economy. 2. U.S. Corporate Profits It is
clear from the previous section that critiques of U.S. businesses as overly short-term oriented have been
with us for at least 35 years. And the criticisms have not changed much, if at all, in their basic tenor. But,
this has very strong implications for the short-term argument. It’s been more than 35 years
since the publication of the Hayes and Abernathy article, and 25 years since the appearance of Porter’s. By any measure,
today is the long-term that U.S. companies supposedly have underinvested in since the 1980s.
Accordingly, the short-term logic implies that U.S. business should be performing poorly today. But
that is unequivocally not the case . Figure 1 reports U.S. corporate profits before tax as a fraction of GDP since
1951. Today, corporate profits are near all-time highs (over that post-war period). The uptrend began just
around the time of the Hayes and Abernathy article, and has continued since. The early 1980s is precisely the time that
many observers believe finance and the goal of shareholder value maximization became
ascendant. It is also the time that
Wall Street and the
financial sector began to grow substantially—both in the US and internationally. The early
1980s also coincided with the rise of management consultants who spread techniques across US firms and
across the world.5 In 1980, consulting firms were relatively new and relatively small. Today, McKinsey & Company has offices in
more than 60 countries; the Boston Consulting Group has offices in more than 40. And the early 1980s also coincided with an
explosion in information technology and globalization. Consistent with the increase in corporate profits, both Autor et al. (2017) and
Burkai (2016) explore explanations for the strong corporate profitability and, concomitant, weak labor share of GDP. Whatever its
source, the strong profitability of U.S. corporations is difficult for the short-termists to explain. It is obviously
not consistent with poor corporate performance over the long-term. Nevertheless, short-termists continue
to repeat the criticisms of the 1980s and 1990s. It is worth adding that the strong corporate performance also is
inconsistent with poor corporate governance overall, suggesting that criticisms of U.S. corporate
governance also are overstated. This is arguably the type of example that the quote by John Stuart Mill that begins this
paper had in mind.
 2AC CAP GOOD – ENVIRONMENT
Economic rationality net good for environment – property rights
Veer 12 (Pierre-Guy, Independent journalist writing for the Von Mises Institute, 5/2, “Cheer for the Environment, Cheer for
Capitalism,” http://www.mises.ca/posts/blog/cheer-for-the-environment-cheer-for-capitalism/)
No Ownership, No Responsibility How can such a negligence have happened? It’s simple: no one was the
legitimate owner of the resources (water, air, ground). When a property is state-owned – as was the
case under communism – government has generally little incentive to sustainably exploit it.
In communist Europe, governments wanted to industrialize their country in order, they hoped, to
catch up with capitalist economies. Objectives were set, and they had to be met no matter what.
This included the use of brown coal, high in sulfur and that creates heavy smoke when burned[4],
and questionable farming methods, which depleted the soil. This lack of vision can also be seen in the public sector of
capitalist countries. In the US, the Department of Defense creates more dangerous waste than the top five chemical product
companies put together. In fact, pollution is such that cleanup costs are estimated at $20 billion. The same goes for agriculture,
where Washington encourages overfarming or even farming not adapted for the environment it’s in[5]. Capitalism, the Green
Solution In order to solve most of the pollution problems, there exists a simple solution: laissez-
faire capitalism, i.e. make sure property rights and profitability can be applied. The
latter helped Eastern Europe; when communism fell, capitalism made the countries seek profitable –
and not just cheap – ways to produce, which greatly reduced pollution[6]. As for the former, it proved its
effectiveness, notably with the Love Canal[7]. Property rights are also thought of in order to protect some
resources, be it fish[8] or endangered species[9]. Why such efficiency? Because an owner’s self-
interest is directed towards the maximum profitability of his piece of land. By containing pollution –
as Hooker Chemicals did with its canal – he keeps away from costly lawsuit for property
violation. At the same time, badly managed pollution can diminish the value of the land, and
therefore profits. Any entrepreneur with a long-term vision – and whose property is safe from arbitrary
government decisions – thinks about all that in order to protect his investment. One isn’t foolish enough to sack
one’s property! In conclusion, I have to mention that I agree with environmentalists that it is importance to preserve the
environment in order to protect mother nature and humans. However, I strongly disagree with their means, i.e. government
intervention. Considering it very seldom has a long-term vision, it is the worst thing that can happen. In fact, one could says that
most environmental disasters are, directly or indirectly, caused by the State, mainly by a lack of clear
property rights. Were they clearer, they would let each and everyone of us, out of self-interest, protect the environment in a
better manner. That way, everyone’s a winner.

Fast growth solves climate change

---growth causes lower fertility rates which means lower populations which have less demand
for resources
---richer countries have more money/time for environmental regulation
---ag productivity means fewer forests are chopped down to make room for farmland
---forests act as a carbon sink; growth fosters innovation for new tech like solar/nuclear
Bailey 15 [Ronald Bailey is a science correspondent for Reason magazine, a former staff writer
for Forbes, and author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century. “Fast
Growth Can Solve Climate Change”, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fast-
growth-can-solve-climate-change]
As representatives from 196 countries gather in Paris this December to negotiate a universal climate treaty, they should keep in mind that richer is
more climate-friendly, especially for developing countries. Why? Because faster
growth means higher incomes, which
correlate with lower population growth. Greater wealth also means higher agricultural
productivity, freeing up land for forests to grow as well as speedier progress toward
developing and deploying cheaper non–fossil fuel energy technologies. These trends can act
synergistically to ameliorate man-made climate change. As economic growth increases incomes,
fertility tends to fall toward, and even below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Some
demographers argue that world population could peak at around nine billion by the middle of
this century and then begin declining. Lower population growth means less demand for energy and
other resources than there would otherwise have been. According to the latest World Bank data on 212 national jurisdictions, 85 countries are
currently at or below the replacement rate, including Japan, China, Russia, Brazil the U.S. and all of Europe. Total fertility rates in large developing
countries like India, Bangladesh and Mexico are also near the replacement rate. Economic development initially worsens
environmental externalities such as deforestation and pollution, including the accumulation of climate-damaging greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere and oceans. But long term, pollution and deforestation can start to improve as economic
growth boosts the incomes of once poor people. The wealthier people become the more they
demand and get improved environmental quality via regulation and market mechanisms that promote
cleaner and less resource-intensive processes and technologies. For example, since 1980 carbon monoxide,
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide air pollution is down 85, 80 and 60 percent, respectively, even as real U.S. GDP
more than doubled. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’
latest global forest trends report shows that deforestation halts and reverses when per capita incomes reach
a threshold of around $4,200. Economies increasingly grow by squeezing more value out of less stuff. The Worldwatch Institute reports that
U.S. carbon intensity (the amount of CO2 emitted to produce a dollar of GDP) has fallen 60 percent since 1990. Boosting agricultural
productivity in poor countries will mean more land for forests. Expanding forests soak up carbon
dioxide, thus slowing warming. Right now cereal yields in India and Nigeria average 2,962 and 1,537 kilograms per hectare,
respectively. This contrasts with the U.S. average of 7,340 kilograms per hectare. Agronomist Paul Waggoner of the
Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station has calculated that “if during the next 60 to 70 years
the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s U.S. corn grower, the 10 billion [people]
will need only half of today’s cropland while they eat today’s American calories.” Jesse Ausubel, head of
the Human Environment Program at The Rockefeller University, now finds that humanity is already near peak farmland. If bioethanol subsidies that
encourage the conversion of food into fuel could be eliminated, then up to 160 million hectares of land could be restored to nature by 2060. That’s an
area about double the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. And as farming efficiency improves, more people can
move to cities, freeing up land for nature. Finally, faster economic growth provides the wherewithal
to spur innovation and create cheaper and more efficient technologies. Swanson’s Law is an example of increasing
economies of scale: Every time global solar panel production capacity doubles, the price drops 20 percent. At the current rate of
growth, electricity from solar panels will be cheaper than that produced by burning natural gas
in less than a decade. Similarly, climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues have urgently argued that there is “no credible path to
climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.” A recent study published in PLoS ONE by Swedish and Australian
researchers estimates that replacing all fossil fuel energy generation with nuclear power could be done in
25 to 34 years. Economic growth supplies the capital needed to fund the global no-carbon energy
transformation, not mandates to deploy current, expensive, clunky versions of renewable energy and nuclear technologies. Just as cell phones
enabled poor countries to skip over landline telephone infrastructure, economic development coupled with increasingly cheap solar panels attached to
inexpensive, high-efficiency energy-storage systems, including batteries, could help them bypass centralized fossil fuel plants and power grids. To
truly address climate change, responsible policy makers should select courses of action that
move humanity from slow- to high-growth trajectories , especially for the poorest developing countries.
This includes honest bureaucracies, the rule of law, free markets, strong property rights and democratic governance. Whatever slows
down economic growth will also slow down environmental cleanup and renewal.

Growth solves environmental damage --- proves the system is sustainable which
takes out their impact calc --- structural changes, clean tech, and public pressure.
Bilgili et al. 16 [Faik Bilgili, PhD in Economics, The City University of New York and
Istanbul University; professor of Economics, Erciyes University, Turkey, Emrah Kocak,
Researcher, Evran University, Ümit Bulut, PhD in Economics, Gazi University and Professor of
Economics, Ahi Evran University, “The dynamic impact of renewable energy consumption on
CO2 emissions: A revisited Environmental Kuznets Curve approach,” Renewable and
Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2016, 54(Feb): 838-9]

Some seminal papers reveal that, within

the process of economic growth, environmental pollution level
first scales up and later scales down. This is an inverted U-shaped relationship between GDP per
capita and pollution level (Grossman and Krueger [3,4], Panayotou [5], Shafik [6], Selden and Song [7]). Since this
relationship resembles the relationship between GDP per capita and income inequality produced by Kuznets [8], Panayotou [5] calls
it Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).
According to the EKC hypothesis, the level of environmental pollution initially intensifies because of economic growth,
later tampers after GDP per capita reaches a threshold value (Panayotou [5], Suri and Chapman [9]; Stern [10]).
Therefore, this hypothesis implies a dynamic process in which structural change occurs together with economic
growth (Dinda [2]). Grossman and Krueger [3] first clarify how the EKC arises. They explore that economic growth
affects environmental quality through three channels: (i) scale effect, (ii) structural effect, and (iii)
technological effect. Fig. 1 presents the EKC within the periods of (i), (ii) and (iii).
According to the scale effect, given the level of technology, more resources and inputs are employed to produce more commodities at the beginning of economic growth path. Hence, more energy resources and production will induce more waste and pollutant

The structural effect states that the economy will have a

emissions, and the level of environmental quality will get worse (Torras and Boyce [11], Dinda [2], Prieur [12]).

structural transformation, and economic growth will affect environment positively

along with continuation of growth as national production grows the structure of economy
. In other words,

changes the share of less polluting economic activities increases gradually

, and an economy . Besides,

experiences a transition from capital-intensive industrial sectors to service sector and reaches
technology-intensive knowledge economy that technology-intensive sectors (the final stage of the structural change). Due to the fact

utilize fewer natural sources, the impact of these sectors on environmental pollution will be less .

Since a high-income economy can allocate more resources for research

The last channel of the growth process is the technological effect channel.

and development expenditures, the new technological processes will emerge the country will . Thus,

replace old and dirty tech with new and clean tech and environmental quality will
nologies nologies,

deepen environmental pollution decreases as a result of scale,

(Borghesi [13], Copelan and Taylor [14]). Consequently, initially increases and later

structural and technological effect emerging along with growth path .

Some studies of EKC hypothesis consider income elasticity of clean environment demand (Beckerman [15], Selden and Song [16],
McConnel [17], Panayotou [18], Carson et al. [19], Brock and Taylor [20]). Accordingly, the share of low-income people’s
expenditures for food and basic necessities is higher than that of high-income societies’ expenditures for the same type of
commodities (Engel’s Law). As income level and life standards rise in conjunction with economic
growth, the societies’ demand for clean environment advances. Besides, societies make often
pressure on policy makers to protect the environment through new regulations . One might argue that,
because of these reasons, clean environment is a luxury commodity and the demand elasticity of clean environment
is higher than unity (Dinda [2]).

Resiliency empirically checks environmental damage. Our evidence cites the

largest data sets.
Kareiva et al. 11—Peter Kareiva is a Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow, chief scientist and
VP of The Nature Conservancy, and member of the National Academy of Sciences; Robert Lalasz
is director of science communications for The Nature Conservancy; Michelle Marvier is a
professor and department chair of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Santa Clara
University. [ “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” Breakthrough Journal, No. 2, Fall,
http://breakthroughjournal.org/content/authors/peter-kareiva-robert-lalasz-an-
1/conservation-in-the-anthropoce.shtml]

As conservation became a global enterprise in the 1970s and 1980s, the movement's justification for saving nature
shifted from spiritual and aesthetic values to focus on biodiversity. Nature was described as primeval, fragile, and
at risk of collapse from too much human use and abuse. And indeed, there are consequences
when humans convert landscapes for mining, logging, intensive agriculture, and urban
development and when key species or ecosystems are lost.
But ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature,
frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever. Some ecologists suggest
that if a single species is lost, a whole ecosystem will be in danger of collapse, and that if too
much biodiversity is lost, spaceship Earth will start to come apart. Everything, from the
expansion of agriculture to rainforest destruction to changing waterways, has been painted as a
threat to the delicate inner-workings of our planetary ecosystem.
The fragility trope dates back, at least, to Rachel Carson, who wrote plaintively in Silent Spring of the delicate
web of life and warned that perturbing the intricate balance of nature could have disastrous
consequences.22 Al Gore made a similar argument in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance.23 And the 2005 Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment warned darkly that, while the expansion of agriculture and other forms
of development have been overwhelmingly positive for the world's poor, ecosystem degradation
was simultaneously putting systems in jeopardy of collapse.24
The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of
collapse. Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to
the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem. In many circumstances, the
demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function. The
American chestnut, once a dominant tree in eastern North America, has been extinguished by a
foreign disease, yet the forest ecosystem is surprisingly unaffected. The passenger pigeon, once so
abundant that its flocks darkened the sky, went extinct, along with countless other species from the Steller's
sea cow to the dodo, with no catastrophic or even measurable effects.
These stories of resilience are not isolated examples -- a thorough review of the scientific
literature identified 240 studies of ecosystems following major disturbances such as
deforestation, mining, oil spills, and other types of pollution. The abundance of plant and
animal species as well as other measures of ecosystem function recovered, at least partially, in 173 ( 72
percent ) of these studies.25

Economic decline makes de-carbonization impossible and triggers mass global

starvation – no transition away from growth and cap is sustainable
Walter Russell Mead 12, Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, 7/28,
“The Energy Revolution 4: Hot Planet?” http://blogs.the-american-
interest.com/wrm/2012/07/28/the-energy-revolution-4-hot-planet/
Capitalism is not, Monbiot is forced to admit, a fragile system that will easily be replaced. Bolstered by huge
supplies of oil, it is here to stay . Industrial civilization is, as far as he can now see, unstoppable. Gaia, that
treacherous slut, has made so much oil and gas that her faithful acolytes today cannot protect her from the consequences of her own folly. ¶ Welcome to
the New Green Doom: an overabundance of oil and gas is going to release so much greenhouse gas that the world is going to fry. The exploitation of the
oil sands in Alberta, warn leading environmentalists, is a tipping point. William McKibben put it this way in an interview with Wired magazine in the
fall of 2011:¶ I think if we go whole-hog in the tar sands, we’re out of luck. Especially since that would doubtless mean we’re going whole-hog at all the
other unconventional energy sources we can think of: Deepwater drilling, fracking every rock on the face of the Earth, and so forth.¶ Here’s why the tar
sands are important: It’s a decision point about whether, now that we’re running out of the easy stuff, we’re going to go after the hard stuff. The Saudi
Arabian liquor store is running out of bottles. Do we sober up, or do we find another liquor store, full of really crappy booze, to break into?¶ A year later,
despite the success of environmentalists like McKibben at persuading the Obama administration to block a pipeline intended to ship this oil to
refineries in the US, it’s clear (as it was crystal clear all along to anyone with eyes to see) that the world has every intention of making use of the “crappy
liquor.Ӧ Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens
prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and
to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their
understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international
affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed. And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to
understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of
greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate
skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so,
they are entirely justified by the record. ¶ Nevertheless, the future of the environment is not nearly as dim as greens think. Despairing environmentalists
like McKibben and Monbiot are as wrong about what the new era of abundance means as green energy analysts were about how much oil the planet
had.¶ The problem is the original sin of much environmental thought: Malthusianism. If greens weren’t so addicted to Malthusian horror narratives
they would be able to see that the new era of abundance is going to make this a cleaner planet faster than if the new gas and oil had never been found.¶
Let’s be honest. It has long been clear to students of history, and has more recently begun to dawn on many environmentalists, that all that happy-
clappy carbon treaty stuff was a pipe dream and that nothing like that is going to happen. A humanity that hasn’t been able to ban the bomb despite the
clear and present dangers that nuclear weapons pose isn’t going to ban or even seriously restrict the internal combustion engine and the generator. ¶
The political efforts of the green movement to limit greenhouse gasses have had very little effect so far, and it is highly unlikely that they will have more
success in the future. The green movement has been more of a group hug than a curve bending exercise ,
and that is unlikely to change. If the climate curve bends, it will bend the way the population curve did: as the result of lots of small human decisions
driven by short term interest calculations rather than as the result of a grand global plan. ¶ The
shale boom hasn’t turned green
success into green failure. It’s prevented green failure from turning into something much worse.
Monbiot understands this better than McKibben; there was never any real doubt that we’d keep going to the liquor store. If we hadn’t found ways to use
all this oil and gas, we wouldn’t have embraced the economics of less. True, as oil and gas prices rose, there would be more room for wind and solar
power, but the real winner of an oil and gas shortage is… coal. To use McKibben’s metaphor, there is a much dirtier liquor store just down the road
from the shale emporium, and it’s one we’ve been patronizing for centuries. The US and China have oodles of coal, and rather than walk to work from
our cold and dark houses all winter, we’d use it. Furthermore, when and if the oil runs out, the technology exists to get liquid fuel out of coal. It isn’t
cheap and it isn’t clean, but it works.¶ The newly bright oil and gas future means that we aren’t entering a new Age of Coal. For this, every green on the
planet should give thanks.¶ The second reason why greens should give thanks for shale is that environmentalism is a luxury good.
People must survive and they will survive by any means necessary. But they would much rather thrive than merely survive, and if they can arrange
matters better, they will. A poor society near the edge of survival will dump the industrial waste in
the river without a second thought. It will burn coal and choke in the resulting smog if it has
nothing else to burn.¶ Politics in an age of survival is ugly and practical. It has to be. The best leader is the one
who can cut out all the fluff and the folderol and keep you alive through the winter. During the Battle of Leningrad, people
burned priceless antiques to stay alive for just one more night.¶ An age of energy shortages and
high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of
people. Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people won’t fold their hands and
meditate on the ineffable wonders of Gaia and her mystic web of life as they pass peacefully away. Nor will they vote George
Monbiot and Bill McKibben into power. They will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their
children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper
and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them.¶ But, thanks to shale and other
unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed. We are heading into a world in which energy is
abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more
secure. A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to
think about other goals and the money to spend on them. As China gets richer, the
Chinese want cleaner air, cleaner water, purer food — and they are ready and able to pay for
them. A Brazil whose economic future is secure can afford to treasure and conserve its rain
forests. A Central America where the people are doing all right is more willing and able to preserve its biodiversity. And a world in
which people know where their next meal is coming from is a world that can and will take
thought for things like the sustainability of the fisheries and the protection of the coral
reefs.¶ A world that is more relaxed about the security of its energy sources is going to be able to do more about improving the quality of those
sources and about managing the impact of its energy consumption on the global commons. A rich, energy secure world is going to
spend more money developing solar power and wind power and other sustainable sources
than a poor, hardscrabble one.¶ When human beings think their basic problems are solved, they start looking for more elegant
solutions. Once Americans had an industrial and modern economy, we started wanting to clean
up the rivers and the air. Once people aren’t worried about getting enough calories every
day to survive, they start wanting healthier food more elegantly prepared.¶ A world of abundant shale oil and gas is a
world that will start imposing more environmental regulations on shale and gas producers. A prosperous world will set money
aside for research and development for new technologies that conserve energy or find it in
cleaner surroundings. A prosperous world facing climate change will be able to ameliorate the
consequences and take thought for the future in ways that a world overwhelmed by energy
insecurity and gripped in a permanent economic crisis of scarcity simply can’t and
won’t do.¶ Greens should also be glad that the new energy is where it is. For Monbiot and for many others, Gaia’s decision to put so much oil
into the United States and Canada seems like her biggest indiscretion of all. Certainly, a United States of America that has, in the Biblical phrase,
renewed its youth like an eagle with a large infusion of fresh petro-wealth is going to be even less eager than formerly to sign onto various pie-in-the-
sky green carbon treaties.¶ But think how much worse things would be if the new reserves lay in dictatorial kleptocracies. How willing and able would
various Central Asia states have been to regulate extraction and limit the damage? How would Nigeria have handled vast new reserves whose extraction
required substantially more invasive methods?¶ Instead, the
new sources are concentrated in places where
environmentalists have more say in policy making and where, for all the shortcomings and
limits, governments are less corruptible, more publicly accountable and in fact more competent
to develop and enforce effective energy regulations. This won’t satisfy McKibben and Monbiot (nothing that could actually
happen would satisfy either of these gentlemen), but it is a lot better than what we could be facing. ¶ Additionally, if there are two countries in the world
that should worry carbon-focused greens more than any other, they are the United States and China. The two largest, hungriest economies in the world
are also home to enormous coal reserves. But based on what we now know, the US and China are among the biggest beneficiaries of the new
cornucopia. Gaia put the oil and the gas where, from a carbon point of view, it will do the most good. In
a world of energy shortages
and insecurity, both the US and China would have gone flat out for coal . Now, that is much less likely.¶
And there’s one more reason why greens should thank Gaia for shale. Wind and solar aren’t ready for prime time now, but by the time the new sources
start to run low, humanity will have mastered many more technologies that can used to provide energy and to conserve it. It’s likely that Age of Shale
hasn’t just postponed the return of coal: because of this extra time, there likely will never be another age in which coal is the dominant industrial fuel.
It’s virtually certain that the total lifetime carbon footprint of the human race is going to be smaller with the new oil and gas sources than it would have
been without them.¶ Neither the world’s energy problems nor its climate issues are going away any time soon. Paradise is not beckoning just a few easy
steps away. But the new availability of these energy sources is on balance a positive thing for environmentalists as much as for anyone else. ¶ Perhaps,
and I know this is a heretical thought, but perhaps Gaia is smarter than the greens.
Any alternative kills adaptive capacity and hurts the environment
David Korowicz 14, former ministerial appointment to the council of Comhar, director of
Metis Risk, on the executive committee of Feasta, The Foundation for the Economics of
Sustainability, “How to be Trapped: An Interview with David Korowicz”,
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-19/how-to-be-trapped-an-interview-with-david-
korowicz
That said, a disorderly de-growth/collapse would bring us to a new era where we would end up
with a much reduced capacity to access and use resources and dump waste. But we’d still have
to respond to problems and that would generally require whatever energy and resources were
at hand. For example, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would likely nose-dive, a good thing of course,
although the effects of climate changes would continue to get worse because of lags in the
climate system while our adaptive capacity compared to today would have been shattered . Thus
the real cost of climate change would escalate beyond our ability to pay quite suddenly
and much faster than conventional climate-economic models would suggest. The danger here
is that in
a state of poverty and forced localization our attempts to respond to such emergent
stress and crises mean we start undermining our local environments and their on-
going capacity to support us . So any form of steady-state economy in the foreseeable future
is inherently problematic.
 2AC CAP GOOD – WAR
Cap net decreases war—capitalist peace theory
Harrison 11 (Mark, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Centre for Russian and East European Studies,
University of Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, “Capitalism at War”, Oct 19
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/papers/capitalism.pdf)
Capitalism’s Wars America is the world’s preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of 21
countries in the second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their own country in
the moral dimension. 4 While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status, many apparently
knowledgeable people also seem to believe that, in the modern world, most wars are caused by America;
this impression is based on my experience of presenting work on the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European
countries. According to the evidence, however, these beliefs are mistaken. We are all aware of
America’s wars, but they make only a small contribution to the total. Counting all bilateral
conflicts involving at least the show of force from 1870 to 2001, it turns out that the countries that
originated them come from all parts of the global income distribution (Harrison and Wolf 2011).
Countries that are richer, measured by GDP per head, such as America do not tend to start
more conflicts, although there is a tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so. Ranking countries by the
numbers of conflicts they initiated, the United States, with the largest economy, comes only in
second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the USSR between 1917 and 1991).
What do capitalist institutions contribute to the empirical patterns in the data? Erik Gartzke (2007)
has re-examined the hypothesis of the “democratic peace” based on the possibility that, since capitalism and
democracy are highly correlated across countries and time, both democracy and
peace might be products of the same underlying cause, the spread of capitalist
institutions. It is a problem that our historical datasets have measured the spread of capitalist property rights and
economic freedoms over shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For the period from 1950 to
1992, Gartzke uses a measure of external financial and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a laissez faire
policy. Countries that share this attribute of capitalism above a certain level, he finds,
do not fight each other, so there is capitalist peace as well as democratic peace.
Second, economic liberalization (of the less liberalized of the pair of countries) is a more powerful predictor of
bilateral peace than democratization, controlling for the level of economic development and
measures of political affinity.
Low-growth world causes great power conflict
Daniel W. Drezner 16, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, professor of
international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, May
2016, “Five Known Unknowns about the Next Generation Global Political Economy,”
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IOS-Drezner-web-1.pdf
Geopolitical ambitions could reduce economic interdependence even further.120 Russia and China have territorial and
quasi-territorial ambitions beyond their recognized borders, and the United States has attempted to
counter what it sees as revisionist behavior by both countries. In a low-growth world , it is possible that
leaders of either country would choose to prioritize their nationalist ambitions over
economic growth . More generally, it could be that the expectation of future gains from
interdependence —rather than existing levels of interdependence—constrains great power
bellicosity.121 If great powers expect that the future benefits of international trade and investment will
wane, then commercial constraints on revisionist behavior will lessen. All else equal, this increases
the likelihood of great power conflict going forward.
 2AC UTIL / AT: VTL
Util good
Greene 2010 – Joshua, Associate Professor of Social science in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (The
Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul published in Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, accessed:
www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Developmental/Greene-KantSoul.pdf)
What turn-of-the-millennium science is telling us is that human moral judgment is not
a pristine rational enterprise , that our moral judgments are driven by a hodgepodge of
emotional dispositions, which themselves were shaped by a hodgepodge of evolutionary forces,
both biological and cultural. Because of this, it is exceedingly unlikely that there is any
rationally coherent normative moral theory that can accommodate our moral
intuitions . Moreover, anyone who claims to have such a theory, or even part of one, almost certainly
doesn't . Instead, what that person probably has is a moral rationalization. It seems then, that we have somehow crossed the
infamous "is"-"ought" divide. How did this happen? Didn't Hume (Hume, 1978) and Moore (Moore, 1966) warn us against trying to
derive an "ought" from and "is?" How did we go from descriptive scientific theories concerning moral psychology to skepticism
about a whole class of normative moral theories? The answer is that we did not, as Hume and Moore anticipated, attempt to derive
an "ought" from and "is." That is, our method has been inductive rather than deductive. We have inferred on the basis of the
available evidence that the phenomenon of rationalist deontological philosophy is best explained as a rationalization of evolved
emotional intuition (Harman, 1977). Missing the Deontological Point I suspect that rationalist deontologists will
remain unmoved by the arguments presented here. Instead, I suspect, they will insist that I have
simply misunderstood what Kant and like-minded deontologists are all about . Deontology,
they will say, isn't about this intuition or that intuition. It's not defined by its normative differences with
consequentialism. Rather, deontology is about taking humanity seriously. Above all else, it's about respect for
persons. It's about treating others as fellow rational creatures rather than as mere objects, about acting for reasons rational beings
can share. And so on (Korsgaard, 1996a; Korsgaard, 1996b). This is, no doubt, how many deontologists see
deontology. But this insider's view, as I've suggested, may be misleading . The problem, more
specifically, is that it defines deontology in terms of values that are not distinctively
deontological , though they may appear to be from the inside. Consider the following analogy with religion.
When one asks a religious person to explain the essence of his religion, one often gets an answer
like this: "It's about love, really. It's about looking out for other people, looking beyond oneself. It's about community, being
part of something larger than oneself." This sort of answer accurately captures the phenomenology of many
people's religion, but it's nevertheless inadequate for distinguishing religion from other things .
This is because many, if not most, non-religious people aspire to love deeply, look out for other people, avoid self-absorption, have a
sense of a community, and be connected to things larger than themselves. In other words, secular humanists and atheists can assent
to most of what many religious people think religion is all about. From a secular humanist's point of view, in contrast, what's
distinctive about religion is its commitment to the existence of supernatural entities as well as formal religious institutions and
doctrines. And they're right. These things really do distinguish religious from non-religious practices, though they may appear to be
secondary to many people operating from within a religious point of view. In the same way, I believe that most of the standard
deontological/Kantian self-characterizatons fail to distinguish deontology from other
approaches to ethics . (See also Kagan (Kagan, 1997, pp. 70-78.) on the difficulty of defining deontology.) It seems to me
that consequentialists, as much as anyone else, have respect for persons , are against treating
people as mere objects, wish to act for reasons that rational creatures can share,
etc. A consequentialist respects other persons, and refrains from treating them as mere objects,
by counting every person's well-being in the decision-making process . Likewise, a
consequentialist attempts to act according to reasons that rational creatures can share by acting
according to principles that give equal weight to everyone's interests, i.e. that are
impartial. This is not to say that consequentialists and deontologists don't differ. They do. It's just that the real differences may
not be what deontologists often take them to be. What, then, distinguishes deontology from other kinds of moral thought? A good
strategy for answering this question is to start with concrete disagreements between deontologists and others (such as
consequentialists) and then work backward in search of deeper principles. This is what I've attempted to do with the trolley and
footbridge cases, and other instances in which deontologists and consequentialists disagree. If you ask a deontologically-
minded person why it's wrong to push someone in front of speeding trolley in order to save five
others, you will get characteristically deontological answers. Some will be tautological : "Because it's
murder!" Others will be more sophisticated: "The ends don't justify the means." "You have to respect
people's rights."But , as we know, these answers don't really explain anything , because if you give
the same people (on different occasions) the trolley case or the loop case (See above), they'll make the
opposite judgment , even though their initial explanation concerning the footbridge case applies equally well to one or
both of these cases. Talk about rights, respect for persons, and reasons we can share are natural
attempts to explain, in "cognitive" terms, what we feel when we find ourselves having
emotionally driven intuitions that are odds with the cold calculus of consequentialism. Although
these explanations are inevitably incomplete, there seems to be "something deeply right" about
them because they give voice to powerful moral emotions . But, as with many religious
people's accounts of what's essential to religion, they don't really explain what's distinctive about
the philosophy in question.
 2AC WAR IMPACT
Their “warfare” impact doesn’t provide any accurate method to understand war ---
prefer the theory with statistical and empirical support
David Chandler 9, Professor of IR at University of Westminster, "Liberal War and Foucaultian
Metaphysics", Review of Dillon and Reid’s The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live,
www.research.kobe-u.ac.jp/gsics-publication/jics/chandler_18-1.pdf
This is a book about the ‘liberal way of war’. But the liberal referred to in the title remains under
theorized. On several occasions the authors highlight the distinction between the liberal way of war and the general framing of
war in the modern liberal era as a geo-strategic contestation, taking the territorial state as its referent object. For Dillon and Reid,
‘liberalism never fitted this model of modern politics and the modern problematization of war very well’（p.83). They therefore seek
The liberal way of war refers
to define liberalism and the liberal way of war as distinct from war in the liberal era.
not to real wars and conflicts but to an abstract model of conflict , defined as a desire
to‘remove war from the life of humanity’which‘derives from the way in which liberalism takes the life of the species as its referent
object of politics ─ biopolitics’（p.84）. In this framing, the liberal nature of war very much depends on the
self-description of the conflict by its proponents: these range from Gladstone’s occupation of Egypt in the cause
of‘suffering humanity’, to US liberal ideological constructions of the cause of‘freedom’in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet
Union up to Bush and Blair’s war on Iraq in the cause of humanity（p.6）. As the authors state, of course, wars may be
fought on other grounds than universal humanity: ‘liberal states may…also act as geopolitical
sovereign actors as well…and may also have geopolitical motives for the wars they wage’（p.84）.¶ It is
clear from the beginning that the distinctiveness of ‘the liberal way of war’ which
they seek to explore cannot be more than a fool’s quest . They assert that they will critically uncover
the paradox of liberal war: why it is that Realist or geostrategic war accepts the necessity of war but attempts to limit it, while liberals
this starting point is already
wish to end war but, to do so, are willing to fight unlimited wars. Yet, they admit that
an ideological dead end ─ the wars of the twentieth century give the lie to the idea that there
is some distinction between ‘unending crusades’ and ‘limited jousts between rationally
calculative political subjects’: war has its own dynamic（p.7). Nevertheless, Dillon and Reid press
on and seek to go beyond a Schmittian critique to ground this paradox in the biopolitical‘driver’of the liberal way of
rule ─ biopolitics: wars waged under the banner of the human（against humans）are liberal and, allegedly biopolitical, as human
life is declared to be the referent in need of being secured. These
wars are alleged to be fought differently to geo-
political wars for territory, because the ‘drivers’ of war are not territorialized interests but the
biopolitical framings of the needs of the human, how human life can and should be lived.
Inevitably there are insuperable methodological hurdles to this Sisyphusian task. Already,
there occurs the first fundamental aporia: how do we tell the difference between a liberal and
non-liberal war? There appears to be no way of preventing the category of liberal war from
becoming a lifeless and descriptive one: wars are liberal and fought biopolitically only if we are
told that these are the motives by those fighting them.¶ This separation of liberal ways of
war from territorialised framings of geostrategic contestation makes little sense as
a framework for understanding either liberal rule or liberal ways of war. In fact, in defining liberal war in
this way the connection between liberal rule and war is entirely severed. ‘Liberal war may on
occasions also be geopolitical; which is to say that war may be simultaneously geopolitical as
well as biopolitically driven since the imperatives behind war are never uniform or simple; but
what distinguishes the liberal way of war as liberal are the biopolitical imperatives which have
consistently driven its violent peace-making.’（p.85）Liberal rule has also resulted in wars for
territory or in defence of territories; nevertheless, a story, of course, could have been told about how views of the
human fitted those of struggles to command territory. This is acknowledged, but sits uneasily with the narrow
view of liberal war for species life. If the racial doctrines of European empires, up to and including the genocidal racism
of the Nazi regime, were also biopolitically driven ─ and the authors, indeed, write of race as part of the‘liberal biopolitics of the
seventeenth century’─ then it seems difficult to separate a liberal way of war from allegedly ‘non-liberal’
wars of territorial control.¶ It seems clear that Dillon and Reid do not seek to take the logical step of arguing that the view
of the human reflects, and is reflected by, how the human is ruled and how wars are both thought and fought. Why? Because for
them there is something suprahistorically unique and distinct about the liberal way of war: a distinctly liberal view which
foregrounds the human as the referent of security. Therefore, a second aporia arises: on what basis is
this specifically ‘liberal’? It would appear that every form of rule and of war has at least an
implicit view of the ‘human’ and through this view of the human the form of rule and the way of
war are rationalized. There is not and cannot be anything specifically ‘liberal’ about this. The
humanity in need of securing, through war on other humans, could be formed by Alexander the Great’s stoic cosmopolitan vision, or
could be‘God’s chosen people’, ‘the master race’, or ‘the gains of the proletarian revolution’: there is little doubt that beliefs of what
the human is, or could become, were a vital part of many non-Liberal dispositifs ─ the discourses and practices - of both rule and
war. ¶ The key starting assumption, that the liberal way of war can be isolated from
any other - and its alleged specific form, of ‘ unending violence’, explained by its referent of
the human - appears to be a particularly unproductive one. At the level of abstraction at
which Dillon and Reid choose to work, there is very little here that would help to distinguish
between a liberal and a non-liberal way of war（the asserted purpose of the book）. Of course, what matters is
what this view of the human is. Here Dillon and Reid appear to recognise the limits of their essentializing
approach: …just as the liberal way of rule is constantly adapting and changing so also is the liberal way of war. There is, in that
sense, no one liberal way of rule or one liberal way of war. But there is a fundamental continuity which justifies us referring to the
singular…the fact that each takes the properties of species existence as its referent object…finding its expression historically in many
changing formations of rule according…to the changing exigencies and understanding of species being…（p.84）¶ Rather than
understand our forms of post-political rule and post-territorial war today on their own terms and
then consider to what extent this way of rule and war can be theorized, and to what extent, if any, Foucault’s conception of
biopolitics may be of assistance, Dillon and Reid start out from the assumption that we live in a liberal
world of rule and war and that therefore both can be critiqued through the framework developed by Foucault
in his engagement with understanding the rise and transformation of liberal forms of rule. In transposing Foucault’s
critical engagement with liberal ways of rule to an understanding of liberal ways of war, Dillon
and Reid take a body of historical work about the changing political nature of liberal rule and
transpose it into an essentialised and under theorized understanding of liberal war. This is no mean
feat; how they manage this accomplishment will be discussed in the next two sections.
 AT: NUKE WAR NOT EXTINCTION
Nuclear war causes extinction
Starr 14 [Steven, the Senior Scientist for Physicians for Social Responsibility and Director of
the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri, 5/30/14, “The Lethality
of Nuclear Weapons,” http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/05/30/lethality-nuclear-
weapons]
Nuclear war has no winner. Beginning in 2006, several of the world’s leading climatologists (at
Rutgers, UCLA, John Hopkins University, and the University of Colorado-Boulder) published a
series of studies that evaluated the long-term environmental consequences of a nuclear war,
including baseline scenarios fought with merely 1% of the explosive power in the US and/or
Russian launch-ready nuclear arsenals. They concluded that the consequences of even a “small”
nuclear war would include catastrophic disruptions of global climate[i] and massive destruction
of Earth’s protective ozone layer[ii]. These and more recent studies predict that global
agriculture would be so negatively affected by such a war, a global famine would result, which
would cause up to 2 billion people to starve to death. [iii] These peer-reviewed studies – which
were analyzed by the best scientists in the world and found to be without error – also
predict that a war fought with less than half of US or Russian strategic nuclear weapons would
destroy the human race.[iv] In other words, a US-Russian nuclear war would create such
extreme long-term damage to the global environment that it would leave the Earth
uninhabitable for humans and most animal forms of life. A recent article in the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war”,[v] begins
by stating: “A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal
reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by
either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction.” In 2009, I wrote an
article[vi] for the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament
that summarizes the findings of these studies. It explains that nuclear firestorms would produce
millions of tons of smoke, which would rise above cloud level and form a global stratospheric
smoke layer that would rapidly encircle the Earth. The smoke layer would remain for at least a
decade, and it would act to destroy the protective ozone layer (vastly increasing the UV-B
reaching Earth[vii]) as well as block warming sunlight, thus creating Ice Age weather conditions
that would last 10 years or longer. Following a US-Russian nuclear war, temperatures in the
central US and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for one to three years; the intense
cold would completely eliminate growing seasons for a decade or longer. No crops could be
grown, leading to a famine that would kill most humans and large animal populations.
Electromagnetic pulse from high-altitude nuclear detonations would destroy the integrated
circuits in all modern electronic devices[viii], including those in commercial nuclear power
plants. Every nuclear reactor would almost instantly meltdown; every nuclear spent
fuel pool (which contain many times more radioactivity than found in the reactors) would boil-
off, releasing vast amounts of long-lived radioactivity . The fallout would make most of the US
and Europe uninhabitable. Of course, the survivors of the nuclear war would be starving to
death anyway. Once nuclear weapons were introduced into a US-Russian conflict, there would
be little chance that a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Theories of “limited nuclear war” and
“nuclear de-escalation” are unrealistic.[ix] In 2002 the Bush administration modified US
strategic doctrine from a retaliatory role to permit preemptive nuclear attack; in 2010, the
Obama administration made only incremental and miniscule changes to this doctrine, leaving it
essentially unchanged. Furthermore, Counterforce doctrinex – used by both the US and Russian
military – emphasizes the need for preemptive strikes once nuclear war begins Both sides would
be under immense pressure to launch a preemptive nuclear first-strike once military hostilities
had commenced, especially if nuclear weapons had already been used on the battlefield. Both
the US and Russia each have 400 to 500 launch-ready ballistic missiles armed with a total of at
least 1800 strategic nuclear warheads,[xi] which can be launched with only a few minutes
warning.[xii] Both the US and Russian Presidents are accompanied 24/7 by military officers
carrying a “nuclear briefcase”, which allows them to transmit the permission order to launch in
a matter of seconds. Yet top political leaders and policymakers of both the US and Russia seem
to be unaware that their launch-ready nuclear weapons represent a self-destruct mechanism for
the human race. For example, in 2010, I was able to publicly question the chief negotiators of
the New START treaty, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov and (then) US Assistant Secretary
of State, Rose Gottemoeller, during their joint briefing at the UN (during the Non-Proliferation
Treaty Review Conference). I asked them if they were familiar with the recent peer-reviewed
studies that predicted the detonation of less than 1% of the explosive power contained in the
operational and deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear forces would cause catastrophic changes in
the global climate, and that a nuclear war fought with their strategic nuclear weapons would kill
most people on Earth. They both answered “no.” More recently, on April 20, 2014, I asked the
same question and received the same answer from the US officials sent to brief representatives
of the NGOS at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee meeting at the UN. None of
the US officials at the briefing were aware of the studies. Those present included top officials of
the National Security Council. It is frightening that President Obama and his administration
appear unaware that the world’s leading scientists have for years predicted that a nuclear war
fought with the US and/or Russian strategic nuclear arsenal means the end of human history.
Do they not know of the existential threat these arsenals pose to the human race . . . or do they
choose to remain silent because this fact doesn’t fit into their official narratives? We hear only
about terrorist threats that could destroy a city with an atomic bomb, while the threat of human
extinction from nuclear war is never mentioned – even when the US and Russia are each
running huge nuclear war games in preparation for a US-Russian war. Even more frightening is
the fact that the neocons running US foreign policy believe that the US has “nuclear primacy”
over Russia; that is, the US could successfully launch a nuclear sneak attack against Russian
(and Chinese) nuclear forces and completely destroy them. This theory was articulated in 2006
in “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”, which was published in Foreign Affairs by the Council on
Foreign Relations.[xiii] By concluding that the Russians and Chinese would be unable to
retaliate, or if some small part of their forces remained, would not risk a second US attack by
retaliating, the article invites nuclear war. Colonel Valery Yarynich (who was in charge of
security of the Soviet/Russian nuclear command and control systems for 7 years) asked me to
help him write a rebuttal, which was titled “Nuclear Primacy is a Fallacy”.[xiv] Colonel Yarynich,
who was on the Soviet General Staff and did war planning for the USSR, concluded that the
“Primacy” article used faulty methodology and erroneous assumptions, thus invalidating its
conclusions. My contribution lay in my knowledge of the recently published (in 2006) studies,
which predicted even a “successful” nuclear first-strike, which destroyed 100% of the opposing
sides nuclear weapons, would cause the citizens of the side that “won” the nuclear war to perish
from nuclear famine, just as would the rest of humanity. Although the nuclear primacy article
created quite a backlash in Russia, leading to a public speech by the Russian Foreign Minister,
the story was essentially not covered in the US press. We were unable to get our rebuttal
published by US media. The question remains as to whether the US nuclear primacy asserted in
the article has been accepted as a fact by the US political and military establishment. Such
acceptance would explain the recklessness of US policy toward Russia and China. Thus we find
ourselves in a situation in which those who are in charge of our nuclear arsenal seem not to
understand that they can end human history if they choose to push the button. Most of the
American public also remains completely unaware of this deadly threat. The uninformed are
leading the uninformed toward the abyss of extinction. US public schools have not taught
students about nuclear weapons for more than 20 years. The last time nuclear war was
discussed or debated in a US Presidential election was sometime in the last century. Thus, most
people do not know that a single strategic nuclear weapon can easily ignite a massive firestorm
over 100 square miles, and that the US and Russia each have many thousands of these weapons
ready for immediate use. Meanwhile, neoconservative ideology has kept the US at war during
the entire 21st century. It has led to the expansion of US/NATO forces to the very borders of
Russia, a huge mistake that has consequently revived the Cold War. A hallmark of
neconservatism is that America is the “indispensable nation”, as evidenced by the
neoconservative belief in “American exceptionalism”, which essentially asserts that Americans
are superior to all other peoples, that American interests and values should reign supreme in the
world. At his West Point speech on May 28, President Obama said, “I believe in American
exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” Obama stated his bottom line is that “America
must always lead on the world stage,” and “the backbone of that leadership always will be the
military.” American exceptionalism based on might, not diplomacy, on hard power, not soft, is
precisely the hubris and arrogance that could lead to the termination of human life.
Washington’s determination to prevent the rise of Russia and China, as set out in the Brzezinski
and Wolfowitz doctrines, is a recipe for nuclear war. The need is dire for the president of the US,
Russia, or China to state in a highly public forum that the existence of nuclear weapons creates
the possibility of their use and that their use in war would likely mean human extinction. As
nuclear war has no winners, the weapons should be banned and destroyed before they destroy
all of us.
 AT: ROOT CAUSE
Root cause explanations of international politics don’t exist --- methodological
pluralism is necessary to reclaim IR as emancipatory praxis and avoid endless
political violence
Bleiker 14 [Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland,
“International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies
Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, 2014, pages 325–327]

This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more
positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of
constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly
achievement. For Levine, the
key challenge in international relations ( IR ) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked
reification” : the widespread and dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between
theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The
dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the most difficult issues, from
genocides to war . Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny can thus have
far-reaching consequences . Following Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine
takes a post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are
inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable
aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated. Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several
decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of reification. He
refreshingly breaks down distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects self-reflective and
critical moments in scholars that are usually associated with straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H.
Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-reflexivity never lasted long and
were driven out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge. The second stage of Levine's inquiry outlines
why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review processes to
the speed at which academics are meant to publish. And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work conducted in
the wake of the third debate, while explicitly post-positivist and critiquing the reifying tendencies of existing IR
scholarship, often lacked critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes that many of the respective
authors failed to appreciate sufficiently that “ reification is a consequence of all thinking —
including itself” (p. 68). The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the path toward what
he calls “sustainable critique”: a form of self-reflection that can counter the dangers of reification. Critique, for him, is not
just something that is directed outwards, against particular theories or theorists. It is also
inward-oriented, ongoing, and sensitive to the “limitations of thought itself” (p. 12). The challenges that
such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins and values of our
concepts are as strong as Levine and other Adorno-inspired theorists believe they are, then how can we actually recognize our own
reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of meanings from which we cannot escape?
Second, if one constantly questions one's own perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to establish the
kind of stable foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been critiqued as relentlessly negative, even
by his second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from Jürgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew Linklater and
Ken Booth). The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing and useful at a
practical level. He starts off with depicting reification not as a flaw that is meant to be expunged, but
as an a priori condition for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked. Methodological
pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique . He borrows from what Adorno calls a
“constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates
multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena . He writes of the need
to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model,
a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to
understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever
adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand . But each should, in a way,
recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In
practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when— or, rather,
precisely when —they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual
deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences . The
benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances
and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very
incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies
in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a
“critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's
approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms
against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and
complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.
 AT: STUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Turn—the case is a gateway to the alt

Folk 78 – Peace Studies Professor, Bethany College (Jerry, Peace Education-Peace Studies Programs, Peace Change 5.1, AG)
Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work of researchers and educators coming to the field
from the perspective of negative peace too easily forget that the prevention of a nuclear confrontation of global
dimensions is
the prerequisite for all other peace research, education, and action. Unless such a
confrontation can be avoided there will be no world left in which to build positive peace. Moreover, the
blanket condemnation of all such negative peace oriented research, education or action as a reactionary attempt to support and
reinforce the status quo is doctrinaire. Conflict theory and resolution, disarmament studies, studies of the international system and
of international organizations, and integration studies are in themselves neutral. They do not intrinsically support either the status
quo or revolutionary efforts to change or overthrow it. Rather they offer a body of knowledge which can be used for either purpose or
for some purpose in between. It is much more logical for those who understand peace as positive peace to
integrate this knowledge into their own framework and to utilize it in achieving their own purposes. A balanced
peace studies program should therefore offer the student exposure to the questions and concerns which occupy those who view the
field essentially from the point of view of negative peace.

Nuke war threat is real and o/w structural and invisible violence---their expansion
of structural violence to an all-pervasive omnipresence makes preventing war
impossible
Boulding 1977 – Kenneth, Prof Univ. of Michigan and UC Boulder, Journal of Peace
Research; 14; 75 p. Boulding p. 83-4

Finally, we come to the great Galtung metaphors of ’structural

violence’ and ’positive peace’. They are metaphors
rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and
metaphors have much more persuasive power than models do, for models tend to be the
preserve of the specialist. But when a metaphor implies a bad model it can be very dangerous,
for it is both persuasive and wrong. The metaphor of structural violence I would argue falls right
into this category. The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation, ill health, low expectations of life, a condition in which more than half the
human race lives, is ’like’ a thug beating up the victim and taking his money away from him in the street, -or it is ’like’ a conqueror stealing the land of
the people and reducing them to slavery. Theimplication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of
the thug or the conqueror and the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While there
is some truth in the metaphor, in the modem world at least there is not very much. Violence,
whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a
very different phenomenon from poverty. The processes which create and sustain poverty are
not at all like the processes which create and sustain violence, although like everything else in
the world, everything is somewhat related to everything else. There is a very real problem of the
structures which lead to violence, but unfortunately Galtung’s metaphor of structural violence as
he has used it has diverted attention from this problem. Violence in the behavioral sense, that is,
somebody actually doing damage to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a ’threshold’ phenomenon, rather like the
boiling over of a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise for a long time without its boiling over , but at some threshold
boiling over will take place. The
study of the structures which underlie violence are a very important and
much neglected part of peace research and indeed of social science in general. Threshold
phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent ’breaks’ in the system
rather than uniformities. Violence, whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the
’strain’ on a system is too great for its ‘~s~trength’. The metaphor here is that violence is like
what happens when we break a piece of chalk. Strength and strain, however, especially in social
systems, are so interwoven historically that it is very difficult to separate them. The diminution
of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture of the two; one is the increase in the
strength of the system, ~the other is the diminution of the strain. The strength of systems
involves habit, culture, taboos, and sanctions, all these things, which enable a system to stand
Increasing strain without breaking down into violence. The strains on the system are largely
dynamic in character, such as arms races, mutually stimulated hostility, changes in relative
economic position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflict of interest are only part of the
strain on a system, and not always the most important part. It is very hard for people to know their interests, and misperceptions of interests take place
mainly through the dynamic processes, not through the structural ones. It is only perceptions of interest which affect
people’s behavior, not the ’real’ interests, whatever these may be, and the gap between
perception and reality can be very large and resistant to change. However, what Galitung calls
structural violence (which has been defined by one unkind commentator as anything that
Galltung doesn’~t like) was originally defined as any unnecessarily low expectation of life, an
that assumption that anybody who dies before the allotted span has been killed, however
unintentionally and unknowingly, by somebody else. The concept has been expanded to include
all the problems off poverty, destitution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and
are a very high priority for research and action, but they belong to systems which are only
peripherally related to the structures which, produce violence. This is not to say that the
cultures of violence and the cultures of poverty are not sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are
culture of violence, and certainly not all cultures of violence are poverty cultures. But the dynamics of poverty and the success
or failure to rise out off ’it are of a complexity far beyond anything which the metaphor of
structural violence can offer. While the metaphor of structural violence performed a ’service in
calling attention to a problem, it may have done a disservice in preventing us from finding the
answer.
ALT ANSWERS
 2AC ALT FAILS – CONDIT

Alt fails – feasible vision key to avoid violent totalitarianism – don’t settle for their
intellectual laziness and instead embrace the hard work of pragmatic reform
Condit 15 [Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the
University of Georgia, “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social
Change,” Feb 4, 2015, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015]

The theories of social change that dominated American Communication Studies at the close of
the twentieth century echoed those of the Western humanities. These theories spurred extensive
thought about the performances of individual identity and the relationship of identity to mass
media and culture, and they probably had some laudable influence on the broader culture. They
are, however, inadequate to the evolving contexts I have described. One can sum up the most
widely circulating theories of social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth
century in the following, admittedly simplified, statement: There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the
blank with one or more: patriarchy, whites, the West, the U.S., neo-liberalism, global capitalism)
that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution. We don't know the shape of what will come
after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that comes after
will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love, Courage, Violence, etc.). For an example,
read Slavoj Žižek's attack on the evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/49), which requires the
“excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p. 81), to eliminate
“democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined “new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The resilience of this social
theory identifies it as a rhetorical attractor; a predispositional symbolic set that readily
transmits emotive potency. To appropriate Kenneth Burke's terms, the bio-symbolics of
human political relationships readily create a “grammar” and “rhetoric” in the form of a
unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle, after which, things in
“our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest that it
may not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but rather that it arises
from an intersection of the structural characteristics of language systems and the nature of
human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social cooperation and inter-tribal
competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems, this fantasy
theme is avoidable, even if it is powerfully attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are
material, however, specific kinds of work are necessary in order to avoid the lure of that
predisposition. This point is crucial, because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist)
approaches to social change, which envisioned a single (violent) leap away from the social as
sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act”
with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the
grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his
appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens
of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead
not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism
of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and/or violent
factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that
it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement
has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that
trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first iteration
of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with
revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely
against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical,
so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the
past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized
alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the
binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been
foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g.,
Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of
the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult, requires multi-disciplinary
understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity than the typical academic theorist
can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to
have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of
autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if
one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people
better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll
get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as
constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.”
This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language,
and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project
for progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative
visions that appear materially feasible.
 2AC ALT FAILS – SECURITY INEV
Rejecting sovereignty exacerbates inequalities and prevents emancipation
Tara McCormack 10, Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester, PhD in
IR from the University of Westminster, “Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to
Emancipatory Approaches,” p139, google books
Critics of critical and emancipatory theory have raised pertinent problems in terms both of the idealism of critical approaches and
their problematic relationship to contemporary liberal intervention. Critical theorists themselves are aware that their prescriptions
seem to be hard to separate from contemporary discourses and practices of power, yet critical theorists do not seem to be able to
the limitations to critical and emancipatory
offer any understanding of why this might be. However,
approaches cannot be overcome by distinguishing themselves from liberal
internationalist policy . In fact a closer engagement with contemporary security policies and discourse would show the
similarities with critical theory and that both suffer from the same limitations.¶ The limitations of critical and emancipatory
approaches are to be found in critical prescriptions in the contemporary political context. Jahn is right to argue that critical theory is
idealistic, but this needs to be explained why. Douzinas is right to argue that critical theory becomes a justification for power and
this needs to be explained why. The reasons for this remain undertheorised. I argue here that critical and
emancipatory approaches lack a fundamental understanding of what is at stake in the political
realm. For critical theorists the state and sovereignty represent oppressive structures that work
against human freedom. There is much merit to this critique of the inequities of the state system. However, the
problem is that freedom or emancipation are not simply words that can breathe life into
international affairs but in the material circumstances of the contemporary world must be
linked to political constituencies, that is men and women who can give content to that
freedom and make freedom a reality. ¶ Critical and emancipatory theorists fail to understand that there must be a
political content to emancipation and new forms of social organisation. Critical theorists seek emancipation and
argue for new forms of political community above and beyond the state, yet there is nothing at
the moment beyond the state that can give real content to those wishes . There is no
democratic world government and it is simply nonsensical to argue that the UN, for example, is a step towards global democracy.
Major international institutions are essentially controlled by powerful states. To welcome
challenges to sovereignty in the present political context cannot hasten any kind of more
just world order in which people really matter (to paraphrase Lynch). Whatever the limitations of
the state, and there are many, at the moment the state represents the only framework in which
people might have a chance to have some meaningful control over their lives.

No one will accept major changes to the structure of sovereignty

Rosa Brooks 12, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a Bernard L.
Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, “Strange Bedfellows: The Convergence
of Sovereignty-Limiting Doctrines in Counterterrorist and Human Rights Discourse,” Law and
Ethics Summer/Fall
None of these projects would be straightforward; each might be seen as facing barriers so high as to be virtually
insurmountable. If the various institutional and legal “fixes” we might envision are unrealistic in the near term, is there any responsible way forward?
The overall thrust of this essay has been to call for intellectual honesty about the logical
implications of emerging sovereignty-limiting doctrines. But, perhaps, this is one of those areas where discretion—even
disingenuousness—is the better part of valor, or at least the better part of preserving stability. Stephen Krasner makes a variant of this argument in
some of his recent work. Krasner famously dubbed sovereignty “organized hypocrisy,” noting that while
the notion of “sovereignty” has long been associated with clear legal criteria and rules, states have, for
just as long, routinely ignored those rules when it suited them to do so.18 To Krasner, this organized hypocrisy is nonetheless
functional—or at least more functional than any available alternative. In a 2010 essay on “The
Durability of Organized Hypocrisy,” Krasner argues that this remains true today.19 He grants that emerging normative or legal doctrines will continue
to challenge and delegitimize traditional notions of sovereignty, and significant “shocks”— such as “the possibility of
mega-terrorist attacks”—might lead to radical change: “Governments in advanced countries would begin to reconfigure
their bureaucratic structures to… [reflect] new rules and principles about responsibilities for territories or functions beyond national borders.” But,
fundamental challenges to the existing sovereignty regime are not to be
argues Krasner, “Such
welcomed. Any new set of principles…would be contested. External actors, even if their claims were legitimated…would not find it easy to
exercise the authority they had asserted…there are no formulaic solutions.” Krasner concludes, “Sovereignty
has worked very
imperfectly but it has still worked better than any other structure that decision-
makers have been able to envision.”20 In other words: in the end, perhaps, when it comes to
teasing out the implications of emerging sovereigntylimiting doctrines, organized hypocrisy is
the best we can do.
 2AC ANTI-WAR MOVEMENTS GOOD
Anti-war movements totally and unequivocally fail
Meyer ’12 /David J., professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine
“Where’s the Peace Movement?’ July 2, http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/wheres-the-
peace-movement/

Just over a decade ago, activists around the world organized the largest coordinated set of peace
protests in history, trying to stop the impending invasion of Iraq. On February 15, 2003, millions
of people took to the streets in the largest cities of the richest countries, with the largest turnouts
appearing in countries were governments were poised to support the war (Walgrave and Rucht
2010). The demonstrations captured media attention and the political imagination of would-be
activists around the world. They did not, however, stop the war. On March 20, 2003, a
multinational coalition comprised overwhelmingly of American military forces started a
bombing campaign designed to inspire “shock and awe,” and pave the way for a relatively smooth
invasion with minimal non-Iraqi casualties. In relatively short order, the American-led coalition ousted
Saddam Hussein’s regime and installed its own provisional government, promising an orderly transition
to democracy. That didn’t quite happen.
As efforts at orderly governance faltered, one after another America’s allies pulled their military forces
out of Iraq. After a surge and decline in American forces, and after several Iraqi factions
negotiated their own truce, President Obama pulled the last troops out of Iraq in December of 2011,
roughly two years later than he promised as a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, the war he had
promised to intensify, in Afghanistan, continued with increases in troops on the ground.
Democracy still nowhere in sight, the United States has committed to withdraw roughly a third
of the 100,000 troops now deployed there, pulling out the rest over time as Afghanistan trains its
own military to keep order and fight terrorists.
There’s no way to describe these outcomes as the products of any happy story, either for the
George W. Bush administration, which started the wars, nor for the peace movement, that tried to
stop them. Early on, it became clear that the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s nuclear
ambitions and capabilities, were, uh, unsubstantiated. Prospects for democracy evaporated somewhat
more quickly. The current Afghan government is now negotiating a peace with the Taliban forces that
had provided a haven for Al-Qaeda, as American participation in the war declines. American troops
eventually killed Osama Bin-Laden, who had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center,
and Iraqis executed Saddam Hussein. These achievements came at the cost of the lives of more
than 6,500 American service people and more than 200,000 Iraqi and Afghani lives. Fiscal
costs to the United States continue to accumulate, and will reach more than $3 trillion (Stiglitz and
Blime 2008). The moral, social, and political costs are surely greater.
So, the peace activists were basically right, but as the evidence for their claims continued to
build, they were less and less visible. Is there anything we can learn from this? Understanding
provides some small recompense, and I’d suggest that the patterns of protest mobilization and
decline are typical of peace movements—and other kinds of movements—in American history. A
few points:
First, although the peace movement didn’t stop the war, it did exercise some influence. The political
fallout in the United States and the Western Alliance led the Bush administration to work harder to
bolster its case, finding or fabricating more evidence for its claims of nuclear ambitions and sending
Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations to promote them. Military planners developed a
strategy designed to achieve a quick military victory which minimized not only allied casualties, but also
bad publicity that would attend visible destruction of Iraqi infrastructure and populations. This is far
from enough, but it is not trivial.
Second, peace and antiwar movements usually emerge when activists are least likely to get what
they’re demanding. Although stalwarts will take to the streets for ultimate goals, most people respond
to political circumstances; they protest when they think it might work—and when they think
nothing else will. There is a long term pattern in which peace movements emerge strongly when
America’s military policy becomes more aggressive and expensive (e.g. Meyer 1990). Some people
and organizations may have a well-developed plan for remaking foreign policy altogether, but a
protest movement is a blunt instrument. Once the most bellicose possibilities seem restrained,
the movement coalition will start to fray, as differences among groups become more salient and
as some groups turn to more pressing issues (Meyer and Corrigall-Brown 2005).
Third, protest movements in liberal polities are closely tied to more conventional political action.
Peace movements decline during election years, as activists and funders channel their efforts
into what seem to be more direct routes to influence. And when your putative ally is in office,
it’s harder to take to the streets. Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas (2011) surveyed participants at
peace demonstrations in the United States before and after Barack Obama’s elections. They found that
the share of identified Democrats at the demonstrations declined after Obama took office. Although
Obama’s policies weren’t all that different from those of his predecessor, it was harder for
activists to get Democrats into the streets when they thought that their president promised to
move policy in a more congenial direction, albeit slowly slowly. President Obama has taken far
less flack over domestic surveillance, political assassination by drones, or the ongoing operation
of a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay than George W. Bush did.
Finally, there’s a critical movement question about democracy. The costs of the wars in Afghanistan were
both concentrated and largely invisible. Financing the wars with borrowed money, in conjunction with
large tax cuts, President Bush minimized opposition from those concerned about costs. (And remember,
protesters are less likely to go public when their man is in office.) And fighting the war with an all-
volunteer force piled the disruption and danger onto a relatively small segment of the American
public. It was all too easy for most Americans to look away most of the time.
 2AC ANARCHY / AT: “REFORMISM BAD”
Legal reform might not be perfect, but it’s better than the alt---the neg has no
metric by which to evaluate the efficacy of their politics---*** K’s of legal change
getting coopted apply equally to them and just prove we need rigorous training in
political advocacy --- the state is inevitable and they have no alternative for a world
outside of the law that doesn’t lapse into the worst form of libertarianism
Lobel 7 [Orly, University of San Diaego Assistant Professor of Law, “The Paradox of Extralegal
Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics,” 120 HARV. L. REV. 937,
http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf]

In the following sections, I argue that the

extralegal model has suffered from the same drawbacks
associated with legal cooptation. I show that as an effort to avoid the risk of legal cooptation, the current wave of
suggested alternatives has effects that ironically mirror those of cooptation itself. Three central types
of difficulties exist with contemporary extralegal scholarship. First, in the contexts of the labor and civil rights movements,
arguments about legal cooptation often developed in response to a perceived gap between the
conceptual ideal toward which a social reform group struggled and its actual accomplishments.
But, ironically, the contemporary message of opting out of traditional legal reform avenues may
only accentuate this problem. As the rise of informatization (moving to nonlegal strategies), civil society (moving to
extralegal spheres), and pluralism (the proliferation of norm-generating actors) has been effected and appropriated by supporters
from a wide range of political commitments, these concepts have had unintended implications that conflict
with the very social reform ideals from which they stem. Second, the idea of opting out of the legal
arena becomes self-defeating as it discounts the ongoing importance of law and the possibilities
of legal reform in seemingly unregulated spheres. A model encompassing exit and rigid sphere distinctions further
fails to recognize a reality of increasing interpenetration and the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres, profit
and nonprofit sectors, and formal and informal institutions. It therefore loses the critical insight that law operates in
the background of seemingly unregulated relationships. Again paradoxically, the extralegal view of
decentralized activism and the division of society into different spheres in fact have worked to subvert rather than
support the progressive agenda. Finally, since extralegal actors view their actions with romantic
idealism, they fail to develop tools for evaluating their success. If the critique of legal
cooptation has involved the argument that legal reform, even when viewed as a victory, is never
radically transformative, we must ask: what are the criteria for assessing the
achievements of the suggested alternatives ? As I illustrate in the following sections, much of the
current scholarship obscures the lines between the descriptive and the prescriptive in
its formulation of social activism. If current suggestions present themselves as alternatives
to formal legal struggles, we must question whether the new extralegal politics that are proposed
and celebrated are capable of producing a constructive theory and meaningful channels for reform, rather
than passive status quo politics.
A. Practical Failures: When Extralegal Alternatives Are Vehicles for Conservative Agendas We don’t want the 1950s back. What we
want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political
bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100 percent Americanism and the sinfulness of
dissent.163 A basic structure of cooptation arguments as developed in relation to the labor and civil
rights movements has been to show how, in the move from theory to practice, the ideal that was
promoted by a social group takes on unintended content, and the group thus fails to realize the
original vision. This risk is particularly high when ideals are framed in broad terms that are open to multiple interpretations.
Moreover, the pitfalls of the potential risks presented under the umbrella of cooptation are in fact accentuated in current proposals.
Paradoxically, as the extralegal movement is framed by way of opposition to formal legal reform
paths, without sufficiently defining its goals, it runs the very risks it sought to avoid by working
outside the legal system.
Extralegal paths are depicted mostly in negative terms and as resorting to new alternative forms
of action rather than established models. Accordingly, because the ideas of social organizing,
civil society, and legal pluralism are framed in open-ended contrarian terms, they do not
translate into specific visions of social justice reform. The idea of civil society, which has been embraced by
people from a broad array of often conflicting ideological commitments, is particularly demonstrative. Critics argue that “[s]ome
ideas fail because they never make the light of day. The idea of civil society . . . failed because it became too popular.”164 Such a
broadly conceived ideal as civil society sows the seeds of its own destruction.
In former eras, the claims about the legal cooptation of the transformative visions of workplace
justice and racial equality suggested that through legal strategies the visions became stripped of
their initial depth and fragmented and framed in ways that were narrow and often merely
symbolic. This observation seems accurate in the contemporary political arena; the idea of civil society
revivalism evoked by progressive activists has been reduced to symbolic acts with very little
substance. On the left, progressive advocates envision decentralized activism in a third, nongovernmental sphere as a
way of reviving democratic participation and rebuilding the state from the bottom up. By contrast, the idea of civil society has
been embraced by conservative politicians as a means for replacing government-funded programs
and steering away from state intervention. As a result, recent political uses of civil society have subverted the
ideals of progressive social reform and replaced them with conservative agendas that reject
egalitarian views of social provision.
 AT: ANARCHY ALT
Alt can’t solve--anarchist states are offensive realists
Taliaferro 2000 ( Jeffrey Taliaferro, Ph.D. in government from Harvard University,
bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Duke University, Associate Professor of
Political Science at Tufts Univeristy, “Security Seeking under Anarchy: Defensive Realism
Revisited”, International security, 25 (3), pp. 128-161)//vl
Does the international system provide incentives for expansion? If so, should the United States
seek to guarantee its long-term security through a grand strategy of preponderance (or primacy)
and pursue opportunities to weaken potential great power com-petitors, such as China?
Alternatively, does the international system provide more disincentives than incentives for
aggression? If this is the case, should the United States seek to guarantee its long-term security
through a grand strategy of selective engagement? Two strands of contemporary realism provide
differ-ent answers to these questions.' Offensive realism holds that anarchy—the absence of a
worldwide govern-ment or universal sovereign—provides strong incentives for expansion. All
states strive to maximize their power relative to other states because only the most powerful
states can guarantee their survival. They pursue expansionist policies when and where the
benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. States un-der anarchy face the ever-present threat that
other states will use force to harm or conquer them. This compels states to improve their relative
power positions through arms buildups, unilateral diplomacy, mercantile (or even autarkic)
foreign economic policies, and opportunistic expansion.3 Defensive realism holds that the
international system provides incentives for expansion only under certain conditions. Under
anarchy, many of the means a state uses to increase its security decrease the security of other
states. This se-curity dilemma causes states to worry about one another's future intentions and
relative power. Pairs of states may pursue purely security-seeking strate-gies, but inadvertently
generate spirals of mutual hostility or conflict. States of-ten, although not always, pursue
expansionist policies because their leaders mistakenly believe that aggression is the only way to
make their states secure. Defensive realism predicts greater variation in internationally driven
expan-sion and suggests that states ought to generally pursue moderate strategies as the best
route to security. Under most circumstances, the stronger states in the international system
should pursue military, diplomatic, and foreign economic policies that communicate restraint.4
Defensive realism has recently come under attack from critics of realism and even from fellow
realists. Critics of realism, such as Andrew Moravcsik and Jeffrey Legro, fault various defensive
realist theories for positing a role for do-mestic politics, elite belief systems and misperceptions,
and international insti-tutions. By including such variables in their theories, the critics argue,
defensive realists effectively repudiate the core assumptions of political real-ism.5 Offensive
realists, such as Fareed Zakaria and Randall Schweller, charge that defensive realism cannot
explain state expansion because it argues that there are never international incentives for such
behavior.6 I argue that the debate between defensive realism and offensive realism over the
implications of anarchy and the need to clarify defensive realism's auxil-iary assumptions
deserve attention for three reasons. First, the outcome of this theoretical debate has broad policy
implications. Defensive realism suggests that under certain conditions, pairs of nondemocratic
states can avoid war, states can engage in mutually beneficial cooperation without the assistance
of international institutions, and norms proscribing the development and use of weapons of
mass destruction are largely epiphenomenal/ In addition, offen-sive realism and defensive
realism generate radically different prescriptions for military doctrine, foreign economic policy,
military intervention, and crisis management.8
 2AC NO MINDSET SHIFT

No mindset shift
Heinberg, 15—Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute (Richard, “The
Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us”, http://www.postcarbon.org/the-anthropocene-its-not-
all-about-us/, dml)
It’s hard to convince people to voluntarily reduce consumption and curb reproduction.
That’s not because humans are unusually pushy, greedy creatures; all living organisms tend to
maximize their population size and rate of collective energy use. Inject a colony of
bacteria into a suitable growth medium in a petri dish and watch what happens. Hummingbirds,
mice, leopards, oarfish, redwood trees, or giraffes: in each instance the principle remains
inviolate—every species maximizes population and energy consumption within nature’s limits.
Systems ecologist Howard T. Odum called this rule the Maximum Power Principle: throughout
nature, “system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation,
and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.”
In addition to our innate propensity to maximize population and consumption, we humans also
have difficulty making sacrifices in the present in order to reduce future costs. We’re
genetically hardwired to respond to immediate threats with fight-or-flight responses, while
distant hazards matter much less to us. It’s not that we don’t think about the future at all;
rather, we unconsciously apply a discount rate based on the amount of time likely to
elapse before a menace has to be faced.
True, there is some variation in future-anticipating behavior among individual humans. A
small percentage of the population may change behavior now to reduce risks to forthcoming
generations, while the great majority is less likely to do so. If that small percentage could
oversee our collective future planning, we might have much less to worry about. But that’s
tough to arrange in democracies, where people, politicians, corporations, and even nonprofit
organizations get ahead by promising immediate rewards, usually in the form of more economic
growth. If none of these can organize a proactive response to long-range threats like climate
change, the actions of a few individuals and communities may not be so effective at
mitigating the hazard.
This pessimistic expectation is borne out by experience. The general outlines of the 21st
century ecological crisis have been apparent since the 1970s. Yet not much has actually
been accomplished through efforts to avert that crisis. It is possible to point to hundreds,
thousands, perhaps even millions of imaginative, courageous programs to reduce, recycle, and
reuse—yet the overall trajectory of industrial civilization remains relatively unchanged.
 2AC NO SPILLOVER
Zero chance they cause foreign policy realignment—pursuit of security is locked in
McDonough 9 (David. S. McDonough, Fellow at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at
Dalhousie University, “Beyond Primacy: Hegemony and ‘Security Addiction’ in U.S. Grand
Strategy”, Winter 2009, Orbis, ScienceDirect)
The reason that the current debate is currently mired in second-order issues of multilateral versus unilateral legitimacy can be attributed to the post 9/11 security environment.
A grand strategy is, after all, ‘‘a state’s theory about how it can best cause security for itself.’’ 35 It
would be prudent to examine why the neoconservative ‘‘theory’’ proved to be so attractive to American decision-makers after the 9/11 attacks, and why the Democrats

have begun to rely on an equally primacist ‘‘theory’’ of their own. As Charles Kupchan has demonstrated, a sense of vulnerability is
often directly associated with dramatic shifts in a state’s grand strategy. Kupchan is, of course, largely concerned with vulnerability to changes in the global distribution of
the 9/11 terrorist attacks have dramatically increased the U.S. sense of strategic
power. 36 Even so,

vulnerability to both global terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and even to more traditional threats that are seen, as Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘‘in a dramatic new
light–through the prism of our experience on 9/11.’’ 37 Perhaps more than any previous terrorist action, these attacks demonstrated the potential influence of non-state terrorist
groups like Al Qaeda. U.S. strategic primacy makes conventional responses unattractive and ultimately futile to potential adversaries. The country’s societal vulnerability to
terrorist attacks will likewise lead to extremely costly defensive reactions against otherwise limited attacks.
For both the United States and its asymmetrical adversaries, the advantage clearly favors the offense over the defense. With the innumerable list of potential targets,
‘‘preemptive and preventive attacks will accomplish more against. . .[terrorists or their support structures], dollar for dollar, than the investment in passive defenses.’’ 38 As
former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith has argued, a primary reliance on defense requires instrusive security measures that would inevitably endanger
American civil liberties and curtail its free and open society. 39 Strategic preponderance ensures that the United States will continue to face adversaries eager to implement
asymmetrical tactics, even as it offers the very resources necessary to implement both offensive and less effective defensive measures. Unfortunately, terrorist groups with
strategic reach (i.e., capable of influencing the actions of states) will likely increase in the coming years due to a combination of factors, including the ‘‘democractization of
As more groups are imbued with sophisticated
technology,’’ the ‘‘privatization of war’’ and the ‘‘miniaturization of weaponry.’’

technological capabilities and are able to employ increasingly lethal weapons, the United States will be forced to rely
even further on its unprecedented global military capabilities to eliminate this threat. The global war on terror, even with tactical successes
against al Qaeda, will likely result in an inconclusive ending marked by the fragmentation and proliferation of terrorist spoiler groups. The ‘‘Israelization’’ of the United States, in
which ‘‘security trumps everything,’’ will be no temporary phenomenon. 40 Realism provides an insufficient means for understanding the current post-9/11 strategic threat
environment and underestimates the potential impact of the terrorist threat on the American sense of vulnerability. Globalized terrorism must be confronted by proactive
measures to reduce the domestic vulnerability to attack and to eliminate these organizations in their external sanctuaries. Even then, these measures will never be able to ensure
significant public pressure for expanded security measures will arise after
‘‘perfect security.’’ As a result,

any attack. The United States will be consumed with what Frank Harvey has termed security addiction: ‘‘As expectations for acceptable levels of pain decrease,
billions of dollars will continue to be spent by both parties in a never-ending competition to convince
the American public that their party’s programs are different and more likely to succeed.’’ 41 This
addiction has an important impact on the dramatically rising levels of homeland security spending. Indeed, while this

increased spending is an inevitable and prudent reaction to the terrorist threat, it also creates high public expectations that will
only amplify outrage in a security failure. 42 Relatedly, American strategic preponderance plays an important role in facilitating a vigorous international response to globalized
terrorism, including the use of coercive military options and interventions. A primacist strategy has the dual attraction of both maximizing U.S. strategic dominance and
the Republicans had developed a strong advantage in
convincing the public of a party’s national security credentials. Indeed,

electoral politics by its adherence to a strong military and aggressive strategy, and the
Democrats in turn ‘‘learned the lesson of its vulnerability on the issue and [...] explicitly declared its devotion to national
security and support for the military.’’ 43 The 9/11 attacks may not have altered the distribution of power amongst major states, but it has directly created a domestic political
situation marked by an addiction to expansive security measures that are needed to satisfy increasingly high public expectations. In such a climate, it is easy to see why the neo-
conservatives were so successful in selling their strategic vision.The fact that the United States has effectively settled on a
grand strategy of primacy in the post-9/11 period should come as no surprise. It is simply
inconceivable that a political party could successfully advocate a grand strategy
that does not embrace military preeminence and interventionism, two factors that are seen to provide
a definite advantage in the pursuit of a ‘‘global war on terror.’’ Political parties may disagree on the necessary tactics to eliminate the

terrorist threat. But with increased vulnerability and security addiction, the United States will continue to embrace strategies of

primacy– rather than going ‘‘beyond primacy’’–for much of the Long War.
 2AC PERM
Alt fails absent combination with political advocacy like the plan – cooption –
political engagement key
McCormack, 10 [Tara, is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester and
has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster. 2010, (Critique,
Security and Power: The political limits to emancipatory approaches, page 137-138]
In chapter 7 I engaged with the human security framework and some of the problematic
implications of ‘emancipatory’ security policy frameworks. In this chapter I argued that the shift
away from the pluralist security framework and the elevation of cosmopolitan and emancipatory
goals has served to enforce international power inequalities rather than lessen
them. Weak or unstable states are subjected to greater international scrutiny and international
institutions and other states have greater freedom to intervene, but the citizens of these states
have no way of controlling or influencing these international institutions or powerful
states. This shift away from the pluralist security framework has not challenged the status
quo, which may help to explain why major international institutions and states can easily
adopt a more cosmopolitan rhetoric in their security policies. As we have seen, the shift away
from the pluralist security framework has entailed a shift towards a more openly hierarchical
international system, in which states are differentiated according to, for example, their ability to
provide human security for their citizens or their supposed democratic commitments. In this
shift, the old pluralist international norms of (formal) international sovereign equality, non-
intervention and ‘blindness’ to the content of a state are overturned. Instead, international
institutions and states have more freedom to intervene in weak or unstable states in order to
‘protect’ and emancipate individuals globally. Critical and emancipatory security theorists argue
that the goal of the emancipation of the individual means that security must be reconceptualised
away from the state. As the domestic sphere is understood to be the sphere of insecurity and
disorder, the international sphere represents greater emancipatory possibilities, as Tickner
argues, ‘if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state sovereignty must be severed’
(1995: 189). For critical and emancipatory theorists there must be a shift towards a
‘cosmopolitan’ legal framework, for example Mary Kaldor (2001: 10), Martin Shaw (2003: 104)
and Andrew Linklater (2005). For critical theorists, one of the fundamental problems with
Realism is that it is unrealistic. Because it prioritises order and the existing status quo, Realism
attempts to impose a particular security framework onto a complex world, ignoring the myriad
threats to people emerging from their own governments and societies. Moreover, traditional
international theory serves to obscure power relations and omits a study of why the system is as
it is: [O]mitting myriad strands of power amounts to exaggerating the simplicity of the entire
political system. Today’s conventional portrait of international politics thus too often ends up
looking like a Superman comic strip, whereas it probably should resemble a Jackson Pollock.
(Enloe, 2002 [1996]: 189) Yet as I have argued, contemporary critical security theorists seem to
show a marked lack of engagement with their problematic (whether the international security
context, or the Yugoslav break-up and wars). Without concrete engagement and analysis,
however, the critical project is undermined and critical theory becomes nothing
more than a request that people behave in a nicer way to each other. Furthermore,
whilst contemporary critical security theorists argue that they present a more realistic image of
the world, through exposing power relations, for example, their lack of concrete analysis of the
problematic considered renders them actually unable to engage with existing power
structures and the way in which power is being exercised in the contemporary international
system. For critical and emancipatory theorists the central place of the values of the theorist
mean that it cannot fulfil its promise to critically engage with contemporary power relations and
emancipatory possibilities. Values must be joined with engagement with the material
circumstances of the time.
 2AC REALISM
The alt doesn’t change the framework states operate within – that takes out all of
their root cause claims, external impacts, and justifies our epistemology – their
heuristic makes war and structural violence more likely
de Araujo, professor for Ethics at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 14
(Marcelo, “Moral Enhancement and Political Realism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology
24(2): 29-43)
Some moral enhancement theorists argue that a society of morally enhanced individuals would

be in a better position to cope with important problems that humankind is likely to face in the future
such as, for instance, the threats posed by climate change , grand scale terrorist attacks , or the risk of catastrophic

wars. The assumption here is quite simple: our inability to cope successfully with these problems
stems mainly from a sort of deficit in human beings’ moral motivation . If human beings were
morally better – if we had enhanced moral dispositions – there would be fewer wars, less terrorism, and more
willingness to save our environment. Although simple and attractive, this assumption is , as I intend to show,
false . At the root of threats to the survival of humankind in the future is not a deficit in our
moral dispositions, but the endurance of an old political arrangement that prevents the
pursuit of shared goals on a collective basis. The political arrangement I have in mind here is the international system of states. In my
analysis of the political implications of moral enhancement, I intend to concentrate my attention only on the supposition that we could avoid major wars in the future by making
individuals morally better. I do not intend to discuss the threats posed by climate change, or by terrorism, although some human enhancement theorists also seek to cover these
topics. I will explain, in the course of my analysis, a conceptual distinction between “human nature realism” and “structural realism,” well-known in the field of international
relations theory. Thomas Douglas seems to have been among the first to explore the idea of “moral enhancement” as a new form of human enhancement. He certainly helped to
kick off the current phase of the debate. In a paper published in 2008, Douglas suggests that in the “future people might use biomedical technology to morally enhance
themselves.” Douglas characterizes moral enhancement in terms of the acquisition of “morally better motives” (Douglas 2008, 229). Mark Walker, in a paper published in 2009,
suggests a similar idea. He characterizes moral enhancement in terms of improved moral dispositions or “genetic virtues”: The Genetic Virtue Program (GVP) is a proposal for
influencing our moral nature through biology, that is, it is an alternate yet complementary means by which ethics and ethicists might contribute to the task of making our lives
and world a better place. The basic idea is simple enough: genes influence human behavior, so altering the genes of individuals may alter the influence genes exert on behavior.
(Walker 2009, 27–28) Walker does not argue in favor of any specific moral theory, such as, for instance, virtue ethics. Whether one endorses a deontological or a utilitarian
approach to ethics, he argues, the concept of virtue is relevant to the extent that virtues motivate us either to do the right thing or to maximize the good (Walker 2009, 35). Moral
enhancement theory, however, does not reduce the ethical debate to the problem of moral dispositions. Morality also concerns, to a large extent, questions about reasons for
action. And moral enhancement, most certainly, will not improve our moral beliefs; neither could it be used to settle moral disagreements. This seems to have led some authors
to criticize the moral enhancement idea on the ground that it neglects the cognitive side of our moral behavior. Robert Sparrow, for instance, argues that, from a Kantian point of
view, moral enhancement would have to provide us with better moral beliefs rather than enhanced moral motivation (Sparrow 2014, 25; see also Agar 2010, 74). Yet, it seems to
Many people, across different countries, already share
me that this objection misses the point of the moral enhancement idea.

moral beliefs relating, for instance, to the wrongness of harming or killing other people arbitrarily, or to
the moral requirement to help people in need. They may share moral beliefs while not sharing the same reasons for these beliefs, or perhaps even not being able to articulate the
beliefs in the conceptual framework of a moral theory (Blackford 2010, 83). But although they share some moral beliefs, in some circumstances they may lack the appropriate
motivation to act accordingly. Moral enhancement, thus, aims at improving moral motivation, and leaves open the question as to how to improve our moral judgments. In a
recent paper, published in The Journal of Medical Ethics, neuroscientist Molly Crockett reports the state of the art in the still very embryonic field of moral enhancement. She
points out, for example, that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) citalopram seems to increase harm aversion. There is, moreover, some evidence that this
substance may be effective in the treatment of specific types of aggressive behavior. Like Douglas, Crockett emphasizes that moral enhancement should aim at individuals’ moral
motives (Crockett 2014; see also Spence 2008; Terbeck et al. 2013). Another substance that is frequently mentioned in the moral enhancement literature is oxytocin. Some
studies suggest that willingness to cooperate with other people,and to trust unknown prospective cooperators, may be
enhanced by an increase in the levels of oxytocin in the organism (Zak 2008, 2011; Zak and Kugler 2011; Persson and Savulescu 2012,
118–119). Oxytocin has also been reported to be “associated with the subjective experience of empathy” (Zak 2011, 55; Zak and Kugler 2011, 144). The question I would like to
examine now concerns the supposition that moral enhancement – comprehended in these terms and assuming for the sake of argument that, some day, it might become
The assumption that there is a relationship
effective and safe – may also help us in coping with the threat of devastating wars in the future.

between, on the one hand, threats to the survival of humankind and, on the other, a sort of “deficit” in our
moral dispositions is clearly made by some moral enhancements theorists. Douglas, for instance, argues that “according to
many plausible theories, some of the world’s most important problems — such as developing world poverty, climate change and war — can be attributed to these moral deficits”
(2008, 230). Walker, in a similar vein, writes about the possibility of “using biotechnology to alter our biological natures in an effort to reduce evil in the world” (2009, 29). And
Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson go as far as to defend the “the need for moral enhancement” of humankind in a series of articles, and in a book published in 2012. One of
the reasons Savulescu and Persson advance for the moral enhancement of humankind is that our moral dispositions seem to have remained basically unchanged over the last
millennia (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 2). These dispositions have proved thus far quite useful for the survival of human beings as a species. They have enabled us to cooperate
with each other in the collective production of things such as food, shelter, tools, and farming. They have also played a crucial role in the creation and refinement of a variety of
human institutions such as settlements, villages, and laws. Although the possibility of free-riding has never been fully eradicated, the benefits provided by cooperation have
largely exceeded the disadvantages of our having to deal with occasional uncooperative or untrustworthy individuals (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 39). The problem, however, is
that the same dispositions that have enabled human beings in the past to engage in the collective production of so many artifacts and institutions now seem powerless in the face
of the human capacity to destroy other human beings on a grand scale, or perhaps even to annihilate the entire human species. There is, according to Savulescu and Persson, a
“mismatch” between our cognitive faculties and our evolved moral attitudes: “[…] as we have repeatedly stressed, owing to the progress of science, the range of our powers of
action has widely outgrown the range of our spontaneous moral attitudes, and created a dangerous mismatch” (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 103; see also Persson and Savulescu
2010, 660; Persson and Savulescu 2011b; DeGrazie 2012, 2; Rakić 2014, 2). This worry about the mismatch between, on the one hand, the modern technological capacity to
destroy and, on the other, our limited moral commitments is not new. The political philosopher Hans Morgenthau, best known for his defense of political realism, called
attention to the same problem nearly fifty years ago. In the wake of the first successful tests with thermonuclear bombs, conducted by the USA and the former Soviet Union,
Morgenthau referred to the “contrast” between the technological progress of our age and our feeble moral attitudes as one of the most disturbing dilemmas of our time: The first
dilemma consists in the contrast between the technological unification of the world and the parochial moral commitments and political institutions of the age. Moral
commitments and political institutions, dating from an age which modern technology has left behind, have not kept pace with technological achievements and, hence, are
incapable of controlling their destructive potentialities. (Morgenthau 1962, 174) Moral enhancement theorists and political realists like Morgenthau, therefore, share the thesis
that our natural moral dispositions are not strong enough to prevent human beings from endangering their own existence as a species. But they differ as to the best way out of
this quandary: moral enhancement theorists argue for the re-engineering of our moral dispositions, whereas Morgenthau accepted the immutability of human nature and
argued, instead, for the re-engineering of world politics. Both positions, as I intend to show, are wrong in assuming that the “dilemma” results from the weakness of our
spontaneous moral dispositions in the face of the unprecedented technological achievements of our time. On the other hand, both positions are correct in
recognizing the real possibility of global catastrophes resulting from the malevolent use of,
for instance, biotechnology or nuclear capabilities. The supposition that individuals’ unwillingness to cooperate with each
other, even when they would be better-off by choosing to cooperate, results from a sort of deficit of dispositions such as altruism, empathy, and benevolence has been at the core
of some important political theories. This idea is an important assumption in the works of early modern political realists such as Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. It was also
later endorsed by some well-known authors writing about the origins of war in the first half of the twentieth century. It was then believed, as Sigmund Freud suggested in a text
Freud went as far
from 1932, that the main cause of wars is a human tendency to “hatred and destruction” (in German: ein Trieb zum Hassen und Vernichtung).

as to suggest that human beings have an ingrained “inclination” to “aggression” and

“destruction” (Aggressionstrieb, Aggressionsneigung, and Destruktionstrieb), and that this inclination has a “good biological basis” (biologisch wohl begründet)
(Freud 1999, 20–24; see also Freud 1950; Forbes 1984; Pick 1993, 211–227; Medoff 2009). The attempt to employ Freud’s conception of

human nature in understanding international relations has recently been resumed, for instance by Kurt
Jacobsen in a paper entitled “Why Freud Matters: Psychoanalysis and International Relations Revisited,” published in 2013. Morgenthau himself was deeply influenced by
Freud’s speculations on the origins of war.1 Early in the 1930s, Morgenthau wrote an essay called “On the Origin of the Political from the Nature of Human Beings” (Über die
Herkunft des Politischen aus dem Wesen des Menschen), which contains several references to Freud’s theory about the human propensity to aggression.2 Morgenthau’s most
influential book, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, first published in 1948 and then successively revised and edited, is still considered a landmark work
in the tradition of political realism. According to Morgenthau, politics is governed by laws that have their origin in human nature: “Political realism believes that politics, like
society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature” (Morgenthau 2006, 4). Just like human enhancement theorists, Morgenthau also takes
for granted that human nature has not changed over recent millennia: “Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical
philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws” (Morgenthau 2006, 4). And since, for Morgenthau, human nature prompts human beings to act
selfishly, rather than cooperatively, political leaders will sometimes favor conflict over cooperation, unless some superior power compels them to act otherwise. Now, this is
exactly what happens in the domain of international relations. For in the international sphere there is not a supranational institution with the real power to prevent states from
pursuing means of self-defense. The acquisition of means of self-defense, however, is frequently perceived by other states as a threat to their own security. This leads to the
security dilemma and the possibility of war. As Morgenthau put the problem in an article published in 1967: “The actions of states are determined not by moral principles and
legal commitments but by considerations of interest and power” (1967, 3). Because Morgenthau and early modern political philosophers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes
defended political realism on the grounds provided by a specific conception human nature, their version of political realism has been frequently called “human nature realism.”
The literature on human nature realism has become quite extensive (Speer 1968; Booth 1991; Freyberg-Inan 2003; Kaufman 2006; Molloy 2006, 82–85; Craig 2007;
Scheuerman 2007, 2010, 2012; Schuett 2007; Neascu 2009; Behr 2010, 210–225; Brown 2011; Jütersonke 2012). It is not my intention here to present a fully-fledged account of
the tradition of human nature realism, but rather to emphasize the extent to which some moral enhancement theorists, in their description of some of the gloomy scenarios
humankind is likely to face in the future, implicitly endorse this kind of political realism. Indeed, like human nature realists, moral enhancement theorists assume that human
nature has not changed over the last millennia, and that violence and lack of cooperation in the international sphere result chiefly from human nature’s limited inclination to
pursue morally desirable goals. One may, of course, criticize the human enhancement project by rejecting the assumption that conflict and violence in the international domain
Sparrow correctly argues that
should be explained by means of a theory about human nature. In a reply to Savulescu and Persson,

“structural issues,” rather than human nature, constitute the main factor underlying
political conflicts (Sparrow 2014, 29). But he does not explain what exactly these “structural issues” are, as I intend to do later. Sparrow is right in rejecting the
human nature theory underlying the human enhancement project. But this underlying assumption, in my view, is not trivially false or simply “ludicrous,” as he suggests. Human
nature realism has been implicitly or explicitly endorsed by leading political philosophers ever since Thucydides speculated on the origins of war in antiquity (Freyberg-Inan
2003, 23–36). True, it might be objected that “human nature realism,” as it was defended by Morgenthau and earlier political philosophers, relied upon a metaphysical or
psychoanalytical conception of human nature, a conception that, actually, did not have the support of any serious scientific investigation (Smith 1983, 167). Yet, over the last few
years there has been much empirical research in fields such as developmental psychology and evolutionary biology that apparently gives some support to the realist claim. Some
of these studies suggest that an inclination to aggression and conflict has its origins in our evolutionary history. This idea, then, has recently led some authors to resume “human
nature realism” on new foundations, devoid of the metaphysical assumptions of the early realists, and entirely grounded in empirical research. Indeed, some recent works in the
field of international relations theory already seek to call attention to evolutionary biology as a possible new start for political realism. This point is clearly made, for instance, by
Bradley Thayer, who published in 2004 a book called Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. And in a paper published in
2000, he affirms the following: Evolutionary theory provides a stronger foundation for realism because it is based on science, not on theology or metaphysics. I use the theory to
explain two human traits: egoism and domination. I submit that the egoistic and dominating behavior of individuals, which is commonly described as “realist,” is a product of
the evolutionary process. I focus on these two traits because they are critical components of any realist argument in explaining international politics. (Thayer 2000, 125; see also
Thayer 2004) Thayer basically argues that a tendency to egoism and domination stems from human evolutionary history. The predominance of conflict and competition in the
domain of international politics, he argues, is a reflex of dispositions that can now be proved to be part of our evolved human nature in a way that Morgenthau and other earlier
political philosophers could not have established in their own time. Now, what some moral enhancement theorists propose is a direct intervention in our “evolved limited moral
psychology” as a means to make us “fit” to cope with some possible devastating consequences from the predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of international
politics (Persson and Savulescu 2010, 664). Moral enhancement theorists comprehend the nature of war and conflicts, especially those conflicts that humankind is likely to face
in the future, as the result of human beings’ limited moral motivations. Compared to supporters of human nature realism, however, moral enhancement theorists are less
skeptical about the prospect of our taming human beings’ proclivity to do evil. For our knowledge in fields such as neurology and pharmacology does already enable us to
the
enhance people’s performance in a variety of activities, and there seems to be no reason to assume it will not enable us to enhance people morally in the future. But

question, of course, is whether moral enhancement will also improve the prospect of our coping
successfully with some major threats to the survival of humankind , as Savulescu and Persson propose, or to reduce evil
in the world , as proposed by Walker. V. The point to which I would next like to call attention is that “human nature realism” – which is implicitly presupposed by
some moral enhancement theorists – has been much criticized over the last decades within the tradition of political realism itself. “Structural realism,” unlike “human nature
realism,” does not seek to derive a theory about conflicts and violence in the context of international relations from a theory of the moral shortcomings of human nature.
Structural realism was originally proposed by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State and War, published in 1959, and then later in another book called Theory of International
Politics, published in 1979. In both works, Waltz seeks to avoid committing himself to any specific conception of human nature (Waltz 2001, x–xi). Waltz’s thesis is that the
thrust of the political realism doctrine can be retained without our having to commit ourselves to any theory about the shortcomings of human nature. What is relevant for our
understanding of international politics is, instead, our understanding of the “structure” of the international system of states (Waltz 1986). John Mearsheimer, too, is an
important contemporary advocate of political realism. Although he seeks to distance himself from some ideas defended by Waltz, he also rejects human nature realism and, like
Waltz, refers to himself as a supporter of “structural realism” (Mearsheimer 2001, 20). One of the basic tenets of political realism (whether “human nature realism” or

states are the main, if not the only, relevant actors in the context of international relations; and
“structural realism”) is, first, that the

second, that states compete for power in the international arena. Moral considerations in international affairs, according to

realists, are secondary when set against the state’s primary goal, namely its own security and

survival . But while human nature realists such as Morgenthau explain the struggle for power as a result of human beings’ natural inclinations, structural realists like
Waltz and Mearsheimer argue that conflicts in the international arena do not stem from human nature, but from the very “structure” of the international system of states

it is this structure that compels individuals to act as they do

(Mearsheimer 2001, 18). According to Waltz and Mearsheimer,

in the domain of international affairs. And one distinguishing feature of the international system of states is its “anarchical
structure,” i.e. the lack of a central government analogous to the central governments that exist in the context of domestic politics. It means that each
individual state is responsible for its own integrity and survival. In the absence of a superior
authority, over and above the power of each sovereign state, political leaders often feel compelled to favor security over
morality , even if, all other things being considered, they would naturally be more inclined to trust and to cooperate with political leaders of other states. On the other
hand, when political leaders do trust and cooperate with other states, it is not necessarily their benevolent nature that motivates them to be cooperative and trustworthy, but,
again, it is the structure of the system of states that compels them. The concept of human nature, as we can see, does not play a decisive role here. Because Waltz and

even if
Mearsheimer depart from “human nature realism,” their version of political realism has also sometimes been called “neo-realism” (Booth 1991, 533). Thus,

human beings turn out to become morally enhanced in the future, humankind may still have to
face the same scary scenarios described by some moral enhancement theorists. This is likely to happen if, indeed,
human beings remain compelled to cooperate within the present structure of the system of states. Consider, for instance, the incident with
a Norwegian weather rocket in January 1995. Russian radars detected a missile that was initially suspected of being on its way to reach Moscow in five minutes. All levels of
Russian military defense were immediately put on alert for a possible imminent attack and massive retaliation. It is reported that for the first time in history a Russian president
had before him, ready to be used, the “nuclear briefcase” from which the permission to launch nuclear weapons is issued. And that happened when the Cold War was already
supposed to be over! In the event, it was realized that the rocket was leaving Russian territory and Boris Yeltsin did not have to enter the history books as the man who started
under the crushing pressure of having to decide in such a short
the third world war by mistake (Cirincione 2008, 382).3 But

time, and on the basis of unreliable information, whether or not to retaliate, even a morally
enhanced Yeltsin might have given orders to launch a devastating nuclear response – and that in
spite of strong moral dispositions to the contrary. Writing for The Guardian on the basis of recently declassified
documents, Rupert Myers reports further incidents similar to the one of 1995. He suggests that as more states strive to acquire nuclear capability, the danger of a major nuclear

What has to be changed, therefore, is not human moral dispositions, but the
accident is likely to increase (Myers 2014).

very structure of the political international system of states within which we currently live. As far as major
threats to the survival of humankind are concerned, moral enhancement might play an important role in the future only to the extent that it will help humankind to change the
moral enhancement may possibly have desirable results in some areas of human cooperation that do not badly threaten
structure of the system of states. While

will not motivate political leaders to dismantle

our security – such as donating food, medicine, and money to poorer countries – it

their nuclear weapons . Neither will it deter other political leaders from pursuing nuclear
capability, at any rate not as long as the structure of international politics compels them to see
prospective cooperators in the present as possible enemies in the future. The idea of a “structure”
should not be understood here in metaphysical terms, as though it mysteriously existed in a transcendent world and had the magical power of determining leaders’ decisions in
in the absence of the
this world. The word “structure” denotes merely a political arrangement in which there are no powerful law-enforcing institutions. And

kind of security that law-enforcing institutions have the force to create, political leaders will often
fail to cooperate, and occasionally engage in conflicts and wars, in those areas that are critical to their security
and survival. Given the structure of international politics and the basic goal of survival, this is likely to continue to happen, even if, in

the future, political leaders become less egoistic and power-seeking through moral enhancement. On the other hand, since the
structure of the international system of states is itself another human institution, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot ever be changed. If people become morally
enhanced in the future they may possibly feel more strongly motivated to change the structure of the system of states, or perhaps even feel inclined to abolish it altogether. In my
addressing major threats to the survival of humankind in the future by means of
view, however,

bioengineering is unlikely to yield the expected results, so long as moral enhancement is

pursued within the present framework of the international system of states.
“No value to life” doesn’t outweigh---prioritize existence because value is
subjective and could improve in the future --- utilitarianism is the only ethical
option
Torbjörn Tännsjö 11, the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm
University, 2011, “Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online:
http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then
according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this
does not mean that, each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when
I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to
collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some even
claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for
the claim that people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not
utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself.
It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And
even if some may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future
lives will be better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about
the future.¶ From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people
should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s
genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill
themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn
us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My strong belief is that most
of us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they
stop being worth living. But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be
worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic.¶ Let us just for the sake of the
argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we
should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do,
each one of us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If
I kill myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ...
suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite
common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's
anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal
act itself. Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left
behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular
perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning, if they do, does not mean that
others will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at
least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake,
to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in
their lives) than I avoid (in my life).
 AT: REALISM BAD
Realists hate war.
Edelstein 10 – (2010, David, PhD in Political Science, Associate Professor in the Edmund A.
Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University,
“Why realists don’t go for bombs and bullets,” http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/07/21/why-
realists-dont-go-for-bombs-and-bullets/)
Thanks to Steve Walt for inviting me to contribute to his blog while he is away on vacation. I have been a regular reader of Steve’s blog since it launched, and for my first post, I wanted to pick up on a motif that I

have seen running through Steve’s posts: Will realists ever again support the use of military force by the United States ?
Followers of this blog will by now have little doubt about how Walt felt about the Iraq War or how he views the prospects for U.S. success in Afghanistan. In fact, throughout the history of his blog, I can only recall
one case in which Walt advocated the use of U.S. military force (and I think the realist credentials in that case are rather dubious).

There is a common perception in the field of political science that realists are war-mongering
Neanderthals anxious to use military force at the drop of a hat. Attend any meeting (if you must) of the American Political Science Association or the International Studies Association, and
one will find realists derided as the "bombs and bullets guys" as if we were all direct descendants of Curtis LeMay. What is
notable about this — and what has been notable about Steve’s blog — is just how infrequently realists have supported the
use of American military force . Take the U.S. interventions of the post-Cold War period: Panama, the Gulf War,
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Of those interventions, Afghanistan was
the only one that received anything close to strong support from most realists. Others, most
notably the Iraq War, received vehement opposition from the vast majority of realists .
Even in the case of Afghanistan, realists expressed trepidation about the prospects for ultimate
success despite early victories.
Go back to the Cold War, and realists like Kenneth Waltz and Hans Morgenthau were famously opposed
to the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Lest one think this is an academic phenomenon, realist
policymakers like Brent Scowcroft were equally critical of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, and George F. Kennan was
skeptical of the U.S. interventions in both Korea and Vietnam. Today, should anyone dare to suggest the use of
military force in new contexts such as Iran, they are summarily dismissed by prominent realists.
Not a single (self-proclaimed or attributed) realist I know of has advocated the use of military force against
Iran in response to its apparent development of nuclear weapons, and most are adamantly opposed to it.
From one perspective, this opposition is surprising. It is realists, after all, who so value material power, in particular military capabilities. It is not difficult to understand why so many would assume that realists
are anxious to use military force because realists are anxious to focus on military capabilities as a primary explanatory variable for international politics.

it is precisely because realists have spent so much time studying military force
But

that they are also so reluctant to use military force . Though realists themselves are divided on the question, many have
concluded that the use of military force is often counterproductive, inviting balancing coalitions that simply make life more difficult. Moreover, as I have argued
elsewhere, using military force to reorder societies is very difficult and unlikely to succeed except in uncommon circumstances.

Neorealism is the opposite of rational subjectivity – the microeconomics-realism

analogy is false.
Bessner and Guilhot 15 – (Fall 2015, Daniel, Assistant Professor in the Henry M. Jackson
School of International Studies at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellow in U.S.
foreign policy and international security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International
Understanding at Dartmouth College, and Nicolas, Research Professor at the National Center
for Scientific Research in France and a visiting scholar at the Center for International Research
in the Humanities and Social Sciences at New York University, “How Realism Waltzed Off:
Liberalism and Decisionmaking in Kenneth Waltz's Neorealism,” International Security, Vol.
40, No. 2, Pages 87-118)

The relationship between neorealism and the question of decisionism becomes even more obvious when one
looks at the methodological choices that distinguished Theory of International Politics. Scholars
commonly assume that Waltz modeled neorealism after microeconomics .91 He had majored in
economics at Oberlin College before turning to political theory, and he often used economic analogies to explain his theory. Yet the emphasis on economics provides little

guidance in understanding the epistemological foundations of neorealism. Waltz may well have looked
occasionally to economics to establish a theory of politics, but, whether he knew so or not, he was observing a discipline whose epistemic status had been transformed by cybernetic approaches.92 All his
considerations about the nature and functions of a theory, about its relation to reality, and about its uses, point in another direction: toward the field of cybernetics and
general system theory .93
The intellectual sources of neorealism appear both in Theory of International Politics and in its embryonic version published in the 1975 Handbook of Political Science.94 The major sources include Ludwig von
Bertalanffy's General System Theory (1968), Ross Ashby's Design for a Brain (1952) and his Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (1948), and David Easton's systemic functionalism in
political science, each of which was foundational to the development of cybernetics and system theory in general.95
Situating Theory of International Politics in the context of the cybernetic movement enables one to understand Waltz's work in relation to both rationalist theories of decisionmaking and to the decisionist

Theory of International Politics belonged to a growing body of political

undertones of classical realism. It suggests that

science scholarship that applied cybernetic insights (when not simply cybernetic terminology) to political problems. Earlier
examples in the field of international relations include Morton Kaplan's System and Process in International Relations (1957), Graham Allison's Essence of Decision (1971), and John Steinbruner's The Cybernetic
Theory of Decision (1974).96 Theory of International Politics was in fact a late addition to this broader intellectual movement.
These works sought to make international relations more scientific while addressing immediate political issues, particularly policy formulation and decisionmaking. In the 1960s and 1970s,

cybernetics and system theory appealed to political scientists because they offered an
alternative to rationalistic theories of decisionmaking and seemed better adapted to the
unprecedented growth of governmental bureaucracies and to the challenge organizational complexity presented for policy research. The most important problem international relations theorists
confronted was that, in the new institutional era, political decisions were largely impersonal outcomes of exceedingly complex procedures that traditional models of decisionmaking, which implied a centralized
decisionmaker, a set of transitive preferences, and a linear decision process, were unable to explain.

Perhaps the most appealing characteristic of cybernetics and system theory for Waltz was that they
moved away from notions of decision and choice . Indeed, they were explicitly conceived as an
alternative to “rational choice” models and operated from “a theoretical base
fundamentally different from rational theory.” 97 They rejected formal decision theories,
and game theory in particular, as better suited to an ideal world where alternatives were known and the capacity to compute them (i.e., rationality) widely available. In
the real world, system theorists claimed, choices were made in a murkier fashion, and the number of actual possibilities was vastly superior to
the limited computing capacities of human actors , who were obviously not rational . Organizational and

bureaucratic processes were also part of the decisional machinery.98 In their own way, system theorists echoed the critique of
rational choice theories made by classical realists from the late 1940s onward, but in a new, formal, and non-ideological language.99

System theory, for its part, made it possible to explain the outcome of thoughtful, strategic decisions
without assuming any underlying deliberative thought process, rationality, or
intention . As Steinbruner declared, “Much of the work [in cybernetics] … has been directed precisely at the problem of
explaining highly successful behavior (usually called adaptive) without assuming elaborate decision-making
mechanisms.”100 To do so, system theory and cybernetics shifted the emphasis from teleological, outcome-
driven models to models that emphasized process and recipe-following , while being deprived of any form
of entelechy. Servomechanics, feedback loops, and other physical analogies were deployed to explain efficient adaptive behavior without ascribing any rationality to political actors or, indeed, taking much account
of actors.101 Before the rise of system theory, to quote one of Waltz's sources, “notions of teleology and directiveness appeared to be outside the scope of science and to be the playground of mysterious,

Goal-seeking behavior, as Ross Ashby had explained,

supernatural or anthropomorphic agencies.”102 Cybernetics made it possible to replace decisions with mechanistic processes.

was now understood on the basis of organizational patterns totally deprived of willful purpose or
self-determination.103 Self-steering could be represented as a process devoid of teleology and will. To put it differently, one could replicate, modelize, or simulate decisional processes
without assuming the existence of a central and omnipotent decisionmaker.

The removal of the decisionmaker was a crucial aspect of Theory of International Politics. System theory enabled Waltz to
describe international politics without recourse to a concept of decision. How decisions were made no longer mattered, because cybernetic models made it possible to describe their outcomes without implying
purpose, intention, or rationality. As Shklar clearly saw, “system” and “decision” were mutually exclusive ways of talking about the same thing. In the system approach, whether the concept of decision was
considered an old anthropomorphic notion tied to obscure forces, or an unrealistic assumption of rationality, it could be jettisoned in favor of anonymous adaptive processes. The new approach to international
politics associated today with neorealism was, in fact, already present in a number of cybernetic works.104

Theory of International Politics thus rested on methodological choices that excluded any
“rationality assumption” (i.e., the idea that humans were rational actors). Neorealist theory,
Waltz wrote in the book, “requires no assumption of rationality or of constancy of will on the part of all the

actors.”105 Foreign-policy making is “such a complicated business,” he later asserted, that “one cannot
expect of political leaders the nicely calculated decisions that the word ‘rationality’ suggests.”106 And
in one of his last interviews, Waltz confessed that he had no idea what the expression “rational actor” meant.107 Mearsheimer is therefore correct to suggest that Waltz's putative rationality assumption is a
perplexing case of collective self-delusion among international relations theorists, who have usually overlooked both the context in which Waltz was writing and the intellectual sources that informed Theory of
International Politics.108

One reason for the persistence of this disciplinary canard is that international relations scholars
have tended to assume that Waltz adopted classical microeconomic foundations for his theory, and
in particular the notion of a rational actor. Not quite: Waltz made it clear that his theory
of international politics was not modeled after the neoclassical economic model
assuming rational actors acting in perfectly competitive markets (given that such a model would end up with
harmonious equilibria requiring no policing, as some critics have noticed).109 To the extent that he drew inspiration from economic theories, his reference was the theory of oligopolistic markets.110

There was, however, a much more formidable obstacle that prevented Waltz from adopting the rational actor assumption, which did in fact come straight from
microeconomics: Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem. As a trained economist, Waltz could not ignore

that the rational actor assumption led to the impossibility of rational collective
choice —unless that choice was undemocratic and coercive, as Arrow had shown.111 Even for the new economists of rational choice, the fact that a decision was
political made it de facto either irrational or authoritarian.112 As collectives, states were either irresolute or irrational if they were democracies,
or their foreign policy decisions had to be insulated from the democratic process in order to attain rationality. In other words, the rationality assumption would have brought Waltz back to where he did not want to
 His explicit reluctance to accept the
be—namely, in the chorus of classical realists calling for the reinstatement of preliberal, pre-democratic foreign policy practices.

notion that states could be rational points directly to the state of the discussion of rationality
after Arrow and to the ideological implications of the rationality assumption.113
FRAMEWORK
 2AC FRAMEWORK
Framework – The neg has to prove the plan is worse than the status quo or a
competitive alternative – anything else lets the neg moots 8 minutes of 1ac offense
and places unfair and unpredictable burdens upon the aff that weaken content
retention and discourages future research --- so that even if they’re right, we’d
never learn why
Debate doesn’t shape subjectivity --- they switch sides in other debates, lots of
rounds happen at once, classes and social background outweigh, and if we lose
we’ll just internalize your decision as a technical failure and try even harder to
disprove their argument later
 2AC SCENARIO PLANNING
Scenario analysis is pedagogically valuable – enhances creativity and self-
reflexivity, deconstructs cognitive biases and flawed ontological assumptions, and
enables the imagination and creation of alternative futures.
Barma et al. 16 – (May 2016, [Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15], Naazneen Barma, PhD
in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the
Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor
of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from
Duke, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-
Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security
Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a
World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2),
pp. 1-19,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_s
cience_isp_2015.pdf)
Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship has been lamented by a
growing chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009). Prominent scholars of international affairs have diagnosed the roots of the gap
between academia and policymaking, made the case for why political science research is valuable for policymaking , and offered

a number of ideas for enhancing the policy relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci

2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put

in place by these projects focus on providing scholars with the skills, platforms, and networks to better

communicate the findings and implications of their research to the policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile
objective for a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and esoteric. Yet enhancing

communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and practice. Another
crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive research programs that are actually

policy relevant —a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many
enter the discipline with the explicit hope of informing policy. In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-

reflection, strikingly little attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-

relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and
problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher 2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about

This article outlines an experiential and problem-based

the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas.

approach to developing a political science research program using scenario analysis. It focuses especially on illuminating the research
generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral students of international and
comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the technique in
political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly benefits of using scenarios to help generate
research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario
format. The fourth section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific

Scenario analysis is
techniques to aid those who wish to generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science?

perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go
beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of
unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum
company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus

typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used
in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses .

This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the
technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We
characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected
combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures , often referred to
as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based
on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns , and they are not hypothesis-
based expert predictions . Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best
characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005).

Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world , offered together with
a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those
futures . Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds.
For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and
declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came
together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures
studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not
capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate
for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present”
(Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global
petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it
defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent
application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These
reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate
thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and
coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area

Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for

financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013).

policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental,
economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges . Yet the ability

of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by
their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known
cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock
2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional

modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and

deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future
worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision
and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present . Designing
Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant

Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine
research programs.

how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example,
terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated
vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and
the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized
states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding

Very simply,
of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself.

scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in
international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative
tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires
careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for
generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in
contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-
evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story
with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some
of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios.
One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit
methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new

The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies

causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005).

certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas
counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our
scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential
futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus
lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints

We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these

imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge.

dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other
methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit
“driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve
as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates
articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused

The scenario process

comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas.

described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate
students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science
dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008),
whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles”
in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base
their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—

The scenario approach to generating research ideas is

in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance.

grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying
questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not
appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The
scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven
year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may
encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically
about them now . This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid
falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In
imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of

creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts
from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international
affairs.
 AT: AFFECT
Affective politics fail to spill up or influence politics
Schrimshaw 12 [Will Schrimshaw, Ph.D. in Philosophy and Architecture at Newcastle
University, is an artist and researcher from Wakefield based in Liverpool. January 28th, 2012,
"Affective Politics and Exteriority"willschrimshaw.net/subtractions/affective-politics-and-
exteriority/#]

The affective turn in recent politics thereby becomes auto-affective and in remaining bound to
an individual’s feelings and emotions undermines the possibility of its breaking out
into collective action and mobilisation. Yet, referring back to Fisher’s article, it is where this affective orientation
is inscribed into the social circuits of musical use and sonorous production that it perhaps
begins to break out of the ideology of individualism through tapping into a transpersonal or
`machinic’ dimension of affective signals that never find a voice yet remain expressive and
hopefully inch towards efficacy. What is important to express here is that much of this affective content is inscribed
in the use of music as much as its composition. As little of the Grime and Dancehall that Fisher and Dan Hancox catalogued towards a
playlist of the riots and uprisings expresses in explicitly linguistic and lyrical content the sentiments of political activism, it is in the use of music and sound as a carrier of affects
Where music is deployed as a more affective than
at the point of both playback and composition that its importance lies.2

symbolic force in resistance, its significance becomes obscure and ambiguous from the
perspective and expectations of symbolic coherence. This noted lack of coherence and
communicable message marks , as Fisher points out, a certain exhaustion of recognised channels
of musical resistance: the protest song seems worn out, lacklustre, its own disempowerment,
apparent obsolescence and displacement in pop culture a symptom compounding the
apathy and estrangement that has characterised much of the still fairly recent discourse on
youth and `political engagement’.
Fear-driven anxiety is vital to affective agency
McManus 11 [Susan, Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen’s University, "Hope, Fear, and the
Politics of Affective Agency", Theory and Event, Volume 14, Issue 4]

Finally, if fear is a predominant affective formation in the political present, how can hope and fear be
oriented together? Utopian-affect does not efface fear, but instead, inflects fear differently than hitherto.
Restructuring or depathologizing fear-affects involves work on the sensory organization of all the different kinds of matter that affect
agential capacity: affect circulates through various encounters of worldly matter and stuff through which subject finds itself manifest
within. One way of restructuring fear-affect, then, is by intervening in the feedback loops through which fear is stabilized. This might
involve turning the technologies that are central to the production of fear against themselves: when protesters use surveillance
technologies against police, for instance, the feedback loops that those technologies sustain are interrupted, and the hegemonies
they secure are disrupted, rendered capricious, variable, and open to intervention. Fear need not be ubiquitous, and
visceral experimentation with our everyday sensorium can have effects upon the 'tone' of the
age. Negri is, after all, right: hope is an 'an antidote to ... fear,' (Brown et al, 2002: 200); but only insofar as the antidote
(hope) is made out of the same matter as the poison (fear). This illustrates the larger point that the future needs to be
made out of matter that is available in the present, out of the same crises, but with different trajectories: it is from
the matter of this world that the future is made. Utopian-affect , then, is made out of both hope and
fear, and while fear might be restructured, it cannot be effaced, for the fear of utopian-affect
also inheres in the encounter with the world itself, in the struggle, and in the uncertainty of the
emergent. As Duggan puts it, 'there is fear attached to hope -- hope understood as a risky reaching out
for something else that will fail,' (Duggan and Muñoz, 2009: 279). Fear and anxiety, rather than
opposing utopian hope, are vital, necessary to its critical agency, as that agency
works through immanent historical processes that remain open and
undetermined .
 AT: FIAT BAD K’S
Simulation allows us to more effectively influence state policy AND is key to agency
– studies prove
Eijkman 12 [Henk, visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales at the Australian
Defence Force Academy and is Visiting Professor of Academic Development, Annasaheb Dange
College of Engineering and Technology in India, has taught at various institutions in the social
sciences and his work as an adult learning specialist has taken him to South Africa, Malaysia,
Palestine, and India, “The role of simulations in the authentic learning for national security
policy development: Implications for Practice,”
http://nsc.anu.edu.au/test/documents/Sims_in_authentic_learning_report.pdf]
However, whether as an approach to learning, innovation, persuasion or culture shift, policy
simulations derive their
power from two central features: their combination of simulation and gaming (Geurts et al. 2007). 1. The
simulation element: the unique combination of simulation with role-playing . The unique
simulation/role-play mix enables participants to create possible futures relevant to the topic being
studied. This is diametrically opposed to the more traditional, teacher-centric approaches in which a
future is produced for them. In policy simulations, possible futures are much more than an
object of tabletop discussion and verbal speculation. ‘ No other technique allows a group of
participants to engage in collective action in a safe environment to create and analyse the futures
they want to explore’ (Geurts et al. 2007: 536). 2. The game element: the interactive and tailor-made modelling
and design of the policy game. The actual run of the policy simulation is only one step, though a most important and visible one, in a
collective process of investigation, communication, and evaluation of performance. In the context of a post-graduate course in public
policy development, for example, a policy simulation is a dedicated game constructed in collaboration
with practitioners to achieve a high level of proficiency in relevant aspects of the policy development
process. To drill down to a level of finer detail, policy development simulations —as forms of interactive or
participatory modelling— are particularly effective in developing participant knowledge and skills in the five
key areas of the policy development process (and success criteria), namely: Complexity, Communication, Creativity,
Consensus, and Commitment to action (‘the five Cs’). The capacity to provide effective learning support in these five
categories has proved to be particularly helpful in strategic decision-making (Geurts et al. 2007). Annexure 2.5
contains a detailed description, in table format, of the synopsis below.

Debate doesn’t jeopardize agency

Hanghoj 8 [Thorkild Hanghøj, Assistant Professor at the School of Education, University of
Aarhus, 2008, or this study, research visits have taken place at the Centre for Learning,
Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of
Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark,
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/
phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf]

Thus, debate games require teachers to balance the centripetal/centrifugal forces of gaming and
teaching, to be able to reconfigure their discursive authority, and to orchestrate the multiple voices of a dialogical game space in
relation to particular goals. These Bakhtinian perspectives provide a valuable analytical framework for describing the discursive
interplay between different practices and knowledge aspects when enacting (debate) game scenarios. In addition to this, Bakhtin’s
dialogical philosophy also offers an explanation of why debate games (and other game types) may be
valuable within an educational context. One of the central features of multi-player games is that players are expected to
experience a simultaneously real and imagined scenario both in relation to an insider’s (participant)
perspective and to an outsider’s (co-participant) perspective. According to Bakhtin, the outsider’s
perspective reflects a fundamental aspect of human understanding: In order to understand, it is
immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time,
in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs
can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and
because they are others (Bakhtin, 1986: 7). As the quote suggests, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined
way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. Thus, it
is in the interaction with other voices that
individuals are able to reach understanding and find their own voice. Bakhtin also refers to the
ontological process of finding a voice as “ideological becoming”, which represents “the process of selectively
assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981: 341). Thus, by teaching and playing debate scenarios, it is
possible to support students in their process of becoming not only themselves, but also in
becoming articulate and responsive citizens in a democratic society.

And, imagining scenarios, even if unlikely or flawed is a pre requisite to good

analysis – the aff isn’t a research paper, just dismiss poorly constructed impacts
Wimbush, 08 – director of the Center for Future Security Strategies
(S. Enders, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of several books and policy
articles, “A Parable: The U.S.-ROK Security Relationship Breaks Down”, Asia Policy, Number 5
(January 2008), 7-24)
What if the U.S.-ROK security relationship were to break down? This essay explores the alternative futures of such a
scenario. Analyzing scenarios is one technique for trying to understand the increasing
complexity of strategic environments. A scenario is an account of an imagined sequence of
events. The intent of a scenario is to suggest how alternative futures might arise and where they
might lead, where conflicts might occur, how the interests of different actors might be
challenged, and the kinds of strategies actors might pursue to achieve their objectives.
Important to keep in mind is that scenarios are nothing more than invented , in-depth
stories —stories about what different futures could look like and what might happen along
plausible pathways to those futures. The trends and forces that go into building a scenario may
be carefully researched, yet a scenario is not a research paper . Rather, it is a work of the
imagination. As such, scenarios are, first, tools that can help bring order to the way analysts
think about what might happen in future security environments; second, scenarios are a
provocative way of revealing possible dynamics of future security environments that might not
be apparent simply by projecting known trends into the future. Scenarios are particularly useful in
suggesting where the interests and actions of different actors might converge or collide with other forces,
trends, attitudes, and influences. By using scenarios, to explore the question “what if this or that
happened?” in a variety of different ways, with the objective of uncovering as many potential answers as possible,
analysts can build hedging strategies for dealing with many different kinds of potential
problems. Though they may choose to discount some of these futures and related scenarios, analysts will
not be ignorant of the possibilities, with luck avoiding having to say: “I never thought about
that.”
 AT: PREDICTIONS K

They’re wrong about predictions and voting for them makes it worse
Fitzsimmons, 7 – Ph.D. in international security policy from the University of Maryland,
Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, analyst in the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division at the
Institute for Defense Analyses (Michael, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning”,
Survival, Winter 06/07)
In defence of prediction Uncertainty is not a new phenomenon for strategists. Clausewitz knew that ‘many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and
most are uncertain’. In coping with uncertainty, he believed that ‘what one can reasonably ask of an officer is that he should possess a standard of judgment, which he can gain
only from knowledge of men and affairs and from common sense. He should be guided by the laws of probability.’34 Granted, one can certainly allow for epistemological debates
about the best ways of gaining ‘a standard of judgment’ from ‘knowledge of men and affairs and from common sense’. Scientific inquiry into the ‘laws of probability’ for any given
strate- gic question may not always be possible or appropriate. Certainly, analysis cannot and should not be presumed to trump the intuition of decision-makers. Nevertheless,
the burden of proof in any debates about planning should belong to the
Clausewitz’s implication seems to be that

decision-maker who rejects formal analysis, standards of evidence and probabilistic reasoning.
Ultimately, though, the value of prediction in strategic planning does not rest primarily in getting the

correct answer, or even in the more feasible objective of bounding the range of correct answers. Rather, prediction requires decision-
makers to expose, not only to others but to themselves, the beliefs they hold regarding why a
given event is likely or unlikely and why it would be important or unimportant. Richard Neustadt and Ernest
May highlight this useful property of probabilistic reasoning in their renowned study of the use of history in decision-making, Thinking in Time. In discussing the importance of
probing presumptions, they contend: The need is for tests prompting questions, for sharp, straightforward mechanisms the decision makers and their aides might readily recall
and use to dig into their own and each others’ presumptions. And they need tests that get at basics somewhat by indirection, not by frontal inquiry: not ‘what is your inferred
causation, General?’ Above all, not, ‘what are your values, Mr. Secretary?’ ... If someone says ‘a fair chance’ ... ask, ‘if you were a betting man or woman, what odds would you put
on that?’ If others are present, ask the same of each, and of yourself, too. Then probe the differences: why? This is tantamount to seeking and then arguing assumptions
underlying different numbers placed on a subjective probability assessment. We know of no better way to force clarification of meanings while exposing hidden differences ...
Once differing odds have been quoted, the question ‘why?’ can follow any number of tracks. Argument may pit common sense against common sense or analogy against analogy.
What is important is that the expert’s basis for linking ‘if’ with ‘then’ gets exposed to the hearing of other experts before the lay official has to say yes or no.’35 There are at least
prediction enforces a certain
three critical and related benefits of prediction in strate- gic planning. The first reflects Neustadt and May’s point –

level of discipline in making explicit the assumptions, key variables and implied causal
relationships that constitute decision-makers’ beliefs and that might otherwise remain
implicit. Imagine, for example, if Shinseki and Wolfowitz had been made to assign probabilities to
their opposing expectations regarding post-war Iraq. Not only would they have had to work
harder to justify their views, they might have seen more clearly the substantial chance that they
were wrong and had to make greater efforts in their planning to prepare for that contingency.
Secondly, the very process of making the relevant factors of a decision explicit provides a firm, or at
least transparent, basis for making choices. Alternative courses of action can be compared and assessed in like terms. Third, the

transparency and discipline of the process of arriving at the initial strategy should heighten the
decision-maker’s sensitivity toward changes in the environment that would suggest the need for
adjustments to that strategy. In this way, prediction enhances rather than under-mines
strategic flexibility. This defence of prediction does not imply that great stakes should be gambled on narrow, singular predictions of the future. On the
contrary, the central problem of uncertainty in plan- ning remains that any given prediction may simply be wrong. Preparations for those eventualities must be made. Indeed, in
many cases, relatively unlikely outcomes could be enormously consequential, and therefore merit extensive preparation and investment. In order to navigate this complexity,
While the complexity of the international security
strategists must return to the dis- tinction between uncertainty and risk.

environment may make it somewhat resistant to the type of probabilistic thinking associated
with risk, a risk-oriented approach seems to be the only viable model for national-
security strategic planning. The alternative approach, which categorically denies prediction,
precludes strategy. As Betts argues, Any assumption that some knowledge, whether intuitive or explicitly formalized, provides guidance about what should be
done is a presumption that there is reason to believe the choice will produce a satisfactory outcome – that is, it is a prediction, however rough it may be. If there is no hope of
discerning and manipulating causes to produce intended effects, analysts as well as politicians and generals should all quit and go fishing.36 Unless they are willing to quit and
go fishing, then, strategists must sharpen their tools of risk assessment. Risk assessment comes in many varieties, but identification of two key parameters is common to all of
them: the consequences of a harmful event or condition; and the likelihood of that harmful event or condition occurring. With no perspective on likelihood, a strategist can have
no firm perspective on risk. With no firm perspective on risk, strategists cannot purposefully discriminate among alternative choices. Without purposeful choice, there is no
strategy. One of the most widely read books in recent years on the complicated relation- ship between strategy and uncertainty is Peter Schwartz’s work on scenario-based
planning, The Art of the Long View. Schwartz warns against the hazards faced by leaders who have deterministic habits of mind, or who deny the difficult implications of
uncertainty for strategic planning. To overcome such tenden- cies, he advocates the use of alternative future scenarios for the purposes of examining alternative strategies. His
view of scenarios is that their goal is not to predict the future, but to sensitise leaders to the highly contingent nature of their decision-making.37 This philosophy has taken root
in the strategic-planning processes in the Pentagon and other parts of the US government, and properly so. Examination of alternative futures and the potential effects of
surprise on current plans is essential. Appreciation of uncertainty also has a number of organisational impli- cations, many of which the national-security establishment is trying
to take to heart, such as encouraging multidisciplinary study and training, enhancing information sharing, rewarding innovation, and placing a premium on speed and
versatility. The arguments advanced here seek to take nothing away from these imperatives of planning and operating in an uncertain environment. But appreciation of
uncertainty carries hazards of its own.Questioning assumptions is critical, but assumptions must be made in the
end. Clausewitz’s ‘standard of judgment’ for discriminating among alternatives must be applied. Creative, unbounded speculation must resolve to choice or else there will be
no strategy. Recent history suggests that unchecked scepticism regarding the validity of prediction can
marginalise analysis, trade significant cost for ambig- uous benefit, empower parochial interests in decision-making,
and undermine flexibility. Accordingly, having fully recognised the need to broaden their strategic-planning aperture, national-security policymakers would
do well now to reinvigorate their efforts in the messy but indispensable business of predicting the future.