SECURITY KRITIK*****



****SECURITY KRITIK*****NegativeSecurity: 1NCThe Aff perpetuates the security state’s never-ending creation of existential enemies---the 1ACs impacts are projections of desire which leads to endless violence under the guise of humanity Achille Mbembe 16. Ph.D. in history at the University of Sorbonne, member of the staff at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, annual visiting appointment at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. “The society of enmity,” Radical Philosophy, 200, November/December 2016, Translated by Giovanni Menegallenotes, originally appeared as chapter 2 of Politiques de l’inimitié by Achille Mbembe, NCC2020It’s equally possible that nowhere on earth has a ‘universal democracy of humanity’ ever existed; that, with the earth divided into states, it is within such states that one seeks to realize democracy, that is, in the last instance, a politics of the state which, by clearly distinguishing between its own citizens – those who are seen to belong – and the rest, keeps at a firm distance all those who are not seen to belong. [3] At any rate, the contemporary era is undoubtedly characterized by forms of exclusion, hostility, hate movements, and, above all, by the struggle against an enemy. As a result, liberal democracies – already considerably ground down by the forces of capital, technology and militarism – are now being drawn into a colossal process of inversion. [4] The disturbing object The term ‘movement’ necessarily implies the setting into motion of a drive, which, even if impure, is composed of a fundamental energy. This energy is enlisted, whether consciously or not, in the pursuit of a desire, which is ideally a master-desire [désir-ma?tre]. This master-desire – at once comprising a field of immanence and a force composed of multiplicities – is invariably directed towards one or several objects. ‘Negro’ [Nègre] and ‘Jew’ were once favoured names for such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few. Desire (master or otherwise) is also that movement through which the subject – enveloped on all sides by a specific phantasy [fantasme] (whether of omnipotence, ablation, destruction or persecution, it matters little) – seeks to turn back on itself in the hope of protecting itself from external danger, while other times it reaches outside of itself in order to face the windmills of the imagination that besiege it. Once uprooted from its structure, desire then sets out to capture the disturbing object. But since in reality this object has never existed – does not and will never exist – desire must continually invent it. An invented object, however, is still not a real object. It marks an empty yet bewitching space, a hallucinatory zone, at once enchanted and evil, an empty abode haunted by the object as if by a spell. The desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid, for separation and enclosure, the phantasy of extermination, today all haunt the space of this enchanted zone. In a number of cases, a wall is enough to express it. [5] There exist several kinds of wall, but they do not fulfil the same functions. [6] A separation wall is said to resolve a problem of excess numbers, a surplus of presence that some see as the primary reason for conditions of unbearable suffering. Restoring the experience of one’s existence, in this sense, requires a rupture with the existence of those whose absence (or complete disappearance) is barely experienced as a loss at all – or so one would like to believe. It also involves recognizing that between them and us there can be nothing that is shared in common. The anxiety of annihilation is thus at the heart of contemporary projects of separation. Everywhere, the building of concrete walls and fences and other ‘security barriers’ is in full swing. Alongside the walls, other security structures are appearing: checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers, trenches, all manner of demarcations that in many cases have no other function than to intensify the zoning off of entire communities, without ever fully succeeding in keeping away those considered a threat. Such is the case in those Palestinian towns that are completely surrounded by areas under Israeli control. [7] In fact, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories can be seen to serve as a laboratory for a number of techniques of control, surveillance and separation, which today are being increasingly implemented in other places on the planet. These range from the regular sealing off of entire areas to limitations on the number of Palestinians who can enter Israel and the occupied territories, from the regular imposition of curfews within Palestinian enclaves and controls on movement to the objective imprisonment of entire towns. [8] Permanent or temporary checkpoints, cement blocks and mounds of earth serving as roadblocks, the control of aerial and marine space, of the import and export of all sorts of products, regular military incursions, home demolitions, the desecration of cemeteries, whole olive groves uprooted, infrastructure turned to rubble and obliterated, highand medium-altitude bombardments, targeted assassinations, urban counter-insurgency techniques, the profiling of minds and bodies, constant harassment, the ever smaller subdivision of land, cellular and molecular violence, the generalization of forms adopted from the model of a camp – every feasible means is put to work in order to impose a regime of separation whose functioning paradoxically depends on an intimate proximity with those who have been separated. [9] In many respects such practices recall the reviled model of apartheid, with its Bantustans, vast reservoirs of cheap labour, its white zones, its multiple jurisdictions and wanton violence. However, the metaphor of apartheid does not fully account for the specific character of the Israeli separation project. In the first place, this is because this project rests on quite a unique metaphysical and existential basis. The apocalyptic and catastrophist elements that underwrite it are far more complex, and derive from a longer historical horizon than those elements that used to support South African Calvinism. [10] Moreover, given its ‘hi-tech’ character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are much more formidable that the relatively primitive operations undertaken by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s. This is evidenced by its miniaturization of violence – its cellularization and molecularization – and its various techniques of material and symbolic erasure. [11] It is also evidenced in its procedures and techniques of demolition – of almost everything, whether of infrastructures, homes, roads or landscapes – and its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing. [12] In South Africa, the mounds of ruins never did reach such a scale. If all forms of inclusion are necessarily disjunctive, separation can conversely only ever be partial. In South Africa wholesale separation would have undermined the very survival of the oppressor. Short of exterminating the entire native population from the outset, it was impossible for the white minority to undertake a systematic ethnic and racial cleansing on the model of other settler colonies. Mass expulsions and deportations were hardly an option. Once the entwining of different racial segments had become the rule, the dialectic of proximity, distance and control could never reach the paroxysmic levels seen in Palestine. In the occupied territories, such proximity is attested by Israel’s continued control over the management of the population register and its monopoly over the issuing of Palestinian identity cards. This is also the case with nearly all the other aspects of daily life, such as regular transfers, the authorization of various permits, and the control of taxation. Peculiar to this model of separation is not only that it can be tailored to the demands of occupation (or abandonment, if need be). [13] It can also, when required, transform itself into an instrument of strangulation. Occupation is in every respect a form of bare struggle, a kind of combat between bodies in a dark tunnel. The desire for apartheid and the phantasy of extermination are not new phenomena, however. They have continued to metamorphose over the course of history, particularly within the old settler colonies. Chinese, Mongols, Africans and Arabs – in some cases long before Europeans – were responsible for the conquest of vast territories. They established complex long-distance trade networks across seas and oceans. But it was Europe, perhaps for the first time in modern history, which inaugurated a new epoch of global resettlement. [14] This resettlement of the world, which occurred between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was double faceted: it was at once a process of social excretion (for the migrants who left Europe to found overseas colonies) and a historic tipping point, which, for the colonized, came at the cost of new forms of enslavement. Over the course of this long period, the re settlement of the world often took the shape of innumerable atrocities and massacres, unprecedented instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’, expulsions, transfers, and concentrations of entire populations in camps, and indeed of genocides. [15] The colonial enterprise was driven by a mixture of sadism and masochism, applied gropingly and in response to largely unexpected events. As such, it was inclined to smash all forces standing in the way of its drives or inhibit their course towards all sorts of perverse pleasures. The limits to what it might have considered ‘normal’ were constantly broken, and few desires were subject to straightforward repression, let alone embarrassment or disgust. The colonial world’s capacity to make do with the destruction of its objects (natives included) was astonishing. If any object came to be lost, the thought was that it could easily be replaced with another. Further still, the principle of separation lay at the root of the colonial project. Colonialism had to a large extent consisted in a constant effort to separate: on one side, my living body; on the other, all those ‘body-things’ surrounding it – with my human flesh as the fundamental locus through which all other exterior ‘flesh-things’ and ‘flesh-meats’ exist for me. On one side, therefore, is me – the basic nexus and source of orientation in the world – while, on the other, are the others with whom, however, I can never completely fuse – others with whom I may relate, yet never genuinely engage in relations of reciprocity or mutual implication. In a colonial context, this constant effort to separate (and thus to differentiate) was partly a consequence of an anxiety of annihilation felt by the colonizers themselves. Numerically inferior but endowed with powerful means of destruction, the colonizers lived in perpetual fear of being surrounded on all sides by ‘evil objects’ threatening their very survival and existence: natives, wild beasts, reptiles, microbes, mosquitoes, illnesses, the climate, nature as such, even witches. The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation. Apartheid in particular openly challenged the possibility of a single body comprehending more than one individual. It presupposed the existence of originary and distinct (already constituted) subjects, each made of a ‘raceflesh’ or ‘race-blood’ able to evolve according to its own rhythm. It was believed that assigning them to specific territorial spaces would be enough to neutralize the otherness of one with respect to the others. These originary, distinct, subjects were called upon to act as if their past had never been a past of ‘prostitution’, of paradoxical dependencies and all manner of intrigues. Such was the phantasy of purity underpinning their existence. [16] Historical apartheid’s failure to secure, once and for all, impenetrable frontiers between different fleshes can therefore be understood as an a posteriori demonstration of the limits of the colonial project of separation. This is because, short of total extermination, the Other can never be external to us: it is within us, under the double figure of the alter ego and the altered ego [l’autre Moi et du Moi autre], each mortally exposed to the other and to itself. The colonial project drew a great deal of its substance and surplus energy from its basis in all sorts of instinctual drives, more or less openly acknowledged desires, in the main located below the conscious I of the agents concerned. In order to exercise a durable project on the native people they had subjugated, and from whom they wanted to differentiate themselves at all costs, the colonists had to somehow constitute them into various kinds of physical objects. In this sense, the whole game of representations under colonialism consisted in turning the natives into a variety of typical or type-images. These stereotypes largely corresponded to the debris of their real biographies, their primary status preceding their first encounter with the colonizers. By producing this imagined material, an entirely artificial secondary status of psychic objects came to be fixed onto their primary status as authentic human persons. For natives within their daily lives, the dilemma thus became how to distinguish between the psychic object they had been asked to interiorize – and often forced to accept as their true self – and the human part of themselves that they had once been and that was still theirs despite everything, but which, under colonial conditions, they were now being forced to forget. Once created, these psychic patterns became constitutive of the colonial self. Their position of exteriority with respect to the colonial self was thus always, at the same time, one of ultimate dependence. The continued psychic functioning of the colonial order rested on investment in these objects. Affective, emotional and psychic life under colonialism orbited around such objects and patterns; without them it would have lost its substance and coherence. It depended for its vitality on permanent contact with them, and indeed showed itself to be particularly vulnerable to being separated from them. In colonial or para-colonial situations, the ‘evil object’ (the object that has survived from initial destruction) can never be thought of as completely exterior from the self. Divided from the very start, it is always already at once subject and object. Since it depends on me at the same time as I depend on it, I cannot simply be rid of it through sheer persecution and obstinacy. In the end, I may choose to destroy everything I abhor, but this can never release me from my link to this other entity – even as I destroy it or separate myself from it. This is because the evil object and I can never be entirely separated. At the same time, however, we can never be entirely one and the same. The enemy, that other that i am The desire for an enemy, for apartheid, the phantasy of extermination, such irrepressible forces can be seen as shaping the basic line of fire, indeed the decisive struggle, at the beginning of this century. As the fundamental vectors of contemporary brainwashing, they push democratic regimes everywhere into a kind of vicious stupor, and, inebriated and reeking, to a life of drunks. As both diffuse psychic structures and generic passionate forces, they are responsible for the dominant affective tonality of our times and serve to sharpen many contemporary struggles and mobilizations. These struggles and mobilizations in turn feed on a threatening and anxiogenic vision of the world, privileging a logic of suspicion where everything must be seen as secret or as belonging to a plot or conspiracy. [17] Pushed to their ultimate consequences, they lead almost inexorably towards a wish for destruction, one according to which blood (spilt blood) makes law, in an explicit application of the ancient dictum of retaliation, the eye-for-an-eye or lex talionis of the Old Testament. In this depressive period within the psychic life of nations, the need, or rather the drive, for an enemy is no longer purely a social need. It corresponds to a quasi-anal need for ontology. In the context of the mimetic rivalry exacerbated by the ‘war on terror’, having an enemy at one’s disposal (preferably in a spectacular fashion) has become an obligatory stage in the constitution of the subject and its entry into the symbolic order of our times. Indeed, it seems as if the denial of the enemy were lived, within oneself, in the form of a deep narcissistic wound. To be deprived of an enemy – or to not experience a terrorist attack or any other bloody acts inflicted by those who hate us and our way of life – means being deprived of the kind of relation of hatred that would authorize the free exercise of many otherwise forbidden desires. It means, in other words, to be deprived of that demon without which almost nothing is allowed, even at a time when calls for absolute licence, unbridling, and generalized disinhibition appear to ring out with great urgency. It is equally to hinder that compulsion to scare oneself, one’s capacity to demonize, and that kind of pleasure and satisfaction one feels when a presumed enemy is shot down by special forces or when he is captured alive and subjected to endless interrogations, rendered and tortured in one of the many so-called ‘black sites’ that stain the surface of our planet. [18] This is an eminently political epoch, since ‘the specific political distinction’ from which ‘the political’ as such is defined – as Carl Schmitt argued, at least – is that ‘between friend and enemy’. [19] If our world today is an effectuation of Schmitt’s, then the concept of enemy is to be understood for its concrete and existential meaning, and not at all as a metaphor or an empty lifeless abstraction. The enemy Schmitt describes is neither a simple competitor, nor an adversary, nor a private rival whom one might hate or feel antipathy for. He is rather the object of a supreme antagonism. In both body and flesh, the enemy is that individual whose physical death is warranted by their existential denial of our own being. However, to distinguish between friends and enemies is one thing; to identify the enemy with certainty is quite another. Indeed, as a ubiquitous yet obscure figure, today the enemy is even more dangerous by being everywhere: without face, name or place. If they have a face, it is only a veiled face, the simulacrum of a face. And if they have a name, this might only be a borrowed name, a false name whose primary function is dissimulation. Sometimes masked, other times in the open, such an enemy advances among us, around us, and even within us, ready to emerge in the middle of the day or in the heart of night, every time his apparition threatening the annihilation of our way of life, our very existence. Yesterday, as today, the political as conceived by Schmitt owes its volcanic charge to the fact that it is closely connected to an existential will to power. As such, it necessarily and by definition opens up the extreme possibility of an infinite deployment of pure means without ends, as embodied in the execution of murder. Underwritten by the law of the sword, it is the ‘meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice [their] life’ (to kill themselves for others), and, under the aegis of the state, that in the name of which such men could be ‘authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings’ (to kill others) on the basis of their actual or supposed belonging to an enemy camp. [20] From this standpoint, the political can be understood as a particular form of association or grouping established with a view to a combat, which is at once decisive and profoundly opaque. But it is not merely the business of the state, and hence an exercise in delegated death, since it also concerns not only the possibility of sacrifice – or self-sacrifice, the giving of one’s life – but also, and very literally, the possibility of suicide. This is because, in the end, suicide serves to brutally interrupt all dynamic of subjection and any possibility of recognition. To willingly relinquish one’s existence by giving death to oneself is not necessarily to make oneself disappear. Rather, it is to willingly abandon the risk of being touched by the Other and by the world – a gesture of disinvestment that forces the enemy to confront his own emptiness. The person who commits suicide no longer wishes to communicate, neither by word nor violent gesture, except perhaps at the moment when, by putting an end to his own life, he also puts an end to the life of his target. The killer kills himself while killing others or after having killed. Either way, he no longer seeks to participate in the world such as it is. He disposes of himself, and disposes of some of his enemies as he does so. He thus discharges himself of what he once was and of the responsibilities that as a living being were once his to attend. [21] The person who commits suicide – killing his enemies in an act in which he also kills himself – shows the extent to which, as far as the political is concerned, the true contemporary fracture is the one opposing those who cling onto their bodies, who take their bodies as the basis of life itself, to those for whom the body can only open the way to a happy life when expunged. The martyr-to-be is engaged in a quest for a joyous life, one that he believes rests only in God, and that is born of a will to truth in turn converted to a will to purity. There can be no authentic relationship to God other than through conversion, that act through which one becomes other than oneself, and, in so doing, escapes from the facticity of life – that is, impure life. By committing to martyrdom, one takes a vow to destroy such impure corporeal life. Usually, nothing is left of the fundamentalist’s body but debris, scattered among other objects: bloody traces that appear more vivid against other traces, prints, enigmatic fragments such as bullets, guns, phones, sometimes scratches or marks. Today, however, there is rarely a suicide attack without its technical devices, at the intersection between ballistics and electronics – chips to unsolder, memory chips to test. In the strict sense of the term, to bring an end to one’s life, to abolish oneself, is thus to undertake the dissolution of that seemingly simple entity that is one’s body. The contemporary age can be seen to embody the fundamental character of the political as a hatred of the enemy, the need to neutralize him, and a generalized desire to avoid the sorts of dangers and contagion he is perceived to bring. Convinced they now face a permanent threat, contemporary societies have therefore come to experience their daily lives as a series of ‘small traumas’ – an attack here, a hostage there, first a shoot-out, then a permanent state of alert, and so on. New technologies have also deepened access to the private lives of individuals. Thus, secret, invasive and sometimes illegal techniques of mass surveillance are able to target people’s most intimate thoughts, opinions and movements. Indeed, by heightening and reproducing the affect of fear, liberal democracies have also gone on to manufacture bogeymen designed to scare their citizens – today a young veiled woman, tomorrow a terrorist novice returning from the battlefields of the Middle East, lone wolves and sleeper cells hidden away in the crevices of society, observing us, looking for the right moment to strike. What about the ‘Muslim’, the foreigner or the immigrant, those about whom one has continued, beyond all reasonable bounds, to weave images that, little by little, have begun to connect into vicious chains of association? That such images do not match reality matters little. Primary phantasies know neither doubt nor uncertainty. As Freud argued, the mass is only ‘excited by immoderate stimuli. Anyone seeking to move it needs no logical calibration in his arguments, but must paint with the most powerful images, exaggerate, and say the same thing over and over again.’ [22] The current epoch is marked by the triumph of mass morality. [23] Contemporary psychic regimes have brought to a maximum level of exacerbation the exaltation of affectivity and, paradoxically, within an age of digital telecommunications, the desire for mythology, a thirst for mysteries. The increasing expansion of algorithmic reason – which, as everyone knows, serves as the crucial basis for the financialization of the economy – goes hand in hand with the emergence of new modes of mytho-religious thinking. [24] Fundamentalism is hence no longer considered as antithetical to rational knowledge. On the contrary, the one serves as support for the other, as the two are put in the service of a form of visceral experience culminating, among other things, in the notion of a ‘communion of martyrs’. Convictions and firm certainties acquired at the end of a long ‘spiritual’ path, punctuated by revolt and conversion, reveal neither feeble fanaticisms nor barbaric madness or ravings, but rather a type of ‘inner experience’ only shared by those who come to profess the same faith, obey the same law, the same authorities, and the same commandments. Essentially, they belong to the same community. This community is made up of communicants, the ‘damned of the faith’ who are condemned to testify, by word and act, and to the bitter end if necessary, to the ‘to-the-bitter-end’ character of divine truth itself. Within the mytho-religious logic of our times, the divine (just like the market, capital or the political) is almost always perceived as an immanent and immediate force: vital, visceral and energetic. The paths of faith are believed to lead to states or acts considered scandalous from the standpoint of simple human reason, or to risks, apparently absurd ruptures and bloody stirrings – terror and catastrophe in the name of God. One of the effects of faith and fundamentalism is to arouse a sort of great enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm that opens the door to a great decision. Indeed, there are many today who live purely in wait of such an event; and martyrdom is one of the means used by the damned of the faith to bring an end to this waiting. Today, such men of faith and enthusiasm seek to make history through a great decision, namely through the enactment of vertiginous acts of an immediate and sacrificial nature. By means of such acts, the damned of the faith come face to face, and with open eyes, with a dimension of excess and loss. Animated by a will to totality, they seek to become singular subjects by scoping the depths for disjunctive forces, daemons of the sacred. Embracing a form of voluntary loss – that which destroys language as much as the subject of discourse – they allow for the inscription of the divine into the flesh of a world become gift and grace. This is no longer a matter of mere mortification, but of annihilation: a crossing from the self to God. The ultimate aim of these sacrificial acts is to master neither life nor the outside world, but an interior dimension; to produce a new morality and, at the end of a decisive (and if need be bloody, and at any rate definitive) battle, to eventually experience an exulting, ecstatic and sovereign form of affirmation. The damned of the faith Mytho-religious thinking is not the exclusive preserve of terrorist groups. In their effort to curb terrorism and complete their transformation into security states, liberal democracies no longer hesitate to turn to grand mythological schemas. In fact, there are hardly any today that do not appeal to bellicose enthusiasm, often with the aim of patching back together their old nationalist fabrics. For every attack that results in casualties a kind of tailor-made mourning is automatically produced. The nation is summoned to shed its tears of rancour in public and show its defiance against the enemy. And with each tear, a shining path is traced. Clothed in the rags of international law, human rights, democracy, or, simply put, ‘civilization’, militarism no longer needs a disguise. [25] To relight the flame of hatred, old allies are suddenly transformed into ‘enemies of humanity as a whole’, while might becomes right. Having only relatively recently counted on dividing humanity into masters and slaves, liberal democracies today still depend for their survival on defining a sphere of common belonging against a sphere of others; in other words, friends and ‘allies’ on the one hand, and enemies of civilization on the other. Indeed, without enemies they struggle to keep themselves going alone. Whether such enemies really exist matters little. It suffices to create them, find them, unmask them, and bring them out into the open. Still, this endeavour became increasingly onerous when one began to believe that the fiercest and most intrepid enemies had lodged themselves in the deepest pores of the nation, forming a kind of cyst that would destroy the nation’s most fertile promises from within. The problem, in this sense, is how to separate the nation from that which gnaws at it without harming its very body (i.e. civil war). Searches, raids, various forms of control, house arrests, the recording of charges under emergency laws, increases in exceptional measures, extended powers for police and intelligence services, and, if required, loss of nationality: everything is put to work, and with ever-growing harshness, in order to pin down these evils – yet not onto their true authors, our attackers, but, as if by accident, onto those who merely resemble them. In doing this, what else is one doing but perpetuating the very thing one claims to oppose? By demanding the death of all those who are not unconditionally on our side, do we not risk forever reproducing all that is tragic of a humanity in the grip of hatred and unable to free itself? Just as in the past, this war against existential enemies is once again framed in metaphysical terms. As a great challenge, it engages the whole of being, its whole truth. These enemies, with whom no agreement is either possible or desirable, thus appear in the form of caricatures, clichés and stereotypes, granting them a figural sort of presence. In turn, this presence only serves to confirm the type of (ontological) menace we perceive as confronting us. In an age marked by a re-enchantment of blood and soil as much as increasing abstraction, the enemy therefore emerges as a spectral figure and a figural presence, while the cultural and biological elements of enmity are combined to constitute a single dimension. With their imaginations whipped up by hatred, liberal democracies do not hesitate to feed on all sorts of obsessions about the real identity of the enemy. But who is this enemy really? Is it a nation, a religion, a civilization, a culture or an idea? State of insecurity Hate movements, groups invested in an economy of hostility, enmity, various forms of struggle against an enemy – all these have contributed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, to a significant increase in the acceptable levels and types of violence that one can (or should) inflict on the weak, on enemies, intruders, or anyone considered as not being one of us. They have also contributed to a widespread instrumentalization of social relations, as well as to profound mutations within contemporary regimes of collective desire and affect. Further, they have served to foster the emergence and consolidation of a state-form often referred to as the surveillance or security state. From this standpoint, the security state can be seen to feed on a state of insecurity, which it participates in fomenting and to which it claims to be the solution. If the security state is a structure, the state of insecurity is instead a kind of passion, or rather an affect, a condition, or a force of desire. In other words, the state of insecurity is the condition upon which the functioning of the security state relies in so far as the latter is ultimately a structure charged with the task of investing, organizing and diverting the constitutive drives of contemporary human life. As for the war, which is supposedly charged with conquering fear, it is neither local, national nor regional. Its extent is global and its privileged domain of action is everyday life itself. Moreover, since the security state presupposes that a ‘cessation of hostilities’ between ourselves and those who threaten our way of life is impossible – and that the existence of an enemy which endlessly transforms itself is irreducible – it is clear that this war must be permanent. Responding to threats – whether internal, or coming from the outside and then relayed into the domestic sphere – today requires that a set of extra-military operations as well as enormous psychic resources be mobilized. The security state – being explicitly animated by a mythology of freedom, in turn derived from a metaphysics of force – is, in short, less concerned with the allocation of jobs and salaries than with a deeper project of control over human life in general, whether it is a case of its subjects or of those designated as enemies. This freeing of psychogenetic energy can be seen in an increasing attachment to what was once called illusion. In its classic conception, illusion is opposed to reality. Mistaking effects for causes, illusion empowers the dominance of images and the world of appearances, reflections and simulacra. It draws from a world of fiction that is opposed to a real world founded in the fundamental fabric of things and of life. The demand of an originary surplus, which has always been necessary for life, today has not only accelerated – it has become uncontrollable. This imaginary surplus is not perceived as the complement to an existence that would be more ‘real’ because supposedly consonant with Being and its essence. For many, it is instead experienced as the very motor of the real, the very condition of its plenitude and radiance. The production of this surplus, which was once administered by religions of salvation, is today increasingly delegated to capital and to all kinds of objects and technologies. The domain of objects and machines, as much as capital itself, is increasingly presented in the guise of an animistic religion. In this context, everything is put into question up to and including the status of truth. Certainties and convictions are held as genuine truths. There is no need to employ reason. It is enough to simply believe and surrender oneself to belief. As a result, public deliberation, which is one of the essential features of democracy, no longer consists in discussing and seeking collectively, under the eyes of all citizens, the truth and, ultimately, justice. The great opposition no longer being that between truth and falsity, the worst crime becomes doubt. This is because, in the concrete struggle opposing us to our enemies, doubt hinders the total freeing of voluntarist, emotional and vital energies necessary for the use of violence and, when required, the shedding of blood. The reserves of credulity have similarly increased. Paradoxically, this increase has gone hand in hand with an exponential acceleration of technological development and industrial innovation, the continuing digitalization of facts and things, and the almost universal advance of what might be called electronic life and its double, or robotically adjusted life. [26] A new and unprecedented phase in the history of humanity has effectively begun, in which it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish human organisms from electronic flows, the life of humans from that of processors. Such a phase is made possible by advances in algorithmic computation, leading to an accumulation of know-how through the storage of enormous data flows, processed at maximum power and speed. This digital-cognitive turn will culminate in a general incorporation of microchips within biological tissues. The coupling of human and machine, which is already under way, has led not only to the emergence of new mythological conceptions of the technical object. It has also, as an immediate consequence, put back into question the very status of the modern subject inherited from the humanist tradition. The other decisive factor in this freeing process is a lifting of inhibitions – a return of the excluded part, of the structures embracing the repressed element – and a multiplication of enhanced pleasures resulting from this freeing of psychogenetic energies and drives. Such a process also results in an adjournment – if not a wholesale suspension – of the powers of moral reflection. What gratificatory pleasures might be possible today for those whose inhibitions are lifted and whose moral conscience is withdrawn? What might explain the contemporary attraction exerted on the multitude by the idea of absolute and irresponsible power? What of many people’s seeming acceptance of the most extreme actions, their receptiveness to the simplest and most confused arguments? And what of the readiness with which many appear to fall into line, and with which world powers can be led towards all sorts of crimes simply by acknowledging the force of this idea? In order to answer these questions one needs to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of affective life under present conditions. [27] The almost total interconnection between individuals made possible by new technologies has not only given rise to new strategies in the formation of masses. Today, constituting a mass is nearly the same as constituting a horde. In truth, this is no longer an era of masses. It is rather an era of virtual hordes. In so far as the mass survives, however, it is still only ‘excited by immoderate stimuli’. [28] As Freud argues, the mass ‘respects strength and is only moderately influenced by the good, which it sees simply as a kind of weakness. What it expects in its heroes is brawn, even a tendency to violence. It wants to be dominated and suppressed and to fear its master.’ [29] Almost everywhere, then, the traditional field of antagonisms has collapsed. Within national borders, new forms of association and social struggles have emerged. These are motivated less by class identity than by familial relations and thus by blood. The old friend and enemy distinction is now embodied in the conflict between kin and non-kin, namely between those linked through blood or origin and those considered to belong to a different blood, culture or religion. According to this vision, these are people who, having come from elsewhere, can never be considered our fellow citizens and with whom we can have almost nothing in common. Though they live among us, they can never be one of us. They must therefore be expelled, put back in their place, or simply led back beyond our borders under the aegis of a new security state that has come to dominate our lives. Domestic pacification, what might be termed a molecular or ‘silent civil war’, mass incarcerations, the decoupling of nationality from citizenship, extrajudicial executions sanctioned by new legal and criminal powers – all these factors contribute to a blurring of the old distinction between internal and external security against a background of heightened racist affects. Nanoracism and narcotherapy At first sight, the case is clear. Our epoch seems to have finally discovered its truth. It only lacked the courage to declare it. [30] Having reconciled itself with its true side, it can finally allow itself to proceed naked, free of all inhibition, without any of the old masks and obligatory disguises that had once served as its fig leaves. The great repression (which never really happened) is therefore followed by a great release. But at what price, for whom, and for how long? With nothing left to hide, the start of this century stands as if gazing out onto a wide-open expanse: vast salt marshes extending without a shadow towards the horizon. The barrel has been scraped. All taboos have been broken. Any notion of the secret or the forbidden lies face down, dead on the ground. Everything becomes see-through and called to its final consummation. The vessels are almost full and twilight cannot be delayed. Whether this ending takes place in a shower of bullets or not, we shall find out soon enough. In the meantime, the tide does not stop rising. Racism – whether in Europe, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, the Caribbean or the rest of the world – will remain with us for the foreseeable future. [31] It will continue to proliferate not only as a part of mass culture, but also (we would do well not to forget it) within polite society, not only in the old settler colonies, but also in other areas of the globe, long deserted by Jews and where neither Negroes [Nègres] nor Arabs have ever been seen. In any case, one had better get used to it: in the past it was games, circuses, plots, conspiracies and gossip that provided the entertainment. As the continent of Europe begins to turn into a sort of boring iceberg (but also elsewhere), one will soon have to entertain oneself through nanoracism, that form of narcotherapy somewhat resembling a little woodland owlet: diminutive, cute, but sporting a powerful beak that is hooked and sharp at the point. These are the bromides of our times, soothing and numbing everything into a kind of flaccid paralysis. Once everything has lost its elasticity, it now appears as if to suddenly contract. Spasms and contractions – that is what we ought to be talking about. Anywhere one finds cramps, spasms, a general shrinking of the spirit – these are the places where nanoracism treads. Yet, in the end, what is nanoracism if not that narcotic brand of prejudice based on skin colour and expressing itself in seemingly anodyne everyday gestures, often apropos of nothing, apparently unconscious remarks, a little banter, some allusion or insinuation, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an innuendo, but also, it must be added, consciously spiteful remarks, like a malicious intention, a deliberate dig or jab, a profound desire to stigmatize and, in particular, to inflict violence, to wound and humiliate, to degrade those not considered to be one of us? Of course, even in an era of shameless nanoracism – where everything comes down to ‘us versus them’, whether expressed in upper or lower case it doesn’t matter – no one wants to hear about it anymore. They should stay home, people say. Or if they really insist on living next to us, in our home, it should be with their pants down, rears out in the open. Nanoracism defines an era of demeaning lowest-commondenominator racism, a sort of pocket-knife racism, a spectacle of pigs wallowing in dirt. Its function is to turn each of us into callous boors. It consists in placing the greatest number of those whom we regard as undesirable in intolerable conditions, to enclose and marginalize them daily, to continually inflict on them an endless series of racist jabs and wounds, to rob them of all their acquired rights, to smoke them out of their hives and dishonour them to the point where they have no choice but to self-deport. And, speaking of racist wounds, it should be remembered that these are cuts and bruises endured by a human subject and thus of a quite specific character: they are painful blows that are difficult to forget because inflicted on the body and its materiality, but also, above all, on intangible elements such as dignity and self-esteem. Indeed, their traces are mostly invisible and their scars difficult to heal. Speaking also of cuts and bruises, it is now clear that on this iceberg continent of Europe – as well as in America, South Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and elsewhere – those who suffer daily racist injuries must today be counted in the hundreds of thousands. They constantly run the risk of letting themselves be touched in the most intense manner by someone – an institution, a voice, a public or private authority – asking them to justify who they are, why they are here, where they come from, where they are going, why they don’t go back to where they came from; in other words, a voice or authority which deliberately seeks to cause them a large or small shock, to irritate them, to hurt them, injure them, to get them to lose their cool and self-composure as a pretext to violate them, to slander and debase without restraint that which is most private, most intimate, and vulnerable, in them. With regard to this sort of constant abuse, it should be added that nanoracism is not the exclusive preserve of narrow-minded ‘white people’, that subaltern group of individuals tormented with resentment and rancour, who hate their own condition profoundly but who would nonetheless never commit suicide, whose nightmare is to one day wake up in the garb of a Negro or with the brown skin of an Arab, not far away in some colony, but right here at home in their own country – the worst of all nightmares. Nanoracism has become the obligatory complement to hydraulic racism – that of microand macro-juridical, bureaucratic and institutional apparatuses – the racism of the state machine, one which eagerly shuffles stowaways and illegals around, which continues to confine the rabble within urban peripheries like a mass of jumbled objects, which in fact multiplies the number of undocumented people, fencing off its territories and electrifying its borders, sometimes content with merely observing the shipwrecks at high seas; a state which controls every aspect of transportation, buses, airport terminals, underground trains, streets, unveiling Muslim women and handling them as it sees fit, multiplying detention centres and transit camps, investing lavishly in deportation techniques; a state, therefore, which practises discrimination and segregation under the full light of day while swearing to the neutrality and impartiality of the secular Republican order – ‘indifferent to difference’, as the saying goes – and still talking nonsense about that putrefying miasma of ‘the rights of man and the citizen’, so-called against all good sense, and despite the fact that for today’s state they are hardly the hard-on fodder of yesteryear. Nanoracism is racism turned culture, a kind of all-pervading breath in its banality and capacity to infiltrate into the very pores and veins of society at a time of generalized brainwashing, automated stupidity and mass stupor. The great visceral fear is that of the Saturnalia, the moment when today’s jinns, which are very much like those of the past – in other words, Negroes, Arabs, Muslims, and, never far away, Jews too – like the scattered droppings of a Pan-god, take the place of their masters and transform the nation into an immense dump, Muhammad’s dump. Still, the distance that separates the phobia of the dump from the camp has always been very short. Refugee camps, camps for the displaced, migrant camps, camps for foreigners, waiting areas for people pending status, transit zones, administrative detention centres, identification or expulsion centres, border crossings, welcome centres for asylum-seekers, temporary welcome centres, refugee towns, migrant integration towns, ghettos, jungles, hostels, migrant homes, the list goes on, as observed in a recent study by Michel Agier. This endless list serves to capture not only an ever-present (though often largely invisible, not to say all-too-familiar and perhaps banal) reality. The camp has not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has also ceased to scandalize. Or, rather, the camp is not just our present. It is our future, namely our solution for ‘keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste’. [32] In short, it is a form of government of the world. Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more language to speak the unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze. Everywhere, appeals to good sense, to common sense, appeals to the good old Republic – as we watch it bend over, bearing the weight and grinning while its spine cracks – appeals to our old friend the humanism of cowards, and appeals to a specific type of degenerate ‘feminism’ for which the term ‘equality’ translates as duty-to-makethe-veiled-muslim-girl-wear-a-thong-and-shave-thebearded-man. [33] Just as in the colonial era, the disparaging interpretation of how blacks and Muslim Arabs treat ‘their women’ draws on a combination of voyeurism and envy – the envy of the harem. The instrumentalization of questions of gender for racist ends, highlighting the Other’s tendency towards modes of masculine domination, is almost always aimed at obscuring the existence of phallocracy at home. The overinvestment of virility as a symbolic and political ingredient belongs not only to the so-called ‘new barbarians’. All forms of power, including our democracies, sit on a continuum in which such symbolic investments can be seen to correspond with a gain in speed and force. Power is always in some sense a mode of confrontation with the statue [la statue], while investment in femininity and maternity serve to orient sexual pleasure towards a politics of rapture, whether secular or not. Yet, to be taken even remotely seriously, it is important at some point to show that one has balls. The fact is that as part of our hedonistic culture the father is still conferred the role of first planter, and it’s the man who is supposed to sow the first seeds. In a culture haunted by the figure of the incestuous father, driven by a desire to have sex with his own virgin daughter or son, the notion of annexing the woman to one’s body as a complement to man’s defective statue has become utterly banal. One should therefore forget all these charred mythologies with no muscle, and move on without hesitation. But to what exactly? Despite all the horrors of the slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations especially, even with their bowels distended by a whole variety of gases, continue to mobilize racism in the service of all manner of wacky and murderous histories. These are histories that are as new as they are old: those of foreigners, hordes of migrants in whose face our doors must be shut, barbed wire that must be hastily erected lest we be swamped by a tide of savages, histories of borders that must be established as if they had ever gone away, histories of nationals including some from very old colonies still labelled with the epithet of immigrants, intruders that must be banished, enemies that must be eradicated, terrorists who are after us because of our way of life, who must be targeted from high altitude and from a distance by drones, histories of human shields transformed into the collateral damage of our bombardments, histories of blood, slaughter, soil, fatherland, traditions, identity, pseudo-civilizations besieged by barbarian hordes, histories of national security, and all kinds of euphemistic, coarse histories, frightful histories that turn everything as black as soot, endless histories that are continuously recycled in the hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of the most gullible. In fact, having fomented misery and death far away – far from the gaze of their own citizens – Western nations now dread the return of the law of the sword, that brand of pious vengeance demanded under the old lex talionis. In order to protect themselves from these vengeful drives, they employ racism like a hooked blade, the poisoned supplement to a beggar’s nationalism now reduced to its last rags, as the true centres of decision-making are denationalized, wealth is offshored, the majority become disenfranchised from real power, debt accumulates, and whole territories are zoned off while entire populations suddenly become superfluous. But if racism has become so insidious, it is also because it has now become a part of the constitutive drives and economic subjectivity of our times. It has not only become a product to be consumed alongside other goods, objects and commodities. In this epoch of salaciousness, it is also the fundamental basis for the kind of ‘society of the spectacle’ described by Guy Debord. In many cases it has acquired an almost sumptuary status. It is something that one allows oneself not because it is unusual, but because it provides an answer to the general call to lust and abandon launched by neoliberalism. Out with the general strike. In with brutality and sex. In an epoch so dominated by a passion for profit, this mixture of lust, brutality and sexuality gives rise to a process in which racism comes to be incorporated into the ‘society of the spectacle’ and molecularized by the structures of contemporary consumption. It is practised without one being conscious of it. This explains our amazement when the other draws our attention to it or when the other calls us out on it. It feeds our hunger for entertainment and allows us to escape the surrounding boredom and monotony. We pretend that it is just a matter of harmless acts that do not possess all the meanings some would like to assign to them. We take offence when the police of another country deprive us of our right to laugh, of the right to a humour that is never directed against ourselves (self-derision) or against the powerful (satire), but always against those weaker than ourselves – the right to laugh at the expense of those we wish to stigmatize. A kind of hilarious, utterly moronic, almost dishevelled form of nanoracism that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence it serves to sanction – herein lies the spirit of our times. We should fear that the switchover has not already happened. That it is not too late. That the dream of a decent society has not been reduced to a mirage. We should fear a violent return to an era in which racism did not yet belong to only the ‘shameful parts’ of society, which one merely seeks to hide without eradicating. In such a scenario, a hearty and bold brand of racism would become a kind of habit, and the muted rebellion against society would become increasingly open and virulent, at least on the part of the recluse. The question of belonging still remains un answered. Who is from here and who is not? Those who should not be here: what are they doing in our home? How do we get rid of them? And, in any case, what do ‘here’ and ‘there’ mean in a world that is both networked and re-balkanizing? If the desire for apartheid is really one of the characteristics of our times, then in reality Europe, for its part, will no longer be as it once was – that is, monochrome. In other words, there will no longer be (if it was ever the case) a unique centre of the world. From now on, the world will be conjugated in the plural. It will experience itself as plural and there is absolutely nothing one can do to reverse this new condition. It is irreversible, irrevocable. One of the consequences of this new condition is the reactivation in many places of the phantasy of annihilation. This phantasy is present in every context where the social forces tend to conceive of the political as a struggle to the death against unconditional enemies. Such a struggle is then called existential. It is a struggle without the possibility of mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation. It opposes distinct essences, each possessing a quasi-impenetrable substance, or a substance that can be possessed only by those who – under the law of blood and soil – are said to belong to the same kin. The political history as much as the history of philosophy and metaphysics of the West are in fact permeated by this problematic. As everyone knows, the Jews paid its price at the very heart of Europe. Before that, Negroes [Nègres] and indigenous peoples, especially in the New World, were first to embark on this bloody Way of Sorrows. This conception of the political can be understood as the almost necessary completion of Western metaphysics’ time-honoured obsession with the question of Being and its supposed truth, on the one hand, and the ontology of life, on the other. According to this myth, history is seen as the unfolding of the essence of Being. In Heideggerian terminology, ‘Being’ is opposed to ‘beings’. Moreover, the West is the crucial site of Being’s disclosure since it alone could have developed this capacity to disclose an experience of repeated inception, the reactivation of existential origins. Everything else is just beings. Only the West could have developed this capacity to disclose an experience of repeated inception since it is the crucial site of Being. That is what makes it universal. As a result, its meanings must be valid unconditionally, beyond all topographical specificity, namely in all places, all times, independently of all language, history, indeed any condition whatsoever. With respect to the history of Being and the politics of Being, however, one could argue that the West has never properly thought its own finitude. It has always posited its own horizon of action as something inevitable and absolute, and this horizon has always been intended as being by definition planetary and universal. Such a conception of the universal does not necessarily correspond to something that would be valid for all humans as humans. Neither is it synonymous with a broadening of my own horizons or a care for the conditions of my own finitude. The universal here is the name given to the truth of the victor, or, rather, to the violence of the victor, to his wars, which are always predatory conflicts. These predatory conflicts are also and above all onto-historical conflicts, since it is through them that a history of truth is staked out in its destinal unfolding. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the phantasy of annihilation or destruction envisions not only the bombing of the planet, but also the disappearance of humans, their outright extinction. This is not an apocalypse as such, if only because the notion of the apocalypse presupposes the survival, somewhere, of a witness whose task it is to recount what they see. It is a form of annihilation conceived not as a catastrophe to be feared, but rather as a sort of act of purification by fire. However, it remains the case that this purification would be the same as an annihilation of present humanity. Such an act of annihilation is supposed to open the way to another beginning, the inception of another history without today’s humanity. It is, in this sense, a phantasy of ablation. In these anxiogenic times, the clues of a return to the question of ontological difference are all there. Under the auspices of the ‘war on terror’, and through aerial bombardments, extrajudicial executions (preferably with the help of drones), massacres, attacks and other forms of slaughter, which constitute the overall tone of this new era of warfare, the idea of the West as the only province of the world capable of understanding and instituting the universal can be seen to resurface. The division of humanity into native and foreign peoples is far advanced. If the fundamental demand was once that of finding the enemy and bringing him out in the open – as Schmitt and Heidegger believed – today it suffices to create him in order to stand up to him, to confront him with the prospect of total annihilation and destruction. For, indeed, these are enemies with whom no communication is either possible or desirable. No understanding is possible with those who lie beyond the confines of humanity. Can one truly come to presence in the world, dwell in the world, or traverse it, on the basis of this impossibility of sharing it with others, this impassable distance? Is it enough to shoot down enemies and expel foreigners to be truly rid of them, to doom them to eternity, to forget them for all time? This attitude demands that such acts of death and banishment succeed in erasing the face (its living substance) that gives the enemy his humanity. The task of disfigurement and erasure is almost a precondition for any execution under the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that continue to multiply structures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care towards the other has been replaced with a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer necessary requirements. Hospitality and hostility have never been so opposed, a factor that serves to explain the interest in returning to those intellectual figures for whom the misery of men and the suffering of enemies were never mere ‘silent remainders of politics’. [34] Instead, they were always combined with a demand for recognition, notably in contexts where the experience of being unrecognized, humiliated, alienated and mistreated was the norm. The alternative is to dismantle security—this is necessary to reconfigure subjectivity and check endless cycles of violence and preemption Calkivik 10 (Emine Asi Calkivik, Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Currently, faculty member of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Istanbul Technical University, “Dismantling Security”, Dissertation submitted for the completion of a Doctor of Philosophy, October 2010, ) NCC2020If ending political violence and securing life is the dream of the modern political project (as captured by Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace”), how is it that the spread of this political project across the globe has translated into not less but more violence, not a disinvestment from but an overwhelming investment in more efficient ways to kill life? How is it that an era of exponentially increasing objects to be secured—objects as diverse and disparate as the nation, the environment, food, health, the human and the globe—is also an era when a constant state of terror inflicted by war, hunger, poverty, displacement, and xenophobia become the defining features of global political life? Taking this paradox as the starting point for my dissertation, I argued that what is needed is to dismantle security rather than reproduce its imperial gaze. To make this argument, I investigated the implications of the construction of politics as a global security project and critically inquired into the implications of politics devoted to securing life at its most general level, in an all encompassing manner. I explored the meaning of dismantling security as untimely critique in this empire of security and discussed alternative conceptions of politics beyond politics of security. I started my analysis by diagnosing the way in which security has emerged as a global bio-political apparatus in the contemporary era—an apparatus that is charged with the task of producing and transforming life at its most general level. In Chapters 1 and 2, I mapped out the contemporary landscape of in/security and discussed the way in which security becomes a sovereign demand amidst the terrorization of life globally. I highlighted the way in which the project to secure life gets articulated in temporal terms through the logic of preemption—revolving around not only the fear of what exists, but also the danger of what might be—and pointed out that the same logic animates contemporary form of capital accumulation. Chapter 4 built upon this diagnosis about preemption becoming the defining feature of politics of security and capital accumulation, where I situated contemporary manifestations of the temporal homology between them within the context of bio-political modernity. Elaborating on the way in which, in modernity, political time gets reduced to abstract unit measure, I suggested that security colonizes the future by annihilating political time as possibility and writing the future as present. It is upon this premise that I offered an interpretation of my call to dismantle security as an untimely claim on time. I carried out a parallel inquiry into the meaning of dismantling security as untimely critique by relating it to an investigation of the reproduction of the hegemony of the sign of security through the disciplinary production of knowledge on security. In Chapter 3, I engaged with the critical security studies literature and tried to show how such critiques of security end up securing security’s hegemonic hold. If critical thought on security in its current formulation transmogrifies into a form of questioning that further consolidates the disciplinary project of security, how then are we to conceptualize a form of critique that would open the space for dismantling security? This was the question that I grappled with in Chapter 5, where I formulated an understanding of critical thought as an untimely intervention—one that is historically situated, yet, not historically foreordained or determined. In contrast to a form of critical subjectivity that takes the limits of what exists as the limits to what is possible, critique in this formulation becomes an untimely intervention that resets the account of times and renders the present as the site of non-utopian possibility. It is this understanding of critique, I argued, that gives form to dismantling security as a critical project. After making these deconstructive moves on the terrain of the empire of security, in the final chapter, I turned to a discussion of what a politics beyond politics of security would entail, what ethical and political possibilities open up when insecurity is embraced as an inescapable condition. What happens when thought of politics starts at the limits of security? To answer this question, I inquired into three possible moves beyond politics of security. One of these three moves, I suggested, passes through de-centering the sovereign subject of security by exposing the Otherness constitutive of subjectivity as such. Shattering the illusion of a sovereign and secure self opens the way to formulate ethical responsibility on the premise of the radical interdependence inscribed at the heart of being. It recasts politics as a way of being in the world beyond a techno-politics of life.The second move beyond a politics of security that I discussed centered on the works of Jacques Rancière, where politics is conceptualized as the overturning of the ordered space of security by staging political subjectivities in excess of the secure and functional order. Deploying the distinction that Rancière makes between “police” (logic of consensus) and “politics” (logic of dissensus), I suggested that, on this account, a politics beyond disrupts the reduction of politics to the management of the given and the securing of the proper distribution of identities, space, and time. I elaborated the third and final move beyond politics of security by visiting Jacques Derrida’s conception of political time as aporetic and his account of the future beyond representation. Such a conception of political time inscribes anxiety that issues from the absence of secure grounds as the condition of possibility of politics. In contrast to politics of security that annihilates political time as possibility by legislating the future, I argued, Derrida’s thinking on political time allows for a form of writing the future beyond security.My investigation into alternative conceptions of political subjectivity beyond security hopes to serve as an opening that calls for further inquiry into other possibilities, other conceptions of politics that would allow approaching global political life with an idiom detoxified from security. Politics beyond politics of security can be a point of reflection in the light of many other questions that could be raised. For instance, if security reduces the body of the political community to a species body, what alternative forms of thinking about the body are available that could challenge this assertion? How would different conceptions of the body beyond biological thinking enable different forms of politics beyond bio-politics of security? Or should political thought abandon the thought of the body altogether? Does politics beyond politics of security call for a new body or a no body?FW / AltFramework: 2NCJudges are academics, not political scientists---don’t let them weigh plan, you should prioritize questioning assumptionZambernardi, 15 – University of Bologna (Lorenzo, “POLITICS IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO POLITICAL SCIENTISTS: A CRITIQUE OF THE THEORY–POLICY NEXUS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS”, European Journal of International Relations 1–21, April) NCC2020There are two main reasons why the notion of applied social science still appears to be unsound. The first one has to do with the need for policymaking to rely on some degree of prediction (Chernoff, 2009; Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013: 436; Merton and Lerner, 1951: 304). As Herbert Simon (2001: 32, 60) explained, while ‘basic’ science describes the world and makes generalizations about collected phenomena, ‘applied’ science is grounded on the predictive power of the knowledge we possess.6 Indeed, choosing one policy rather than another means having some expectations about the effects of the policy itself. As Bueno de Mesquita (2009) rightly contends, you can shape and engineer the future only if you are able to make accurate predictions.However, even if one overlooks the fact that IR scholars have systematically tried (Gaddis, 1992–1993: 10)7 but failed to predict major events such as the Iranian Revolution, the peaceful end of the Cold War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and, more recently, the Arab Spring, available studies show that experts are not much better at predicting future outcomes than common people. In his Expert Political Judgment, Philip Tetlock (2005) has shown that experts, largely political scientists, area study specialists and economists working in academic and non-academic institutions, are not very good at predicting future developments. They are better than the ‘unwashed masses’ (i.e. Berkeley undergrads), but no better than relatively simple statistical procedures and attentive readers of newspapers. Moreover, Tetlock found that knowledge of a specific issue might make one a better forecaster, but being a specialist can actually reduce the ability to predict future developments: ‘we reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly’ (Tetlock, 2005: 59). That leads to a paradoxical situation in which more knowledge means a lower capacity of being a reliable forecaster. Tetlock’s conclusion is quite depressing for those scholars who wish to influence policymaking:In this age of academic hyper-specialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals — distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on — are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations. (Tetlock, 2005: 233)8If the ability to predict is a necessary requirement for an applied science but IR scholars are only slightly better at predicting than the general public, why should they be credited with a privileged epistemological standpoint in the policymaking process? Here, I am not suggesting that policymakers can master political subjects better than scholars; as Henry Nau (2008: 636) points out, ‘neither profession can make a superior claim to social knowledge.’ Nor do I contend that prediction is impossible. In fact, some limited prediction is possible but, again, experts of international politics are not much better at forecasting than practitioners and laypeople.Although failure to predict might not pose any problems for a scientific study of politics — as explaining (Keil, 2010; Lepgold and Nincic, 2001: 89; Singer, 1990: 74) or scenario analysis (Bernstein et al., 2000) can be sufficient goals9 — it does have detrimental implications for a social science that aspires to advise, drive and change politics. Advising, designing and planning are all based on the assumption that social scientists are much better at prediction than the general public. Yet, such a claim is, at present, unsubstantiated.The second reason why the argument for an applied IR theory seems misguided is concerned with the issue of the knowledge generated within the discipline. In particular, there is no agreement among scholars about what we know and how international politics works. Even if we neglect the problems concerning prediction and go for a pragmatic attitude to political knowledge — an attitude by which the latter is simply what investigators agree upon (Friedrichs and Kratochwil, 2009; Peirce, 1992[1878]: 138–139) — scholars do not agree about what we know and about the best means to reach political goals. Interestingly, disagreement on these important areas can be found not only between different epistemological approaches, but also among like-minded scholars working within the same theory of knowledge and even within the same school, tradition, research programme or paradigm.The problem lies not solely in the fact that there are several theories aiming to explain one and the same political phenomenon, but rather in the fact that it has become impossible to establish the scientific validity of the knowledge produced in the discipline. Despite the presence of agreed-upon rules to determine theory acceptance (Bueno de Mesquita, 2004; Christensen and Snyder, 1997; Elman and Elman, 2002; Hopf, 1998; Lake, 2013; Legro and Moravcsik, 1999; Vasquez, 1997), there is still sharp disagreement on the progress of IR. Indeed, the widespread (though not universal10) adoption of the criteria suggested by Imre Lakatos (1970) — the methodology of scientific research programmes — has not generated consensus on the progress in terms of knowledge achieved by the discipline. If some of the main theorists of some of the main schools of IR claim that their research programmes are all progressive (Di Cicco and Levy, 2003; Keohane and Martin, 2003; Lee Ray, 2003; Moravcsik, 2003) and, therefore, all scientific and cumulative, then one could infer that none of them is probably truly progressive, at least in Lakatos’s terms. For Lakatos, judgement on progress is not simply a contest between theory and empirical evidence, but rather a three-cornered contest between competing theories and empirical evidence. Moreover, besides awarding a promising future to their research programmes, some of these scholars have also claimed that their rivals’ theoretical programmes are ‘degenerative’ and, thus, outside the scope of science (Legro and Moravcsik, 1999; Vasquez, 1997).Thus, not only do meta-theoretical debates about epistemology and ontology appear irresolvable (Monteiro and Ruby, 2009; Sil and Katzenstein, 2010a: 417), but so are empirically testable questions rarely resolved. Indeed, there is no consensus on what causes war, on the economic and political sources of democracy, on when states should intervene abroad, and on other major issues concerning international politics. The debate over these questions seems interminable.11The fact that strong disagreement also exists in the hard sciences is not good news for IR theory. Although scientific research always implies the assumption of fallibility and the knowledge produced is often subject to change, that does not mean that the natural and social sciences are essentially identical. Dismissing the differences in accuracy, prediction and control between the natural sciences and social sciences as ‘mere matters of degree’ is an old but untenable strategy in order to defend the scientific study of politics (Crick, 1959: 218). Indeed, differences in degree might soon turn into differences in kind.The modest success of IR theory in developing a body of policy-relevant knowledge barely comparable to the one generated by the natural sciences suggests that the so-called scientific method has not yet been able to produce remarkable results when employed in the study of international politics. Hayek’s and Morgenthau’s critiques of applied social science still appear to be valid, though many students of international politics think and write that such an unsuccessful record does not question the possibility of an applied political science.If no theory or method can deliver any truly predictive knowledge of international politics, then policy must be insensitive to theoretical and empirical findings. This is why, despite being concerned with relevant political issues and emphasizing any potential dangers and mistakes, IR theory should not directly inform policy. French statesman Georges Clemenceau famously remarked that ‘war is too important to be left to the generals.’ Paraphrasing Clemenceau, I would argue that politics is too important to be left to political scientists.Suggesting that policies are to ignore scientific conjectures, however, does not imply that there should be no role for IR theory and no point in theorizing about international politics and foreign policy. Being practically relevant does not equate to directly affecting policy. The argument developed here does not deny the importance of IR scholarship, which, far from claiming any direct influence of a scientist kind, can have practical relevance in two different functions.The first one refers to the role of theory in political judgement. In particular, I would argue that theory is an important tool for the intellectual development of policymakers. From this viewpoint, no broad line of demarcation should be drawn between the practitioner and the scholar. The second function, on the other hand, is concerned with IR scholarship as a whole and involves its unintended effects on policymaking. Such influence is indirect, yet no less important. Here, I contend that a broad line of demarcation should be drawn between decision-making and IR theory. Despite the fact that these two implications might appear to be inconsistent at first sight, as I will try to show in the next two sections, they tend to reduce the scholar’s role but not the function of scholarship.IR as a tool of self-educationWhile, at present, point prediction appears impossible in international politics, what about the most common type of forecasting in social science — that is, probabilistic predictions? Apart from Bueno de Mesquita perhaps, no scholar would claim to have developed the right formula for forecasting future outcomes. Proponents of statistical models, for example, would argue that the predictions they make are probabilistic and the variables they employ are ‘probability-raisers’ (Grynaviski, 2013: 824).In relation to the theory–policy nexus, however, facts and figures cast in probabilistic terms cannot solve the dilemmas of policy. Although scholars might be content with knowing that there is a certain relationship between variables, policymakers cannot act according to probabilistic propositions in the particular, individual cases that they have to face. In matters of war and peace, for instance, where many lives may be at stake, the error term is something that cannot be ignored: ‘How, for example, can the cost of thinking rather too well of a particular speculation within pure theory be compared to the pain, sufferance and death which follow errors in the application of theory?’ (Collingridge and Reeve, 1986: 34).Practitioners are not interested in distinguishing between approximations and exact results not because they fail to understand the epistemological limits of the social sciences and the complex nature of political reality, but because they often face issues and circumstances that are unique. Since a variable ruled out of a theory on account of its rare or scarce influence on a particular phenomenon might have a major effect under specific circumstances, generalizations are of little help to practitioners.Likewise, knowledge of causal mechanisms and processes, highly valuable for understanding how variables are connected to one another, does not solve the problem of whether the case that a policymaker is facing is either a particular case of a general class of events or a contingency characterized by unique features.12 Thus, general propositions about causal chains and mechanisms are also of limited use for policymaking. As George and Bennett (2004: 277) acknowledge: ‘No theory or systematic generic knowledge can provide policy specialists with detailed, high-confidence prescriptions for action in each contingency that arises. Such policy-relevant theory and knowledge does not exist and is not feasible.’By clarifying the problems and risks involved in certain situations, theory can contribute to informing policy. However, scientific knowledge cannot replace political deliberation; many instances in international politics are so unique that the idea that generalizations can be employed to conduct foreign policy appears misguided.13 What ‘makes men foolish or wise, understanding or blind, as opposed to knowledgeable or learned or well informed’, writes Isaiah Berlin (1999: 24), ‘is the perception of these unique flavours of each situation as it is, in its specific differences.’ To these ‘unique flavours’, IR conceived as a scientific enterprise has not much to offer. Good political judgement might not be illusory; the illusion is to think that judgement can be replaced with rational calculation or probabilistic inference.Acting on the highest probabilities available, indifference to the ‘particular’ and blindness to the individual circumstances is a very dangerous path to take in international politics. Thus, it is necessary to understand the nature, the structure and the issues of a particular context regardless of universal formulas and general rules. As Isaiah Berlin (1999: 45) argued:What makes statesmen, like drivers of cars, successful is that they do not think in general terms — that is, they do not primarily ask themselves in what respect a given situation is like or unlike other situations in the long course of human history...Hence, every situation must be understood in its own distinctiveness and a particular decision should not be the rigid application of a mathematical formula, but rather a deliberation based on critical reflection over the specific situation in which one needs to act.Ethical questions cannot be reduced to yes/no answers---reject their close minded framing Biswas 7 – Shampa Biswas, Professor of Politics at Whitman College, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Minnesota, M.A., International Relations, Maxwell School of Citizenship, Syracuse University, M.A., Economics, Dehli School of Economics, University of Dehli, “Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist”, Millennium, 36(1), p. 117-125 NCC2020It has been 30 years since Stanley Hoffman accused IR of being an ‘American social science’ and noted its too close connections to US foreign policy elites and US preoccupations of the Cold War to be able to make any universal claims,7 yet there seems to be a curious amnesia and lack of curiosity about the political history of the discipline, and in particular its own complicities in the production of empire.8 Through what discourses the imperial gets reproduced, resurrected and re-energised is a question that should be very much at the heart of a discipline whose task it is to examine the contours of global power. Thinking this failure of IR through some of Edward Said’s critical scholarly work from his long distinguished career as an intellectual and activist, this article is an attempt to politicise and hence render questionable the disciplinary traps that have, ironically, circumscribed the ability of scholars whose very business it is to think about global politics to actually think globally and politically. What Edward Said has to offer IR scholars, I believe, is a certain kind of global sensibility, a critical but sympathetic and felt awareness of an inhabited and cohabited world. Furthermore, it is a profoundly political sensibility whose globalism is predicated on a cognisance of the imperial and a firm non-imperial ethic in its formulation. I make this argument by travelling through a couple of Said’s thematic foci in his enormous corpus of writing. Using a lot of Said’s reflections on the role of public intellectuals, I argue in this article that IR scholars need to develop what I call a ‘global intellectual posture’. In the 1993 Reith Lectures delivered on BBC channels, Said outlines three positions for public intellectuals to assume – as an outsider/exile/marginal, as an ‘amateur’, and as a disturber of the status quo speaking ‘truth to power’ and self-consciously siding with those who are underrepresented and disadvantaged.9 Beginning with a discussion of Said’s critique of ‘professionalism’ and the ‘cult of expertise’ as it applies to International Relations, I first argue the importance, for scholars of global politics, of taking politics seriously. Second, I turn to Said’s comments on the posture of exile and his critique of identity politics, particularly in its nationalist formulations, to ask what it means for students of global politics to take the global seriously. Finally, I attend to some of Said’s comments on humanism and contrapuntality to examine what IR scholars can learn from Said about feeling and thinking globally concretely, thoroughly and carefully. IR Professionals in an Age of Empire: From ‘International Experts’ to ‘Global Public Intellectuals’ One of the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush administration has been a significant constriction of a democratic public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive curtailment of intellectual and political dissent and a sharp delineation of national boundaries along with concentration of state power. The academy in this context has become a particularly embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts on academic freedom. At the most obvious level, this has involved fairly well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher education that have invoked the mantra of ‘liberal bias’ and demanded legislative regulation and reform10, an onslaught supported by a well-funded network of conservative think tanks, centres, institutes and ‘concerned citizen groups’ within and outside the higher education establishment11 and with considerable reach among sitting legislators, jurists and policy-makers as well as the media. But what has in part made possible the encroachment of such nationalist and statist agendas has been a larger history of the corporatisation of the university and the accompanying ‘professionalisation’ that goes with it. Expressing concern with ‘academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in the United States’, Herbert Reid has examined the ways in which the university is beginning to operate as another transnational corporation12, and critiqued the consolidation of a ‘culture of professionalism’ where academic bureaucrats engage in bureaucratic role-playing, minor academic turf battles mask the larger managerial power play on campuses and the increasing influence of a relatively autonomous administrative elite and the rise of insular ‘expert cultures’ have led to academics relinquishing their claims to public space and authority.13 While it is no surprise that the US academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the predicament of many contemporary institutions around the world, there is much reason for concern and an urgent need to rethink the role and place of intellectual labour in the democratic process. This is especially true for scholars of the global writing in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said has written extensively on the place of the academy as one of the few and increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured from the seductions of power.14 Defending the US academy as one of the last remaining utopian spaces, ‘the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today’15, and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many academic intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains that ‘the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged (intellectuals)’16. The most serious threat to the ‘intellectual vocation’, he argues, is ‘professionalism’ and mounts a pointed attack on the proliferation of ‘specializations’ and the ‘cult of expertise’ with their focus on ‘relatively narrow areas of knowledge’, ‘technical formalism’, ‘impersonal theories and methodologies’, and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by power.17 Said mentions in this context the funding of academic programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the Cold War18, an area in which there was considerable traffic of political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with institutions of policy-making. Looking at various influential US academics as ‘organic intellectuals’ involved in a dialectical relationship with foreign policy-makers and examining the institutional relationships at and among numerous think tanks and universities that create convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World both during and after the Cold War made possible and justified through various forms of ‘intellectual articulation’.19 This is not simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual orientation. It is not uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their scholarly conclusions in terms of its relevance for global politics, where ‘relevance’ is measured entirely in terms of policy wisdom. Edward Said’s searing indictment of US intellectuals – policy-experts and Middle East experts - in the context of the first Gulf War20 is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context preceding and following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this war has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic ‘for or against’ and ‘costs and benefits’ analysis can simply not be raised. In effect, what Said argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an understanding of ‘intellectual relevance’ that is larger and more worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical, historical, ethical and perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering of recipes and solutions, that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most fundamental and important senses of the vocation.21Alternative: 2NCWe need to embrace uncertainty---rejecting the will to secure the future is the only way to cultivate spaces for dissent against securitization.Eric Van Rythoven 19. PhD in Political Science from Carleton University. Journal of Global Security Studies and the International Studies Association and the Canadian Political Science Association. “The Securitization Dilemma.” . NCC2020The most important result of this reconstruction, however, may be in how taking the tragic element of the dilemma seriously reorders the political role of the analyst. Rather than assessing the validity of a particular security discourse, or exposing its socially constructed nature, this perspective asks the analyst to provoke reflexivity on behalf of power-holders over the risks associated with securitization. While this entails a bias toward deescalation and desecuritization, unlike other approaches this is not achieved through overt references to any liberal, democratic, or emancipatory ideal. Instead, it is packaged for power-holders as a strategy of self-preservation. Here, the analyst presents the move to securitize as a risk-laden and potentially self-defeating strategy. The analyst points to a series of precedents showing how such a strategy can produce perverse consequences: how today's tough talk can become tomorrow's liability; how audiences can interpret threatening messages in unexpected ways; and how today's framing of security can lead to perverse consequences tomorrow. By foregrounding the problem of uncertainty, the analyst works to accentuate and impress upon actors the dilemmatic quality of securitizing moves. Yet, the problem with presenting the move to securitize as a risk is that it may become accepted. Ironically, framing an escalation in enmity as possible but dangerous is precisely what may legitimize such a move in the eyes of risk-insensitive actors. This is Huysmans’ (2002) now familiar normative dilemma of writing security. The indeterminacy of language means that political actors may interpret advice in unpredictable ways. Frustratingly, this may include the precise opposite of the analyst's intention. This situation is likely inescapable, but it may be mitigated. What I suggest is that analysts should strive to cultivate a deeper subjectivity of risk sensitivity, comparable to Booth and Wheeler's security-dilemma sensibility, among political actors. Key to this argument is how visions of the future satisfy the human desire for certainty. As Berenskoetter argues, “visions depicting the self in an imagined future order serve as anxiety controlling mechanisms” (2011, 654). Visions of the future inoculate actors against the anxiety of uncertainty by providing a narrative of where they are going and how to get there. Indeed, normative debates on securitization are already loaded with such visions. The impulse to securitize is underpinned by a utopian future where the security frame can finally mobilize a response to an otherwise intractable problem. Conversely, the impulse to desecuritize is sustained by a dystopian future defined by unrestrained authoritarian politics. A tragic vision of the future does something different: it presents a future where the only thing we can know decisively is that it is indeterminate and attempts to conclusively control it are vulnerable to failure. The very recognition of fundamental limits on human freedom (Steele 2007, 281–82) becomes transformed into a source of ontological security. This tempers the human need for cognitive closure by reconfiguring it into what Herz understood as a “fundamentally humble posture toward the value and precariousness of life” (Sylvest 2008, 442). An actor with a greater sensitivity to indeterminacy may still pursue securitizing moves, but with a cautious awareness that they are volatile acts best pursued sparingly. The analyst does not simply educate political leaders by pointing to the indeterminacy of the world; she seeks to make political subjects more sensitive toward it by crafting visions of a precarious future. Finally, this tragic vision cannot, and should not, escape its own need for reflexivity. Its scholarly proponents need to engage in their own process of self-reflection, focusing on how their knowledge and interests are themselves historically situated. The ethic of restraint is a value, and not necessarily the value for all historical circumstances. A recognition of the social construction of security “facts” must be sobered by a recognition of the social construction of security “values” (Hamati-Ataya 2012, 685).Vote Neg to reject the aff and interrogate their assumption of securityNeocleous 8 – Mark Neocleous, PhD in Philosophy from Middlesex, MSc in Politics and Sociology from Birkbeck, BSc in Philosophy and Sociology from City, Critique of Security, p. 185-186 [language modified] NCC2020The 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-encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant 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 remoeves 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,"' 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."' 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 reaffirming 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 [ignore] 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 conception 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."' Security is closed minded---questioning the concept of “security” allows us to think of new possibilities.--- we aren’t ignoring the problem, we’re deliberating whether it’s a problem in the first place.Bruce 96 – Robert Bruce, Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Curtin University and Graeme Cheeseman, Senior Lecturer at New South Wales, Discourses of Danger & Dread Frontiers, p. 5-9 [language modified] NCC2020This goal is pursued in ways which are still unconventional in the intellectual milieu of international relations in Australia, even though they are gaining influence worldwide as traditional modes of theory and practice are rendered inadequate by global trends that defy comprehension, let alone policy. The inability to give meaning to global changes reflects partly the enclosed, elitist world of professional security analysts and bureaucratic experts, where entry is gained by learning and accepting to speak a particular, exclusionary language. The contributors to this book are familiar with the discourse, but accord no privileged place to its ‘knowledge form as reality’ in debates on defence and security. Indeed, they believe that debate will be furthered only through a long overdue critical re-evaluation of elite perspectives. Pluralistic, democratically-oriented perspectives on Australia’s identity are both required and essential if Australia’s thinking on defence and security is to be invigorated. This is not a conventional policy book; nor should it be, in the sense of offering policy-makers and their academic counterparts sets of neat alternative solutions, in familiar language and format, to problems they pose. This expectation is in itself a considerable part of the problem to be analysed. It is, however, a book about policy, one that questions how problems are framed by policy-makers. It challenges the proposition that irreducible bodies of real knowledge on defence and security exist independently of their ‘context in the world’, and it demonstrates how security policy is articulated authoritatively by the elite keepers of that knowledge, experts trained to recognize enduring, universal wisdom. All others, from this perspective, must accept such wisdom or remain outside the expert domain, tainted by their inability to comply with the ‘rightness’ of the official line. But it is precisely the official line, or at least its image of the world, that needs to be problematised. If the critic responds directly to the demand for policy alternatives, without addressing this image, [they are] he or she is tacitly endorsing it. Before engaging in the policy debate the critics need to reframe the basic terms of reference. This book, then, reflects and underlines the importance of Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said’s ‘critical intellectuals’.15 The demand, tacit or otherwise, that the policy-maker’s frame of reference be accepted as the only basis for discussion and analysis ignores a three thousand year old tradition commonly associated with Socrates and purportedly integral to the Western tradition of democratic dialogue. More immediately, it ignores post-seventeenth century democratic traditions which insist that a good society must have within it some way of critically assessing its knowledge and the decisions based upon that knowledge which impact upon citizens of such a society. This is a tradition with a slightly different connotation in contemporary liberal democracies which, during the Cold War, were proclaimed different and superior to the totalitarian enemy precisely because there were institutional checks and balances upon power. In short, one of the major differences between ‘open societies’ and their (closed) counterparts behind the Iron Curtain was that the former encouraged the critical testing of the knowledge and decisions of the powerful and assessing them against liberal democratic principles. The latter tolerated criticism only on rare and limited occasions. For some, this represented the triumph of rational-scientific methods of inquiry and techniques of falsification. For others, especially since positivism and rationalism have lost much of their allure, it meant that for society to become open and liberal, sectors of the population must be independent of the state and free to question its knowledge and power. Though we do not expect this position to be accepted by every reader, contributors to this book believe that critical dialogue is long overdue in Australia and needs to be listened to. For all its liberal democratic trappings, Australia’s security community continues to invoke closed monological narratives on defence and security. This book also questions the distinctions between policy practice and academic theory that inform conventional accounts of Australian security. One of its major concerns, particularly in chapters 1 and 2, is to illustrate how theory is integral to the practice of security analysis and policy prescription. The book also calls on policy-makers, academics and students of defence and security to think critically about what they are reading, writing and saying; to begin to ask, of their work and study, difficult and searching questions raised in other disciplines; to recognise, no matter how uncomfortable it feels, that what is involved in theory and practice is not the ability to identify a replacement for failed models, but a realisation that terms and concepts – state sovereignty, balance of power, security, and so on – are contested and problematic, and that the world is indeterminate, always becoming what is written about it. Critical analysis which shows how particular kinds of theoretical presumptions can effectively exclude vital areas of political life from analysis has direct practical implications for policy-makers, academics and citizens who face the daunting task of steering Australia through some potentially choppy international waters over the next few years. There is also much of interest in the chapters for those struggling to give meaning to a world where so much that has long been taken for granted now demands imaginative, incisive reappraisal. The contributors, too, have struggled to find meaning, often despairing at the terrible human costs of international violence. This is why readers will find no single, fully formed panacea for the world’s ills in general, or Australia’s security in particular. There are none. Every chapter, however, in its own way, offers something more than is found in orthodox literature, often by exposing ritualistic Cold War defence and security mind-sets that are dressed up as new thinking. Chapters 7 and 9, for example, present alternative ways of engaging in security and defence practice. Others (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8) seek to alert policy-makers, academics and students to alternative theoretical possibilities which might better serve an Australian community pursuing security and prosperity in an uncertain world. All chapters confront the policy community and its counterparts in the academy with a deep awareness of the intellectual and material constraints imposed by dominant traditions of realism, but they avoid dismissive and exclusionary terms which often in the past characterized exchanges between policy-makers and their critics. This is because, as noted earlier, attention needs to be paid to the words and the thought processes of those being criticized. A close reading of this kind draws attention to underlying assumptions, showing they need to be recognized and questioned. A sense of doubt (in place of confident certainty) is a necessary prelude to a genuine search for alternative policies. First comes an awareness of the need for new perspectives, then specific policies may follow. As Jim George argues in the following chapter, we need to look not so much at contending policies as they are made for us but at challenging ‘the discursive process which gives [favoured interpretations of “reality”] their meaning and which direct [Australia’s] policy/analytical/military responses’. This process is not restricted to the small, official defence and security establishment huddled around the US-Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It also encompasses much of Australia’s academic defence and security community located primarily though not exclusively within the Australian National University and the University College of the University of New South Wales. These discursive processes are examined in detail in subsequent chapters as authors attempt to make sense of a politics of exclusion and closure which exercises disciplinary power over Australia’s security community. They also question the discourse of ‘regional security’, ‘security cooperation’, ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘alliance politics’ that are central to Australia’s official and academic security agenda in the 1990s. This is seen as an important task especially when, as is revealed, the disciplines of International Relations and Strategic Studies are under challenge from critical and theoretical debates ranging across the social sciences and humanities; debates that are nowhere to be found in Australian defence and security studies. The chapters graphically illustrate how Australia’s public policies on defence and security are informed, underpinned and legitimised by a narrowly-based intellectual enterprise which draws strength from contested concepts of realism and liberalism, which in turn seek legitimacy through policy-making processes. Contributors ask whether Australia’s policy-makers and their academic advisors are unaware of broader intellectual debates, or resistant to them, or choose not to understand them, and why?Alternative: A2 “Pragmatism”The appeal to pragmatism obscures truly political thinking and sustains boomer political logic---we need to problematize typical policy debates as fundamentally depoliticizing Lindsey 12 – Jason Lindsey, PhD from Columbia University and Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at St. Cloud State University, Baudrillard’s Simulated Politics and Debord’s Agents of Detournement, Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 NCC2020For the political scientist, Baudrillard's work on simulation and the hyperreal is prescient. Politics in contemporary times seems very hollow when compared to the past. In democratic political systems debates on policy have given way to increasingly baroque ideological arguments. The "issues" that resonate the most with voters are generally symbolic or cultural disputes disconnected from economic management or social welfare. Scholarly evidence for this trend continues to accumulate. A good example is the work Lau and Heldman (2009) which builds on earlier research by Lau in (Sears, Lau, Tyler, and Allen (1980). From this perspective politics, at least in the most developed countries, increasingly resembles Baudrillard's interaction of simulacra.Before his death, Baudrillard frequently pointed out the ironies of contemporary politics. Consider his statement about the French vote on the EU’s Constitutional treaty in 2005: “The vote is fixed. If the ‘no’ side wins the day this time, they will make us vote again (as in Denmark and Ireland) until the ‘yes’ wins. We may as well vote yes right now” (Baudrillard, 2006). Here there is the sense that this is not what politics and a referendum are, but this is what they have come to be. In most of our political systems we see similar hints that something is not the way it was. What are the tangible differences between left and right wing administrations? Would a left or right government in France handle the EU differently? In the United States, Presidents as vastly different as Obama and Bush dealt with the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath with a continuity of policies. So when we vote, what are we doing? What are the actual options we are choosing between?Baudrillard’s perspective fits well with a growing commentary on the emptiness at the heart of contemporary politics. Zizek in his recent (2008) writing on violence points to the curious demands of young rioters in Paris’ banlieus in October 2005. That is, they did not seem to have any demands beyond the spasm of violence in which they engaged. A similar incoherence can be observed at anti globalization protests. People are angry and want to do something about it. However, they seem unable to coherently explain what it is that has them so angry. The spasms of violence that break out on the periphery of any large protest nowadays also points to a frustration with current politics. Most recently, we have seen the Occupy Wall Street protests successfully capture the attention of a very large audience. However, these protests failed to articulate a coherent political program. In his visit to the group camped out in New York, Zizek pointed out this shortcoming when he was invited to speak. As he put it, “We know what we do not want. But what do we want?” (Zizek, 2011).If there are no substantive policy differences between parties anymore, then, as Baudrillard would expect, we have to invent some. Witness the entire pop culture industry in the United States devoted to the mythology of Conservatives and Liberals. This industry now embraces books, television, radio, and the Internet, as well as satirical greeting cards in either flavor. Here again is the sense that these examples are not real politics. Instead, we have cultural products that seem to be the very definition of Baudrillard’s simulacra. But how do we know this?If all politics is just being played out within the hyperreal, that is, politics are just combinations of signs and simulacra, then why do we have a sense that this is not “real” politics? Why do referendums seem so empty to us? Why are we able to organize protests, but then have the sense that we failed to define a “real” concrete program? Furthermore are signs and simulacra powerful enough to inspire individuals to the point of political violence? Baudrillard would most likely argue that violence on the periphery of politics is not inspired by the interaction of simulacra. Instead, this violence represents a frustration and impatience with politics. For Baudrillard, the possibility of a contemporary, active politics is very slim. Thus, we should expect to see indifference or frustration. However, if that is the case, then how do we explain the motivation of some individuals for engaging in this empty politics to the point of extremism? To explain this tension, we should examine evidence of a politics capable of referencing something outside of other simulacra. A good pressure point for such an analysis is contemporary use of the modern political tactic of detournement as described by Debord and the situationists. Despite evidence for Baudrillard’s analysis of politics as simulation, the modern political tactic of detournement is still effective. If this is the case, then how can this be explained within Baudrillard’s larger analysis of our contemporary situation? II. Simulations and Detournement Recently, a colleague expressed some frustration to me when trying to talk to his students about Che Guevera. Although the students recognized his image, they had no clear idea who Che was. As Baudrillard and others would expect, they knew the image of Che from our consumer culture, but could not articulate who he was. Yet, they still knew his image was associated with subversive activities and radical politics. This sort of incident illustrates an important point about images; they are double edged. Since the image can be disconnected from its initial context, we have the possibility of DeBord and the Situationists' detournement. We can recycle and re cut the image (like the "culture jamming" of the Ad Busters) to create new messages [culture-jamming] that are communicable through the cultural terrain (see ). On the other hand, given Baudrillard’s description of our contemporary situation, how plausible is detournement since images are indeed detached? More concretely, how far removed can a given image be before it has lost both its "official" meaning and its reprogrammed "subversive" one? Does this problem indicate that we must consider the timing of detournement activities? Must we create the subversive use of the image while there is still a consciousness of the image's original intent? Furthermore, if there is an element of timing necessary for detournement, then we must consider the following sort of analysis. Why are some images more deeply ingrained with their initial intent? In turn, such deeper images may retain a possible subversive or detournement meaning for a longer period as well. If some images can be used for a longer period, then does this challenge Baudrillard's assertions that there is no meaning left beyond simulation? If there is no meaning behind the image, then why are some still useable in both "official" and "subversive" modes for a much longer period than others? Does the possibility of detournement mean that there is some truth to our sense of contemporary politics being a simulation of "real politics”? The ability of detournement to expose the real meaning behind advertising and other public statements suggests that we still possess an ability to understand the authentic when we see it. How else can one explain detournement's continuing effectiveness? Baudrillard indicates in his work Simulations that this is the wrong question to ask. According to Baudrillard: "We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space (which remains a moral hypothesis bound up with every classical analysis of the 'objective' essence of power), and hence the very abolition of the spectacular” (Baudrillard, 1983:54). Thus, Baudrillard thought that we had already entered (in the 1980's) a period later than the society of the spectacle that Debord describes in the 1960's. The idea of any remaining ground or foundation from which one could engage in Debord's neo Marxist analysis has already disappeared according to Baudrillard. From this perspective, there is no relationship or channel of manipulation to unmask. The relationship between media and us (the audience) has collapsed to the point that Baudrillard sees no space between the two. In, Simulations, Baudrillard speaks explicitly about television (Ibid.:55-58). Already in 1983 he is concerned that reality television meant that there was no longer a subject with perspective. So, to Baudrillard, Debord's analysis is already obsolete because we are no longer an audience to a spectacle but instead we are a part of simulation. Thus for Baudrillard, the real has been replaced by the hyperreal. However, if Baudrillard is correct, then shouldn't detournement become ineffective? If the distance needed for a relationship like Debord's spectacle has collapsed, then how could the dialectic of recuperation and detournement still be possible? For Baudrillard the answer would appear to be that Debord's concept is impossible. Anything that appears to us now as detournement is most likely a simulation of that process. Recuperation and detournement are collapsed categories just like every other possible anchor in the hyperreal. Indeed, Baudrillard seems borne out to some extent when we consider the efforts of companies and products to establish "street cred". These efforts range from advertising that engages in self-parody to the planting of grass roots reviews on websites. Thus, the idea of detournement, or perhaps we should say authentic, non-simulated detournement seems obsolete.Debord himself indicates that detournement relies on some sort of ground or context. Hence, his second law of detournement, "The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main impact of detournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements" (Debord and Wolman [1956] 2006). If Baudrillard is correct in his description of the hyperreal, then it is hard to see how this original context can survive. Yet, despite Baudrillard's criticism, there is evidence of Debord's dialectic functioning in contemporary culture. Writing in the late 1950's, Debord and Wolman argued that a growth in detournement would become visible in the arts through, "an increasingly extensive transformation of phrases or plastic works that happen to be in fashion" (Ibid.:3). This observation triggers several associations with contemporary culture such as the pervasive sampling that makes up current music, books that stitch together different cultural worlds, (such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) or television sitcoms such as The Office, which styles itself like a reality program. Furthermore, some images and pieces of culture retain enough meaning that they can easily be turned into a "subversive" mode. How is this possible unless there remains enough relationship and connection to areas outside of simulation?Perhaps Baudrillard could argue that these acts of resistance are simply wheels within wheels. The evidence we see of Debord's dialectic is simply the dramatic narrative of the simulation we know. With this interpretation, the hyperreal can retain the dramatic elements and themes of an earlier time, even though this is now unhinged from meaning. However, this solipsistic position ignores much evidence from contemporary culture.For example, we can see the dynamic of Debord's detournement and recuperation at work in several areas of contemporary, popular culture. Consider these recent manifestations of cultural recuperation: Motorcycles and motorcycle gang style- now co-opted into brand named superstores; punk rock and punk rock music- co-opted in the 1990's through grunge and alternative labels; or Goth subculture- co-opted both in popular television and movies and mainstream cosmetics that now feature Goth style colors in lipstick etc. Thus Debord's dynamic of detournement and recuperation seems to still be going strong Two intertwining poles of agency explain this dynamic’s motive force. The first pole (or it could be the second) of this dynamo are strategic, market calculations (recuperation revives failing street cred and hence sales). The second pole (though we might prefer that it be the first), are artistic imperatives (detournement carves out a space for creativity and, hence, originality). Yet, where is such agency to be found in Baudrillard's view?In Baudrillard's broader work the simulacra he describes appear to feed off of each other. Yet this view seems sorely lacking in human agency. In a classic, broad reflection on perception and memory Bergson states, "The function of the body is not to store up recollections, but simply to choose, in order to bring back to consciousness, by the real efficacy thus conferred on it, the useful memory, that which may complete and illuminate the present situation with a view to ultimate action" (Bergson, 1991:179). Indeed, if the goal of an actor within Debord's dialectic is action, then she chooses some images and symbols with purpose. This dimension of strategy and tactics is missing from Baudrillard's analysis because it is, again to him, the wrong perspective. In contrast, detournement is at its core for Debord, a tool or tactic of class struggle and for defeating the remains of modernism in the arts. Such a program or cause is obsolete to Baudrillard given his view of our contemporary situation. Another way to pose this difference between the two thinkers is to compare Debord's idea of the "spectacle" to Baudrillard's idea of "the system of objects". The chapter on advertising in Baudrillard's The System of Objects, brings out an important distinction between Baudrillard and Debord (Baudrillard, [1968] 1996:164-196). The discussion develops into an exploration of the mass psychology of advertising. Baudrillard argues that the rational claims made in advertising are not really believed by any of us. Instead, they provide a rationalization for purchases that we desire due to non-rational motivations. Baudrillard sees advertising as a surface phenomenon of the system of objects that we live within. The key difference between Baudrillard's description of this vast economic, political, and ideological system of consumption from Debord turns upon agency. Debord still sees the spectacle as a force that can be countered with tactics such as detournement. In contrast, Baudrillard sees the system of objects as a more pervasive whole into which we are psychologically integrated. The idea of individual agency leading to some sort of resistance begins to look in Baudrillard's conception like the rebelliousness of a child, rather than the acts of Debord's class conflict.So, where has this discussion taken us in thinking about politics and the simulation of politics? Debord and Wolman argue under the second law of detournement that it indeed requires a context but that this is, "only a particular case of a general law that governs not only detournement but also any other form of action in the world. The idea of pure absolute expression is dead" (Debord and Wolman [1956] 2006). Thus, for Debord this context can be as mythical, metaphysical, or ideological as its audience is capable of comprehending. Signs and simulacra in such a context suggest the stage of “sorcery” within Baudrillard's precession of simulacra. Could this be a good way of thinking about contemporary politics as a closed system of obscurantist meanings? From this perspective, detournement could still be alive in pockets of the hyperreal where individuals still participate within a bounded envelope of ideology. Within this context signs can profoundly refer to other signs for the initiated.On the other hand, how believable is the idea that contemporary politics is an obscurantist system for the initiated, since politics involves mass behavior? Can such a view explain the agency and motivation we still encounter among political entrepreneurs that emerge from the grassroots? How can we explain the efforts at detournement we still see in society from below, as well as successful examples of recuperation?III. Baudrillard, Debord, and Nostalgia A possible path of reconciliation between these two positions is to consider Baudrillard's discussion of nostalgia. Baudrillard discusses in several of his later writings the prevalence for nostalgia in contemporary culture. Furthermore, our recent visions of the future seem to be ones where individuals are looking back upon us. The most obvious versions of this nostalgia for Baudrillard are books and films where, in a post apocalyptic setting; the survivors walk around the debris of our contemporary world. In this sense there is a context in Baudrillard when he examines contemporary ideas of the future. The odd nostalgia he describes comes from us, human agents, trying to imagine the outcome of our contemporary actions. From this perspective, our unease is not due to the style or practice of contemporary politics, but to an underlying intuition about the failure of politics. Contemporary humanity faces the possibility of catastrophic risk. The shadow of ecological disaster is especially present in the minds of most of us.Nostalgia then is something we feel for what politics was. Perhaps detournement continues to work because many of us long for modern (as opposed to contemporary) politics with its clarity of class conflict and ideologies that revolved around the role of the free market. Thus, we still respond to detournement actions that reference this earlier context. Furthermore, many of us prefer to still practice and participate in politics bounded by this context. Yet, we suspect that this is simulation, not because it is "unreal" but because politics in this sense does not address the most urgent issues that should be political. Instead, with our politics locked into this modern context, the urgent issues of climate change, pollution, technological risk, and mass scale terrorism become topics for culture. Thus, we see the nostalgia for the "society that was", our current one, in literature and film with post apocalyptic themes.Nostalgia is also a defense or a coping mechanism. What agency do any of us possess within our contemporary context? Because we sense the futility of politics, as we know it within this contemporary setting, we retreat to behaving as if the old context, with its familiar categories and practices, still exists. Because we behave this way, it does continue to exist but at a cost. We soldier on within a modern politics that is increasingly detached from the constraints (ecological, economic, and biological) of our existence. This closed system of modern politics goes on in a ritualistic fashion, despite our growing frustration, and awareness, of its inability to address our common problems. Recent commentary that criticizes the whole idea of detournement and Baudrillard’s analysis reflects this desire for politics as it was. In their book, Nation of Rebels, Heath and Potter argue that Baudrillard and Debord have created a closed ideology (Heath and Potter, 2004). From this critical perspective, they argue that there is no system performing recuperation. Instead, by collapsing the categories of the political and the cultural, many on the left have fallen into a bottomless trap. They continue to try and create a counterculture that simply sells more lifestyle product, while failing to attend to “real” politics. Real politics being the incremental policy changes that create results as in the past.Is this a devastating critique? Or is this nostalgia for the politics that was? The examples Heath and Potter give of positive change, the American Civil Rights Movement, the construction of the welfare state, seem like a museum to us now. Is the context for such political activity still with us? Do we live in an era capable of producing such outcomes? Instead, politics in this sort of analysis begins to resemble religion in that we appeal to it and diligently perform our duties waiting for an intervention that does not come. Have we not performed our roles earnestly enough? Are we neglecting the rites of our fathers? Do we need to switch to another denomination? Should we blame the clergy? And of course some of us begin to have our doubts that any of it matters. From this perspective, the post apocalyptic nostalgia so prevalent in contemporary culture voices our lurking fears. In these movies and books, our lurking suspicion that contemporary politics fails to address the "real problem" is realized. This is also a reconciliation of Baudrillard and Debord. Detournement still works because we can access this past context. Indeed, we continue to blindly insist that this past social context is still our contemporary home. When our contemporary attempts at politics founder, because they must confront a very different world today, we try to evaluate their efficacy with this rubric from the past. Why are our governments unable to address the looming ecological crisis? Why don’t our political parties provide us with a range of public policies to choose from?What do these observations mean for thinking about politics? If Baudrillard and Debord are both accurate in their descriptions, then we seem to be in a moment of political stagnation. The tactics of Debord's detournement remain relevant because we continue to look backward to what politics were. These tactics are successful on one larger point, they temporarily expose our contemporary politics as a simulation of the modern form of politics that was. In this sense, practicing Debord's detournement is a useful activity, but only a first step leading to our contemporary time's pervasive nostalgia. The next step, taking Baudrillard's diagnosis seriously, and developing new forms of politics for our contemporary situation, is a greater challenge (see also Lindsey 2007). We need to embrace radical ideas and avoid trying to save our current system—this is the best way to find the root causes of our problemsJeff Shantz, Department of Criminology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, “In Defense of Radicalism,” RADICAL CRIMINOLOGY n. 2, 2013, , NCC2020In periods of rising mass struggles, the issue of radicalism is inevitably posed. It is in these times that a radical orientation breaks through the confines of hegemonic legitimation-posing new questions, better answers, and real alternatives. To oppose radicalism is to oppose thought itself. To oppose radicalism is to accept the terms set out by power, to limit oneself to that which power will allow. Anti-radicalism is inherently elitist and anti-democratic. It assumes that everyone, regardless of status, has access to channels of political and economic decision-making, and can participate in meaningful ways to address personal or collective needs. It overlooks the exclusion of vast segments of the population from decisions that most impact their lives and the unequal access to social resources that necessitate, that impel, radical changes. Activists, as well as sociologists and criminologists, must defend radicalism from below as the necessary orientation to struggle against injustice, exploitation, and oppression and for alternative social relations. Actions should be assessed not according to a legal moral framework provided by and reinforced by state capital (for their own benefit). Assessment should be made on real impacts in ending (or hastening the end of) injustice, exploitation, and oppression, on the weakening of state capital. As Martin Luther King suggested, a riot is simply the language of the unheard. Self-righteous moralizing and reference to legal authority, parroting the voices of state capital, is an abdication of social responsibility for activists. For sociologists and criminologists it is an abandonment of the sociological imagination which in its emphasis on getting to the roots of issues has always been radical (in the non-hegemonic sense). Critical thinkers and actors of all stripes must defend this radicalism. They must become radicals themselves. Debates should focus on the effectiveness of perspectives and practices in getting to the roots of social problems, of uprooting power. They should not center on fidelity to the law or bourgeois morality. They should not be constrained by the lack of imagination of participants or by the sense that the best of all worlds is the world that power has proposed. Again, radicalism is not a tactic, an act, an event. It is not a matter of extremes, in a world that takes horrifying extremes for granted. It is an orientation to the world. The features of radicalism are determined by, and in, specific contexts. This is the case now in the context of mass mobilizations, even popular uprisings against statist austerity offensives in the service of neoliberal capitalism. Radicalism always threatens to overflow attempts to contain it. It is because it advances understanding-poses social injustice in stark relief-that it is by nature re/productive. It is, in current terms, viral.Permutation AnswersThe perm still implicates us with security logic which make doing the alt impossibleLacy 14 – Dr. Mark Lacy, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, Security, Technology, and Global Politics, p. 43 NCC2020 What I think Virilio is pointing to here is this: global media technologies can 'hook' people into a democracy of emotion - that could involve sadness, love and hate - that can be very difficult to resist and easy to manipulate. Just as people across the planet can consume the same products at the same time so people are consumed by the same emotions or affects, emotions that 'capture' us. Nigel Thrift suggests that Virilio presents a rather narrow view of emotion and politics, developing a view that plays down the ways in which emotions can playa 'vital part of political citizenship and communication', noting that emotion 'cannot be caricatured as likely to diminish a full consideration of an intended action or as likely to provoke action without thought'.43 What I think Virilio is suggesting is that while emotion can be used to expand our political and social imaginations there is a danger that contemporary society is dominated by environments (or media ecologies) of fear and panic that reduce politics to simplistic desires for protection and security (something that the Right have been particularly effective at manipulating in the United States44). And the environment of panic and anxiety 'captures' us even where we can be aware that we are caught up in the 'administration of fear': the ubiquity of the vectors means that it can be difficult to escape the synchronization of affects. The plan may decreases commitments BUT gets there by using securitizing logic which locks in futures wars and makes them inevitable Ivie, Prof of American Studies @ Indiana University, 11 (Robert, “Obama at West Point: A Study in Ambiguity of Purpose,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs Volume 14, Number 4, Project Muse) NCC2020Obama maneuvered at West Point to delimit U.S. war objectives and reduce American responsibility for stabilizing Afghanistan. Transitioning out of Afghanistan in the foreseeable future, by means of a relatively brief military surge and short of an overt withdrawal, was rhetorically segueing from an open-ended war on terrorism to a greater emphasis on diplomacy and more "restraint in the use of military force,"21 not only in Afghanistan [End Page 729] (and Iraq, where the United States was already withdrawing forces designated as "combat" troops) but in the world at large. It was a rhetorical turn to align American values with a more balanced sense of national purpose in which Afghanistan would no longer appear to stand as the glaring exception to Obama's larger foreign-policy vision. This rhetorical undertaking to realign national values with a more balanced and circumscribed foreign policy, as one factor in the political complex, was a gesture of adaptation to the dynamic of global power relations. The underlying tension associated with America's diminishing stature as the world's sole superpower was manifest in U.S. public opinion polls showing, for example, that the general public increasingly viewed the United States as a less important world leader and saw China as an ascending world power and economic force.22 Adjusting to these perceived new realities risked serious displacements, such as the likely negative consequences of curtailing the U.S. commitment to a still-unstable Afghanistan.23 Obama's rhetorical construction of a transition out of Afghanistan was therefore especially challenged to render the adjustment plausible enough in the short run to supplant in the long run a still-potent notion of national security premised on a quest for global supremacy. Toward this end, the myth of American Exceptionalism remained part of the rhetorical mix,24 but in a revised form ameliorated by an ethic of pragmatism expressed in a culturally resonant theme of reasoned and balanced self-interest. This posture of rhetorical prudence marked the new president's departure from the previous president's rhetorical crusade.25 As an exercise in prudence, Obama's rhetoric tenuously reconceptualized the war on terrorism. Rather than overtly abandon the war metaphor, which had authorized extreme measures (of torture, militarism, unilateralism, and state building) to defend America from terrorist acts, Obama transposed war into a "struggle against extremism" in which the United States would "exercise restraint" in its goals and its means in order to restore the "balance" that had been lost in recent years and conform again to the lasting values that gave America moral authority in an "interconnected world."26 Circumscribed rather than open-ended, temperate rather than extreme, Obama's characterization of the conflict as a "struggle" positioned it semantically in the category of contention and strife—one step up from discord but also a step down from warfare. Such moderated action called for moderated agency, for a "partnership" of "mutual respect" that would "transfer" a corresponding measure of [End Page 730] "responsibility" from the United States to its Afghan associates instead of presuming the condescending position of "patron."27 This was the ambivalent rhetorical attitude of Obama's "new strategy" for Afghanistan, his prescription for "passing through a time of great trial" in which "a successful conclusion" was a passage, not a triumph.28 Privileging process over outcome suggested ending a war rather than achieving a definitive victory.29 The president's formulation of the transition was sufficiently ambiguous to be interpreted variously and to afford a degree of tactical flexibility.30 Just as the ambiguity of Obama's position could be interpreted either as a misguided escalation of the war in Afghanistan or as a lack of sufficient commitment to stay the course of a long war, or even as a muddled attempt at compromise, the flexibility of his rhetoric could allow for making political adjustments to shifting circumstances.31 He could decide, for instance, after "taking into account conditions on the ground," that the goal of "begin[ning] the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011" must be reduced to a symbolic trickle or even deferred.32 Alternatively, he could choose at that same point to move ahead as planned, consistent with his trademark theme of change, even if enemy resistance were not abated, given America's now scaled-down responsibilities and abridged aims in Afghanistan where "the days of providing a blank check are over."33 Even the motif of hope, Obama's other rhetorical mainstay, was circumscribed by a language of transition. Hope—signifying faith, unity of purpose, and optimism over cynicism, rancor, fear, and despair—was framed within the speech as part of a process of becoming, rather than a state of ideal being. A prudent hope in the struggle against extremism would avoid "an endless war in Afghanistan" by balancing a "nimble and precise" use of military power with a renewed commitment to diplomacy within bounded limits of "our responsibility, our means, or our interests."34 To the extent that hope was a process of moving forward, it meant moving beyond extremism of any kind, avoiding especially the extreme of militarism, to manage a complex ecosphere of political and economic relations. There would be no end of history in Obama's scheme of things, insofar as the West Point speech was concerned. His "better future" was to be a dynamic act of weighing resources and balancing commitments in a continuous struggle against extremism to provide for a relatively "safer" world.35 [End Page 731] Progressive Form in Limbo In Kenneth Burke's "dramatistic" sense of symbolic action, understood as "any use of symbol systems in general," Obama was engaged rhetorically in "the dancing of an attitude," which was an "incipient act," a predisposition toward a certain kind and quality of action over another, a "terministic screen" that channeled attention and shaped interpretation.36 The "strategic ambiguity" of Obama's ambivalence finessed rather than debunked the prevailing attitude toward terrorism, consistent with Burke's observation that in such cases "one introduces new principles while theoretically remaining faithful to old principles" of interpretation.37 The articulation of a revised way of seeing the struggle in Afghanistan was requisite to, but not the same as, changing the actual conduct of foreign policy—at least not immediately, if ever. As a case in point, within a different venue of political action, the Associated Press reported that, although presidential candidate Obama campaigned on the premise that the war on drugs at the border with Mexico had failed and that "drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue," President Obama's drug-war budget remained "essentially the same as [former President] Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention." Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, insisted that "nothing happens overnight"; it would take time for funding to catch up to rhetoric.38 Attitude was embryonic action—nothing more and nothing less—the shaping of which was the role of Obama's political rhetoric. An attitude of incremental transition reflected Obama's sense of political time and his corresponding strategy of change. Thus, as he stated repeatedly five months after West Point, the "transformation" of Afghanistan would not "happen overnight"; to "execute a transition" was "going to be taking some time."39 Yet, advancing an attitude of transition in Afghanistan and against extremism in foreign affairs more generally was a difficult undertaking because of its vague purpose. A balanced attitude, while prudent, lacked a clear and compelling sense of direction and carried an overtone of slippage in world standing—of falling back rather than moving forward. It was easier to understand what the country was being encouraged to transition from than to grasp the continuous process of adaptation it was being invited to endorse. There had been something definitive and compelling after 9/11 about taking a heroic stand against evil, just as there could be clarity at least [End Page 732] in outright withdrawal from a misadventure. Obama's nuanced West Point rhetoric lacked both a sense of heroism and the quality of clarity, especially as the earlier contrast to an out-of-favor foreign policy faded with George W. Bush's departure from office. In attempting to circumvent the dilemma of Afghanistan, the president seemingly stumbled over the crucial matter of advancing a positive conception of peace as a guiding sense of purpose. As a consideration of rhetorical form, Obama's theme of transition implied a progression of thought captured in Burke's three-part question: "from what through what to what"?40 Such a development, as a function of the psychology of form, was required to fulfill the expectations created by the speech itself, the presence of one premise or quality preparing the way, more or less subtly, for the emergence of another.41 In Burke's words, "A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence."42 A gratifying sequence of moving from a negative critique of belligerence through a prudent balancing of responsibilities and resources would then lead to a positive promise of peace. In Obama's West Point address, however, the prospect of peace seemed obscure at best. Without hope for peace there would be insufficient warrant, at least at the level of rhetorical form, for undertaking the process of change. The function of rhetorical form, in Burke's theory of symbolic action, is realistic and substantive, not epiphenomenal. Form is a source of social and political cohesion, or "stylistic identification," wherein those who are addressed become consubstantial by sharing conceptions, images, and sensations through the gratifying patterns of formal devices such as antithesis, similitude, and gradatio or climax.43 When a key pattern is disrupted or left unfinished, its ideational and attitudinal development is disordered and discounted. Thus, to announce a departure is to anticipate a destination; one does not undertake a journey without a destination or engage in an endless transition without the whole matter seeming pointless. "A critical element of the journey metaphor," James Darsey explained, "the element that distinguishes the journey from mere movement, is purpose. . . . [J]ourneys have a direction and a destination."44 The process of transformation, Burke observed, is "a development from one order of motives to another" by the completion of forms such as a crossing followed by a return, an exile by a homecoming, a movement inward by a movement outward, something lost by something found, and so on.45 As a form of transformation, Obama's central theme of transition was underdeveloped and incomplete and thus a potential source of frustration [End Page 733] as well as, perhaps more importantly, a sign of conflicted motivation. What little indication there was of journey's end was nearly imperceptible and, for the most part, went unremarked. The ultimate destination to which the president would "navigate the momentous challenges of our time" remained shrouded in frequent references to interim goals, such as creating "conditions for a transition," bringing about "a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan," increasing "the stability and capacity of our partners in the region," "disrupt[ing], dismantle[ing], and defeat[ing] al Qaeda and its extremist allies" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and avoiding "an endless war in Afghanistan." Perhaps under the moderating influence of political realism,46 these intermediate objectives served as means to the deliberately vague and mostly restricted, sometimes even circuitous, aims of meeting "the challenges of a new age," securing "our interests," fighting for "a better future," competing "in this century as successfully as we did in the last," or continuing the "noble struggle for freedom."47 America would seek enhanced security, resist oppression, spread hope abroad, rebuild its economy at home, and exercise leadership short of world domination. The list was a familiar but restrained iteration of America's "special burden in global affairs,"48 not an amplification of guiding purpose sufficient to establish a rhetorically satisfying transformation from dependency "on military might alone"49 to a just peace. The closest Obama got at West Point, where he spoke as Commander in Chief, to suggesting a progression toward a just peace was in passing reference to "breaking a cycle of conflict" with the Muslim world and seeking "a future in which those who kill innocents are isolated by those who stand up for peace and prosperity and human dignity."50 In short, the unanswered question of peace, implied by the president's progressive form and pivotal theme of transition, haunted the West Point address. What kind of peace might reasonably be anticipated if America no longer acted the part of the world's one essential nation and abandoned military force as its principal instrument of national security to rely more heavily on diplomacy? What degree of leadership could the United States expect to exercise in partnership with other countries in an interconnected and interdependent world? What are the long-term prospects of a country that must trim its aspirations and commitments to keep them in balance with its limited resources? And what about the immediate threat of terrorism? How would more moderate measures adopted by the United States transform the extremism of others? This was the unmet rhetorical burden of the speech. Much of the frustration expressed by critics of the speech corresponded [End Page 734] to this unexplained and unfulfilled expectation of pursuing peace. Some conservative critics, such as Senator John McCain, understood that the speech signaled a departure from Afghanistan and a retreat from an open-ended, all-out war on terrorism, complaining that "the way that you win wars is to break the enemy's will, not to announce dates that you are leaving."51 The aim of Obama's rhetorical transition was to end the war for the United States rather than to win it, and the point of the military surge was to shift responsibility for the fighting from the United States to Afghanistan. It was a kind of Afghanization, except in name, that suggested a troublesome comparison to the quagmire of Vietnam and the prospect of another lost war.52 The transition, seen from this perspective, signaled a negative choice between victory and defeat, not a positive movement from war through victory to peace. From the perspective of progressive critics, Obama's "escalation speech" was a "lousy speech" that "had none of the power, the lyricism, the passion for history, the capacity to engage and to persuade virtually every listener, even those who may ultimately disagree, that have characterized the president's earlier addresses."53 It lacked optimism and vision. There was no way, Phyllis Bennis observed, that Obama would now be able to portray his actions in Afghanistan as a "commitment to global peace." He had betrayed the spirit of his soon-to-be-awarded Nobel Peace Prize and broken faith with the "extraordinary mobilization of people" who had swept him into office as an "anti-war" candidate.54 Even though Obama spoke as if he did not want to be known as a "war president,"55 which critics to the political right rued, critics on his left heard nothing in the speech sounding like a transition out of the present framework of war and toward a positive conception of peace.56 The rhetorical obscurity of the president's ultimate goal left the nation in political limbo with only a vague promise of deliverance insinuated by the underlying progressive form of his West Point address. If language is sermonic, as Richard Weaver maintained,57 the president's sermon at West Point provoked an unfilled wish for salvation, while ignoring key questions about the future of peace and glossing over unresolved problems in Afghanistan. Thus, as Bennis observed, much was missing from the speech. By her reckoning, Obama left out any "reference to finishing transfer of all troops out of Afghanistan and ending the occupation," offered no explanation of how the continuing war would be paid for, merely "assumed Afghan support for the U.S. occupation" despite evidence to the contrary, ignored "increasingly visible opposition to the Karzai government," made no reference to the disposition of "the U.S.-paid [End Page 735] mercenaries . . . in Afghanistan" who numbered in excess of 100,000, made no mention of "the need for a broad regional diplomatic strategy," and more.58 Michael Cohen added that, by disregarding the "incoherence" of the "current military strategy," while leaving unspoken the "obstacles to waging an effective counter-insurgency," Obama risked a "military quagmire" in Afghanistan.59 Indeed, the Vietnam analogy troubled the West Point address, compelling a disclaimer from Obama that revealed the weight of its discomforting presence.60 One paragraph two-thirds of the way into the speech—139 tormented words—showed a president seemingly bound conceptually to the very likeness between then and now, a likeness he wished to disavow. The argument that Afghanistan was another endless Vietnam depended on "a false reading of history," he asserted.61 False or not, the ubiquitous comparison engendered a basic conflict between staying longer without a practical prospect of victory and leaving sooner in a tacit admission of defeat. Since abandoning Afghanistan would "create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies," Obama insisted, the United States must stay in Afghanistan long enough to see it "stabilized."62 Yet, his announced timeline of 18 months for beginning to withdraw military forces from Afghanistan was shorter than any likely estimate of how long it would take to stabilize such a war-torn country, if it could be stabilized at all.63 The contradiction of adopting half measures in destabilized Afghanistan to quell an unacceptable risk to the U.S. homeland could be finessed only by fudging the meaning of the term "stabilize." His gamble was that within 18 months he might plausibly claim that the temporary swell of U.S. military forces had broken the momentum of the Taliban and al Qaeda resurgence enough to begin turning over lead responsibility for the fight to the Afghans. Obama's rhetorical hedge obscured the contradiction and muddled the gamble with a three-pronged contention that, unlike Vietnam, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was prompted by a vicious attack "from Afghanistan," legitimized by "a broad coalition of 43 nations," and not resisted by "a broad-based popular insurgency."64 In short, this American war was necessary, just, and winnable (by Afghans with reduced American assistance). Although subject to dispute and interpretation, the mere assertion of these differences served largely as a diversion from the otherwise evident resilience of the Taliban insurgency and al Qaeda resistance to U.S. occupation, which was the real basis of the worrisome comparison to Vietnam.65 These were three differences that seemingly did not make a difference except as cover for the president's attempted maneuver around the paradox of ending U.S. military [End Page 736] involvement in a persistent war that supposedly was crucial to national defense. They served less to debunk any important resemblance to Vietnam than to obfuscate the fact that the riddle of the Afghan quagmire remained unsolved, except perhaps by a rhetorical sleight of hand. Afghanization, like the ruse of Vietnamization, was a pretext of bringing the war to a responsible end. Thus, it fell short of the promise, embedded in the progressive form of the West Point address, to transition from war and beyond extremism to a prudential peace. Just Peace The overall import of the president's strategic ambiguity was to postpone a final decision on Afghanistan while putting in motion a process with uncertain purpose. The speech was of insufficient vision to constitute a new foreign policy, but it insinuated change in an oblique departure from reliance on military force as the cornerstone of American foreign relations. It followed upon candidate Obama's campaign promise of "a fundamental change" in foreign policy at "a time of great uncertainty for America," a "change of course" from "the failed policies of the last eight years," a "new direction" that "focuses on the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and restores strong alliances and tough American diplomacy."66 Just as at West Point, candidate Obama had spoken on the campaign trail in favor of balancing foreign policy goals and security measures with economic constraints and bringing the war in Iraq to "a responsible end," but at West Point President Obama was no longer talking so clearly about sending "more troops and more resources to win the war in Afghanistan."67 The new strategy he announced was intended to narrow U.S. responsibilities, clarify the mission, temporarily increase troop presence in order to transition U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, and transfer responsibility for the fighting to the Afghans so that the war could be brought to a responsible conclusion, whatever that might mean. Although ambiguity of purpose afforded the president a measure of tactical adaptability over the treacherous course of the planned transition, it left the speech curiously deficient in its formal progression, which confused the reception of his stance on Afghanistan. Whatever attitude toward peace building the president might have held, it could not be clearly discerned by examining the West Point speech in isolation from related speeches, such as his address to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4, 2009, his speech to the [End Page 737] United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2009, and his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway on December 10, 2009. In these texts, two of which preceded and one of which followed the West Point address, the kind of peace Obama professed and toward which his rhetorical transition might be inclined was made evident. President Obama spoke in these places as a prudent visionary patiently seeking true peace. His quest for a just peace was prophetic, incremental, and oblique.68 There was "no force in the world more powerful than the example of America," he had previously told a joint session of Congress in late February. "In our hands lies the ability to shape our world for good or for ill," he professed. "As we stand at this crossroads of history, the eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us—watching to see what we do with this moment; waiting for us to lead."69 This sacred mission required America to use the full range of its exceptional power, not only its military force, and to remain true to its values in pursuit of a secure and lasting peace. In Cairo, the president acknowledged the deep historical roots of the present "tension between the United States and Muslims around the world," but invoked "God's vision" that "the people of the world can live together in peace." He professed that "our work here on Earth" was to attain "God's peace." Together, he insisted, the people of all religions "have the power to make the world we seek"—a world guided by the sacred command to "do unto others as we would have them do unto us."70 Religion was a healing vision of peacemaking, not a noxious call to arms. Speaking to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Obama expressed his confidence that "conflicts can end and a new day can begin," declaring that he would "not waver" in his "pursuit of peace."71 In Oslo, recognizing both "the imperfections of man" and the "imperatives of a just peace," which made the "human folly" of war "sometimes necessary" but always "tragic" and "never glorious," he envisioned "a gradual evolution of human institutions" and the "continued expansion of our moral imagination," rather than "a sudden revolution in human nature," on the road to a "just peace." This was "the story of human progress," of reaching "for the world that ought to be—that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls."72 Where George W. Bush's rhetoric of evil had appropriated religion to a ritual of redemptive violence,73 Obama's rhetorical quest would draw upon religion to reconcile differences, seek common ground, and recognize a common humanity in an interdependent world to remake the world in the [End Page 738] image of just peace—gradually.74 The "hard truth" was that "we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes," but "faith" was humanity's "moral compass" in a continuing evolution toward a "more practical, more attainable peace."75 Obama envisioned a just peace that was "the North Star" of humanity's "journey."76 This "true peace," which was not the "hollow promise" of peace or the mere "absence of visible conflict," would require incremental change along several dimensions of human endeavor, including "painstaking diplomacy," the development of positive "incentives" and real "sanctions" to reduce the resort to military force, the protection of "civil and political rights," respect for "human rights and dignity," provision for "economic security and opportunity," and development of a stronger sense of human solidarity and an abiding respect for "particular identities."77 This was the vision of positive peace toward which the president would have humanity advance "over time"78 and perhaps the ultimate goal implied in the otherwise unfulfilled rhetorical progression of his West Point address. Yet, the Cairo, United Nations, and Oslo texts contained no overt cues to interpret the West Point address as part of a larger progression toward peace. Moreover, Obama said little to nothing about the ultimate goal of just peace in his joint press appearance with Afghan President Karzai five months after West Point. He mentioned only in passing goals such as transitioning responsibility to the Afghans, improving governance, and developing economic capacity "to reduce the influence of extremists" in Afghanistan in order to "achieve peace and stability and security there."79 In the Cairo address, Obama insisted that no one should tolerate extremists in Afghanistan, for "their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam."80 In the United Nations address, despite his commitment to promoting peace, he insisted that the United States would "permit no safe haven for al Qaeda."81 And in the Oslo address all references to the fight in Afghanistan rendered it an exception to the very "law of love" that guides humanity's journey toward a just peace, for "evil does exist in the world," Obama insisted, and "negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms." America faced a "vicious adversary" in Afghanistan, he continued, "that abides by no rules" and that exploits a "warped view of religion . . . incompatible with the concept of peace."82 The substantive issue of Obama's rhetorical form remained unresolved, leaving the president attitudinally positioned to fight a more limited war in Afghanistan over a shortened (or prolonged) period of time, depending on circumstances. His rhetoric of transition was minimally inclined to transform [End Page 739] the very mindset of just war. It progressed too little toward peace to escape the paradigm of war or to shift to a focus on peace building. In Oslo he actually affirmed just war while accepting the peace prize. Thus, the notion of a just peace remained a dream at best and a fantasy, dissociated from reality, at worst. In Obama's words, despite "the moral force of non-violence," I must "face the world as it is."83 God's peace was not meant for this world, at least not in the foreseeable future. For the meantime, continuous war would remain the American way of life and death.84Attempting to rehabilitate security remains locked within its terms---attempting to redefine one example of a violent political order actively prevents resisting its very foundationChris 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 # NCC2020The 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.The affirmative cannot pretend It’s justifications for action don’t exist—how they describe the world shapes how we understand and act within itRoxanne Lynn Doty 96, Assistant Professor, Political Science, Arizona State University, IMPERIAL ENCOUNTERS: THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION IN NORTH-SOUTH RELATIONS,, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 5-6. NCC2020This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power. LinksLink: China ThreatThe representation of China as a dangerous country when acting outside U.S. influence sustains U.S. Exceptionalism and the idea that America is superior to ChinaTurner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 14 (Oliver, “American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy” 165-168) NCC2020Finally, twenty-first-century Opportunity China additionally remains a relatively prominent and powerful construction of American design. Sino-US trade relations are now more significant than at any point in their history, not least because China’s economy is now the second largest in the world9 This is a crucial clement of modern-day Chinese—American relations. Nonetheless, particular ideas of which Chinas economy is constituted are still inextricable from its significance to American policy. To reassert, the economic practices of states are interpretable not merely through the calculated significance of material gain. hut through examination of the ideas which give those gains meaning.9 In the 1950s Washington had maintained an embargo on China despite its international trade activities expanding The military sales embargo of the present day, examined briefly in Chapter 5, further demonstrates that while potential economic opportunities with China exist, their interpretation as opportunities is contingent upon discourse and representation. As Shaun Breslin observes, China is likely to encounter foreign (especially Western) pressure to liberalize its economy into the foreseeable future.9 Nonetheless, the boundaries of political performance are now far more accommodating of China’s membership to the imagined family of civilized nations. In 2000. For example. China was granted Permanent Normal ‘trade Relations (PNTR, the equivalent of permanent MFN status) with the United States. Like Bush. Clinton revealed that Opportunity China was still an imaginative geography expected to conform to the ideals of American identity. ‘Economically,’ he argued, ‘this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets in unprecedented new ways’.98 In 2001 China was granted membership to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Throughout the Cold War the PRC had been marginalized from the most powerful international institutions, hut this was now a possibility accepted by the regulatory processes nl’ American discourse. The American press. for example. broadly supported China’s WTO entry: ‘The news of |the| agreement is worth celebrating’, noted the Wall Street Journal after China had been granted PN’I’R. establishing the basis for WTO membership. As ever. then. the endurance of Opportunity China stems from the expectation that it conforms to American ideals of international trade Its significance to US China policy has always been that it works to legitimize actions aimed at facilitating this goal This was reaffirmed in 2008 by President Bush, who asserted that ‘the key to ensuring that all sides benefit is insisting that China adhere to the rules of the international economic system.’ As noted earlier in this chapter. these rules are consistently broken. The widespread use of tariffs, trade barriers and other protectionist measures by the United States, the EU and countless other state actors illustrates the imaginary existence of these rules as building blocks of a purely fictional “civilized” and orderly system. As the supposed defender of the rules and still the most powerful international actor, not least in the dissemination of information and knowledge, the United States can attribute their abuse to others for selected reasons. Once again, China may indeed be guilty of rule infractions, yet it is one perpetrator among many, and as an imaginative geography of subjective design can be an opportunity only when others — most notably the United States — deem it to be so. To recap. Chapter 5 interrogated societal American images of China and its people throughout the modern age. The purpose of this chapter has been to similarly explore contemporary American perceptions and interpretations of China. hut with a keener focus upon the presidency of Barack Obama. It began by outlining China’s presence within the election contest of 2008. Obama’s rhetoric towards Beijing softened after securing the presidency, in further affirmation of China’s continuing existence as an imaginative geography whose identity is not simply there to sec, hut is discursively manufactured and controlled. It then showed that while American politicians may adopt varying positions on China as a result of their contrasting ideologies, their underlying concern is still for a country and people which to some extent constitutes a problem to be resolved. It was argued that this is inextricably tied to modern-day representations of a ‘rising’ China which, rather than merely a description of a rapidly developing state, carries powerful connotations of a non-Western challenger to a US-led global status quo. The chapter then briefly examined some of the imagery of China generated by the 2012 presidential elections, and in particular that which followed traditional patterns of opposition candidates criticizing US China policy and portraying the PRC in broadly negative terms. It also showed how China’s representation as a manipulator of its currency and a principal offender in the realm of ‘cyber warfare’ simultaneously confirms the United Stales as the defender of the rules of the international system despite it (and many other others) being guilty of identical crimes’. Like so many times in the past, American discourse and image utilises inconsistency and contradiction to sustain the accepted binary opposites of a good/civilised United States in comparison with a bad/uncivilised China ‘the chapter explored how understandings of a ‘rising’ China, tied inexorably to imagery of Threatening China are working to enable the implementation of Obama’s so-called pivot’ towards the Asia Pacific, as well as how the discourses of the pivot’ itself sustain and reinforce the ideas on which it is grounded. Finally, this chapter has demonstrated how the four highly stable and enduring constructions of Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China continue to the reproduced throughout American society today. In the modem information age they co—exist perhaps more prominently than ever. Each has evolved and modified over time but, in many ways. they retain the basic foundations upon which they were first established. Perhaps most importantly, the chapter has shown that these constructions are still actively complicit in the creation of realities in which American foreign policy towards China can he enabled and legitimized. As ever, the most powerful representations of China can be used to best explain how that policy is made possible. Moreover, they allow an interrogation of how US China policy itself serves in the production and reproduction of imagery so that China’s foreignness from the United States can be perpetually reaffirmed.Link: Extinction FocusThis makes global war, Global warming, and massive structural violence inevitable and results in a new form of colonization that destroys value to life---their harms and solvency are bad and rely on oversimplified understandings of the worldMark Lacy 15, Lancaster IR professor, Security, Technology, and Global Politics, p. 8-10 NCC2020For Virilio, attempts to contain the insecurity of geopolitics through improved global governance, 'free markets' and the liberal peace might transform security and war around the world, creating a world of perpetual peace and prosperity. The global economy - coupled with the acceleration of technology - might generate harmonious and creative societies where the unpleasant jobs have been replaced by machines and where there is a growing consensus that we need to accelerate and intensify distributive justice around the planet. Technology will not only improve our health and security - it will foster a cosmopolitan society built on the information technologies that expand the possibilities for dialogue. The war game will become the peace game that aids the improvement of the human condition.Virilio isn't so sure about the optimistic liberal view of history. For Virilio, we are surrounded by the 'propaganda of an endless progress', the promise of a world where technology and capitalism will overcome the problems and suffering that have blighted the human condition; the 'propaganda of progress' is the vision of the future one often finds in corporate depictions of the future that illustrate how new products will transform life, creating an existence where a multitude of technologies are effortlessly integrated into everyday life to create more rewarding and efficient work and relationships.27 Virilio is less certain that technology and capitalism will improve the human condition, asking us to pay attention to what lies underneath this propaganda of progress in the world around us - in the stress, suffering, paranoia, control, exhaustion and inequality that he thinks might intensify in coming decades. Progress (and the peace game), on this view, is a progress in the arts and technologies of control designed to manage the growing numbers of the 'living dead' that are excluded from the 'legitimate' economy, to control those that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in 'network' society. As we see later, for Virilio the peace game is the war game turned inward, toward what he calls the endo-colonization of society, the attempt to control the constantly mutating terrains of security in the post-Cold War world. The other side ofthe 'propaganda of an endless progress' is the 'administration of fear': Virilio suggests that we need to pay attention to the way fear (usually fear of otherness and difference) is used to distort debate over the problems we confront (so, for example, when fear of immigrants is presented as the cause of our economic woes and societal implosion - and the route to further disorder). For Virilio, we need to negotiate our way through both the propaganda of progress and the administration of fear, to pay attention to the way we can be captured by these 'easy' modes of responding to the world around us, to be constantly aware of these two very different traps. 9Our world might be heading toward the realization of the liberal dream of progress but Virilio looks around and sees a world of accelerating ecological, economic and social degradation; politics becomes an increasingly narrow attempt to manage the insecurity and messiness in societies intent on realizing the dream of a fast and efficient consumer lifestyle. On this view, the politics of security that promises to control the messiness has a tendency to get out of control, nourishing the 'war-machine' and the 'military scientific complex', producing misguided security projects that generate chaos in the realization of policies that are often driven by fear, technological optimism about what technology and war can achieve, and a sense of cultural and racial superiority. 28We might believe that we will learn from our mistakes (such as the wars that have dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century after 9111) but that is to become caught up with the 'propaganda of endless progress'. There is an excess to security that results in 'unnecessary wars' that become experimental zones for new technologies - and there is desire to control all aspects of life in increasingly intensive and extensive ways that risks to undermine civil liberties, tipping the balance of liberty and security toward the endo-colonization of society; an excessive focus on the problems of 'otherness' to the exclusion of the insecurity that comes from inside, from our financial systems or modes of consumption.Military and political elites get caught up in the seductive possibilities offered by new technologies, the god-like ability to control the world. Virilio comments that: the nature of absolute speed is also to be absolute power, absolute and instantaneous control, in other words an almost divine power. Today, we have achieved the three attributes of the divine: ubiquity, instantaneity, immediacy; omnivoyance and omnipotence. 29 We can see an example of this excess of security and the desire to obtain these attributes of the divine in the discovery in June 2013 that the National Security Agency obtained direct access to the digital infrastructures of Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, allowing the PRISM program to access the emails, file transfers, search histories and live chats of all citizens, the metadata of the world. While this desire to become an omnipotent machine of surveillance might confront ethical and limits - or might confront the limits of what is possible, the excess of information - the intention is clearly to know everything. 30 Or we can see this desire to control the world from a distance in the development of drone technology: machines of vision and death that make possible control-at-a distance.In his preface to The Administration of Fear, Betrand Richard notes that 'this son of an Italian communist and a catholic from Brittany traces the rules of the game in which we are caught. And that we must escape' .31 We are trapped in a perverse situation where our societies are obsessed with security - but are governed with a security politics and economic policy that appears to be making the societies we live in more fragile (and thus requiring more 'security' and 'protection sciences'). The question that Virilio leaves us with is - after we negotiate through the propaganda of progress and the administration of fear - how do we escape the dangers of our accelerating reality, the darker possibilities made possible by the modem world? There is a sense in Virilio's work that past attempts to re-design how we live were not up to the task, producing new 'traps', new types of control. 10So the optimistic 'liberal' student of international politics won't find much to agree with in Virilio's vision of politics and security. For the liberal optimist, the modem age has made it possible for our 'rationality' to overcome the irrational and dangerous aspects of the human condition; while there is much more to 'overcome' we are heading in the right direction and progress in this overcoming will be aided by new 'tools' and technologies; human existence is more civilized and secure than at any point in our history.32The liberal will reply that information technologies are creating the foundation for a global public sphere that generates a 'transparent society' that makes it harder for states to hide what they do; Virilio replies that information technologies create new types of control and incarceration. Freedom and progress in this world order are illusions that mask the stress, control and inequality created by the system. The liberal will suggest that the continued growth in a interconnected global economy - where crisis is simply a glitch on the way to a world of progress for everybody around the planet - is a sign of the liberal capitalist world's resilience, its superiority to other ways of organizing human life.33 Virilio would reply that we should be careful not to mistake this resilience as proof of the universal or 'timeless' vitality or appeal of a capitalist (and not necessarily liberal) world order. The liberal sees global mobility as a symbol of the emerging cosmopolitan world order that overcomes the limits of locality and nationalism. Virilio sees global mobility in terms of forced migration, of border camps, of climate refugees, of habitats that can no longer support human life. Writing about Michel Foucault's studies of prisons and asylums Virilio comments: 'I think that the real imprisonment is just ahead. '34 For Virilio, the problems on the horizon will expose the fragility of the ways of organizing life that were enjoyed in the West through the second half of the twentieth century: rapid technological, ecological and geopolitical transformation will force us to confront a reality where it becomes difficult to hold on to the values and ideas that shaped political imaginations in the West during much of the previous century. Link: Russia ThreatMaking Russia the foremost enemy is bad and orientalist. We only see them as dangerous because they threaten the American empire. Reject them for their simplistic and ignorant constructionsBrown, Prof @ University of Aberdeen, 10(James, “A Stereotype, Wrapped in a Cliché, Inside a Caricature: Russian Foreign Policy and Orientalism,” POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(3), 149–159) NCC2020As a natural consequence of the lack of real knowledge about the area, the ‘“East” has always signified danger and threat’ (ibid., p. 26). It represents an ‘otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries’ (ibid., p. 57) that the West must confront forcefully. Moreover this sense of fear is not restricted to the past: Today, bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there (ibid., p. xv). This portrayal of the East as an enigmatic and dangerous counterpoint is a fundamental component of Orientalist literature. However, as well as exaggerating the East’s distinctiveness, the Orientalist canon is committed to proclaiming its inferiority. The second core characteristic of Orientalist literature is its portrayal of the region as a degenerate divergence from Western norms. Specifically, the people are presented as backward or, as Chaim Weizmann put it to Arthur Balfour, ‘the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times’ (quoted in ibid., p. 306). What is more, unlike superior Europeans, [they] Orientals are prone to irrationality, inefficiency, inability to learn from mistakes and a chronic incapacity for self-government (ibid., pp. 36–40, 107, 228, 241). In dealing with them, one must appreciate that ‘power is the only language they understand’ (ibid., p. xv). Furthermore, not content with highlighting this supposed inferiority, Orientalism is committed to rectifying it. The East must therefore be kept ‘in statu pupillari’ (ibid., p. 37) while the West imposes its more advanced socio-political model upon it. The knowledge produced by Orientalism is therefore ‘never raw, unmediated, or simply objective’ (ibid., p. 273) but complicit in a political project with imperialist instincts. For this reason, Said brands Orientalism a trahison des clercs (ibid., p. xxi), suggesting that, even though their participation may be unconscious, ‘the Orientalist could be regarded as the special agent of Western power’ (ibid., p. 223). Having said this, recognition of Orientalism’s close connections to power is not to imply that its analysis is compelling. The third prominent feature of Orientalist discourse is its ‘paper-thin intellectual apparatus’ (ibid., p. 322). Said explains that over time Western writing about the Orient has acquired a narrow set of convictions which now serve as the foundation of all subsequent thinking. Analyses of the region proceed from the basis of this received knowledge and are consequently repetitive and unimaginative. Their purpose is no longer to engage with their subject directly or achieve fresh insight, but to reiterate and reconfirm ‘unshakeable abstract maxims about the “civilization”’ (ibid., p. 52). Every fact is taken to be a reaffirmation of established principles and all phenomena are explained via reduction to the same tired models. This problem is exacerbated by the tendency for Area Studies to be closed off from other disciplines (ibid., p. 70). Some of the specific traits of this orthodoxy are as follows: First is ‘demeaning generalization’ (ibid., p. xiii), whereby ‘innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored’ (ibid., p. xiv). Second is eternality: the Orient is deemed never to change and there is therefore no need to alter one’s intellectual models. Momentous shifts are downplayed and previously unseen phenomena are confi- dently labelled atavism (ibid., pp. 58, 104, 240). Third, Orientalism uses crude one-dimensional models upon which scholars would not countenance relying if their object of study was the West. Prominent examples include a fixation with geographical determinism (ibid., pp. 162, 216) and obsession with the ‘Oriental personality’ (ibid., p. 31). Fourth, Orientalists have a great talent for combining ‘imperial vagueness and precise detail’ (ibid., p. 50). Therefore, while indulging in the most shameless of generalisations, Orientalists simultaneously bombard the reader with ‘sheer, overpowering, monumental description’ (ibid., p. 162). Fifth, despite pretensions to expertise, numerous Orientalists are remarkably underqualified to speak about the East and cannot even claim knowledge of the relevant languages (ibid., pp. 178, 193). In developing the argument outlined above, Said refers almost exclusively to representations of the Arab world. However, as an intellectual model, Orientalism lends itself to application well beyond its original field of study as a means of drawing attention to any area of scholarship in which the literature has become stuck in a monotonous cycle of reaffirmation. With this in mind, this article employs Orientalism to critique Western discourse on Russian foreign policy. Orientalism and Russian foreign policy Orientalism and Russia are not unacquainted. In fact, Russia (or the Soviet Union) features more than ten times in Orientalism. There is also a substantial secondary literature that explores Orientalism in the Russian context (e.g. Bolton, 2009; David-Fox, Holquist and Martin, 2006; Khalid, 2000). However, for both Said and the vast majority of subsequent scholars, Russia is significant, not as an object of Orientalist modes of thought, but as an origin. In particular, the literature highlights Russia’s long imperial history, its tendency to define its core culture in contradis-tinction to those of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and its imposition of a standardised way of life upon the peoples of its empire. However, just because a culture is itself an instigator of Orientalism does not mean that it is not also a recipient. This fact has been recognised by Iver Neumann. In Uses of the Other, Neumann describes the historical construction of Russia as Europe’s Other. In particular, he draws attention to representations of the country as a ‘barbarian at the gate’ (Neumann, 1999, p. 77), acknowledges the popular stereotype of ‘an alleged Russian Volksgeist (“national character”) of sloth, drunkenness, and laziness’ (ibid., p. 104) and highlights the perception of Russia as ‘a gigantic specimen to which the most advanced legal and administrative ideas could be applied with a completeness impossible in western Europe’ (Anderson, quoted in ibid., p. 78). In making this case, Neumann cites Said and clearly demonstrates the appropriateness of his model to this context. However, Russia is not the exclusive focus of his book and, even when dealing with the subject, Neumann’s concern is with long-standing cultural representations of the country and not contemporary portrayals of its position in international politics. Elsewhere, some scholars have explored specific deficiencies in the Western political discourse about Russia (Gleason, 1951; Lieven, 2000; Malia, 1999; Mikoyan, 2006; Solzhenitsyn, 1980); most recently, studies have highlighted anti-Russian sentiment among US policymakers (Tsygankov, 2009) and lack of balance in Western media coverage of the 2008 Russo–Georgian war (English and Svyatets, 2010). And yet, as valuable as these contributions are, they tend to frame their arguments in terms of Russophobia and do not recognise the interdisciplinary relevance of Orientalism. This article fills the gap in this literature by demonstrating how Said’s model can be employed to make sense of the clichés, distortions and exaggerations that taint this discourse. The use of this alternative framework is a valuable addition, not only because it highlights some heretofore un-noted deficiencies, but also because it does so by drawing upon a more substantive and deep-rooted theory than the nebulous Russophobia. As such, rather than simply describing the weaknesses, the Orientalist model is able to employ its sophisticated understanding of the process of Othering to offer a clear and credible account of their emergence. Moreover, Said’s depiction of how the discourse about a region can come to be dominated by a partisan and self-perpetuating orthodoxy provides a valuable explanation for the pervasiveness and durability of the unfortunate representation of Russian foreign policy that is detailed here. Each of these considerations provides significant scope for further research, thus encouraging the opening up of this subject area to much-needed intellectual rejuvenation. At this point I should make clear that it is not my intention to suggest that all Western accounts of Russian foreign policy are Orientalist; there are many fine studies that do not fit the model. However, as the following paragraphs reveal, there is a sizeable mass of literature that unmistakably displays the characteristic symptoms of Orientalism. With regard to the first trait – the exaggeration of difference – there is a striking propensity to portray Russian foreign policy as markedly different from that of Western states. Although probably of older origin, this perception was powerfully reinforced by the stark dividing lines of the Cold War and by Moscow’s use of ideological rhetoric to justify its international strategy. Despite the collapse of communism, this image of Russia as an Other, which pursues a qualitatively different mode of behaviour, remains prominent in Western scholarship. It might be noted that all branches of Area Studies are prone to stress countries’ dissimilarities, while downplaying their commonalities, since this represents much of the field’s unique selling point. However, be this as it may, there is certainly a tendency for Russia’s mode of engagement in international affairs to be presented as unusual. To be specific, scholars regularly present Russian foreign policy as puzzling, unpredictable and divergent from the Western norm. Indeed, the country’s behaviour is considered to be so exceptional and difficult to define that standard analytical models are not thought to apply (Arias-King, King de Arias and Arias de la Canal, 2008; Kubicek, 1999, pp. 547–548; Legvold, 2007a, pp. 10–11). Bobo Lo, one of the best-known Western experts on the subject, clearly highlights this conception, beginning his popular textbook with the observation that Russia’s external activities reflect ‘the perversity of human nature’ and, ‘far from exhibiting an underlying if specific pragmatism ... have been liberally streaked with irrationality’ (Lo, 2002, p. 1). Moreover, in accordance with the Orientalist model, this image of inscrutable foreignness is persistently reaffirmed through shared language use. Most notable in this regard is the literature’s compulsive repetition of Churchill’s claim that Russia’s actions are a ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ (Arias-King, King de Arias and Arias de la Canal, 2008, p. 118; Donaldson and Nogee, 2009, p. 65; Joyce, 1984, p. 134; Lo, 2002, p. 1; March, 2006, p. 88; Rubinstein, 1989, p. 12). Another popular means of expressing the same idea is the medical metaphor, whereby Russia is presented as ‘genetically different’ (Wesson, 1974, p. 3), exhibiting allergic reactions (Lo, 2008, p. 258) and afflicted by various ailments, including Borderline Personality Disorder (Arias-King, King de Arias and Arias de la Canal, 2008). Meanwhile, others contribute to this sense of exoticism, deviance and distance via clichés about bears (Garnett, 1997, p. 61; Menon, 1995), chess (Goldman, 2008, pp. 92, 154–155) and nesting dolls (Legvold, 2009, pp. 42–43). Furthermore, as Said predicts, as well as being presented as somehow more extraordinary and incomprehensible than the behaviour of any other large, complex state, Russian foreign policy is portrayed as significantly more dangerous. Despite its ‘syndrome of backwardness’ (Snyder, 1994, p. 181), Russia continues to represent a serious potential threat to international stability (Kubicek, 1999, pp. 567–568; Pipes, 1997; Snyder, 1994, p. 197) and is thus a popular subject for Western polemic (Baker and Glasser, 2005; Lucas, 2008). Turning to the second tenet of Orientalism – the assumption of Western superiority – there is also clear evidence that Russia’s mode of engagement in international politics is routinely presented as inferior to that of Western countries. In a manner that contributes to the image of Russian deviationism (though contradicts the illusion of mysterious unpredictability), a substantial values gap is proposed to exist between Russian and Western strategic cultures (Forsberg, 2004, pp. 261–263; Mankoff, 2010, p. 134; March, 2006, p. 93). In essence, while the West is considered to have largely transcended Hobbesian modes of thought, Russian foreign policy remains ‘nakedly realist’ (March, 2006, p. 92), fixated with security, sovereignty and the pursuit of national interest. This is an entirely legitimate observation, yet what is dubious is the disparaging suggestion that this approach is un-European (ibid., p. 93), anachronistic (Lo, 2008, p. 176) or even so backward as to be rooted in a different historical era (Vihavainen, 2009, pp. 53–54). What is more, not only is Russia’s strategy deemed outdated, but its attempts to implement it are also seen as substandard since its policymaking is habitually cast as chaotic, error prone and even feckless (Garnett, 1998, pp. 67–70; Legvold, 2007a, pp. 7–10; Lo, 2008, p. 141; Simes, 2007, p. 36). Again, there may be some truth to this, especially with regard to the early 1990s, yet so embedded has this image become that even successful (from the Russian perspective) undertakings – such as the use of energy as a means of economic and political leverage, and military intervention in Georgia – are instinctively portrayed as fundamental failures (Baev, 2008, pp. 128–129; Sestanovich, 2008, pp. 25–26; Vendil Pallin and Westerlund, 2009). Furthermore, as the Orientalist model suggests, as well as being convinced of the waywardness of Russia’s approach, Western scholars are committed to rectifying it. The issue of how its pupil was ‘lost’ in the 1990s continues to be debated (Columbus, 2001; Eyal, 2009; Simes, 2007), thus assuming that Russia was ever someone’s to lose, and academics presumptuously dictate how the country can be returned to the ‘right’ path (Council on Foreign Relations, 2006). While nominally independent, such scholarship clearly shares and serves the interests of Western power. Finally, traces of Orientalism are detectable in the intellectual models employed in the study of this subject. Although the number of publications in this area is large, accounts of Russian foreign policy, when not essentially heavyweight descriptions (e.g. Donaldson and Nogee, 2009; Kennedy-Pipe, 1998; Rangsimaporn, 2009), are remarkably repetitive and unimaginative. Testimony to this fact is provided by the surprising number of similarities to be found in the analyses, if not the ultimate expectations, of liberal (e.g. Legvold, 2007b) and conservative (e.g. Pipes, 1996) commentators. Rather than undertaking innovative research into how findings from other disciplines can be applied to this context or drawing new cross-national comparisons, scholars habitually reiterate a core set of convictions which, on the basis of use rather than truth, has become the standard narrative. Employing simplifications and unsubstantiated claims that would not be tolerated with regard to Western states, this basic approach does little to enhance our understanding of Russian foreign policy. At core, the orthodox discourse takes the view that there is a specifically Russian mindset or pattern of behaviour to which the country inevitably reverts. While Western states are assumed to respond rationally to incentives and constraints, Russian policy is guided by some primordial instinct that has been indelibly imprinted upon its national character by the weight of geography and history. This predisposition naturally inclines the country towards expansionism, militarism and autocracy (Brzezinski, 1984; Galeotti, 1995, pp. 3–24; Lo, 2003, pp. 72–83; Pipes, 1996; Snyder, 1994, p. 179). Moreover, so enduring is this assumed inclination that it is deemed to apply across the fault lines of Russian and Soviet history. In consequence, there is an uncommon tendency to explain Russia’s current foreign policy by drawing upon historical precedent (Bunce, 1993; Joyce, 1984; Lederer, 1962; Legvold, 2007b and 2009; Lo, 2008, pp. 17–37; Vihavainen, 2009). For example, Russia is said still to possess a collective ‘Mongol complex’ as the result of the subjugation of Russian lands from the 13th to 15th centuries (Lo, 2008, pp. 18–19; Vihavainen, 2009). This phenomenon apparently helps account for today’s ambivalent national identity and troubled relations with both East and West. In explaining why no respected scholar would account for modern British policies in such a way, Timo Vihavainen states bluntly that ‘England had changed, while Russia had not’ (2009, pp. 18–19). Encouraged by this view that Russia is trapped in the past, all manner of modern phenomena are labelled atavism and dubious parallels are drawn between modern and historical figures, such as between Vladimir Putin and Peter the Great, Stolypin and Stalin (Lo, 2003, pp. 6, 133–134; McDonald, 2007, pp. 182–183; Murawiec, 2000). Of course, there is nothing wrong with historical comparison per se; it is a widely used and valuable analytical technique. However it should be employed when genuinely merited and not simply as a matter of convention.Link: Security Dilemma[for reference] This is what a security dilemma isNye and Welch 14“Understanding Global Conflict & Cooperation: Intro to Theory & History” Joseph S. Nye Jr. David A. Welch Ninth Edition NCC2020Security dilemmas are related to the essential characteristic of international politics: anarchy, the absence of a higher authority. Under anarchy, independent action taken by one state to increase its security may make all states less secure. If one state builds its strength to make sure that another cannot threaten it, the other, seeing the first getting stronger, may build its strength to protect itself against the first. The result is that the independent effort of each to improve its security makes both more insecure. It is an ironic result, yet neither has acted irrationally. Neither has acted from anger or pride, but from fear caused by the threat perceived in the growth of the other. After all, building defenses is a rational response to a perceived threat. States could cooperate to avoid this security dilemma; that is, they could agree that neither should build up its defenses and all would be better off. If it seems obvious that states should cooperate, why don’t they? An answer can be found in the game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (Security dilemmas are a specific type of Prisoner’s Dilemma.) The Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario goes like this: Imagine that somewhere the police arrest two men who have small amounts of drugs in their possession, which would probably result in one-year jail sentences. The police have good reason to believe these two are really drug dealers, but they do not have enough evidence for a conviction. As dealers, the two could easily get 25-year jail sentences. The police know that the testimony of one against the other would be sufficient to convict the other to a full sentence. The police offer to let each man off if he will testify that the other is a drug dealer. They tell them that if both testify, both will receive ten-year sentences. The police figure this way these dealers will be out of commission for ten years; otherwise they are both in jail for only a year and soon will be out selling drugs again. The suspects are put in separate cells and are not allowed to communicate with each other. Each prisoner has the same dilemma: If the other stays silent, he can secure his own freedom by squealing on the other, sending him to jail for 25 years, and go free himself; or he can stay silent and spend a year in jail. But if both prisoners squeal, they each get ten years in jail. Each prisoner thinks, “No matter what the other guy does, I’m better off if I squeal. If he stays quiet, I go free if I squeal and spend a year in jail if I don’t. If he squeals, I get ten years if I squeal and 25 years if I don’t.” If both think this way, both will squeal and spend ten years in jail each. If they could trust each other not to squeal, however, they would both be much better off, spending only one year in jail. That is the basic structural dilemma of independent rational action in a situation of this kind. If the two could talk to each other, they might agree to make a deal to stay silent and both spend one year in jail. But even if communication were possible, there would be another problem: trust and credibility. Continuing with the metaphor in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, each suspect could say to himself, “We are both drug dealers. I have seen the way the other acts. How do I know that after we’ve made this deal, he won’t say, ‘Great! I’ve convinced him to stay quiet. Now I can get my best possible outcome: freedom!’?” Similarly, in international politics the absence of communication and trust encourages states to provide for their own security, even though doing so may reduce all states to mutual insecurity. In other words, one state could say to another, “Don’t build up your armaments and I will not build up my armaments, and we will both live happily ever after,” but the second state may wonder whether it can afford to trust the first state. The Athenian position in 432 looks very much like “the security dilemma” is a self-serving intellectual concept that props up the security infrastructure by creating excuses for continued intervention.Chisem ’12 (James, Aberystwyth University, International Politics Department, Graduate Student. Studies International Relations, Historiography, and Cold War, “Can the security dilemma explain actual conflicts?” NCC2020The concept of the security dilemma describes how it is possible, given the “existential uncertainty” which the condition of international anarchy produces amongst states, for violent conflict to arise between two or more actors even when neither has malign intentions towards the other[1]. Although the idea appears in text as far back as the fifth century BCE in the writings of the Greek intellectual Thucydides, the term only entered the academic lexicon after John Herz concretised it in his 1950 treatise ‘Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma’[2]. In the decades since then, a number of scholarly works, most notably by Robert Jervis, Ken Booth, and Nick Wheeler, have drawn attention to the ontological significance of the security dilemma[3]. Indeed, Booth and Wheeler argue that it is a foundational concept which “goes right to the heart of the theory and practice of international politics”[4]. Nevertheless, if the security dilemma is now ubiquitous in the contemporary study of the states-system, its implications have certainly not resulted in theoretical or prescriptive parsimony. Whereas offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer contend that international anarchy and ‘Hobbesian Fear’ predispose states to perpetual confrontation, thinkers from diverse scholastic backgrounds have challenged the fatalistic logic of security-competition models, instead emphasising the ameliorative potential of human agency and inter-state regimes[5]. This essay will demonstrate that, although the occurrence of certain wars can be attributed to the operation of the security dilemma, a number of socio-structural factors limit the likelihood of such an extreme outcome. The narrative will be divided into three constituent parts. The first section will examine the theoretical underpinnings of the security dilemma. Section two will look at the Anglo-German naval race in order to assess whether these conceptual abstractions can be applied to actual conflicts. The final section will consider the various mitigating factors which moderate the deleterious effects of the security dilemma. Different epistemological approaches to international relations engender very distinctive scenarios and outcomes. As such, in order to properly understand the nature, importance, and context, of the security dilemma, it is pertinent to situate the concept in the wider framework of Structural Realism – the school of thought from which the term originated, and which has generated the most voluminous literature on the subject. According to realists, the character of the international sphere is determined not by human biology or anthropology, but rather by the absence of an overarching central authority. “The requirements of state action” observes Kenneth Waltz, “are imposed by the circumstances in which all states exist”[6]. In this anarchical environment it is impossible for decision-makers to deduce with absolute certainty the intentions of others[7]. As a consequence, each state must rely on its own devices to pursue what it perceives to be in its rational self-interest – generally understood to be the attainment of existential security and the maximisation of relative power vis-à-vis other states[8]. To illustrate the endemic behavioural bias towards rivalry in the international system, Jervis appropriates Rousseau’s ‘parable of the stag’, drawing a parallel between the mind-set of the story’s hunters and that of modern nationstates. If the men cooperate to ensnare and slay the stag, they will all eat in good measure. But if one leaves his post to go in pursuit of a rabbit – which provides inferior sustenance – the stag will successfully flee and the remaining huntsmen will be left hungry. Since each person is liable to harbour doubts about whether everybody in the entourage will cooperate, collaboration appears to be the least advantageous option[9]. Unit-level variations thus have a nominal systemic impact, meaning that, unless a global hierarchy emerges, international interaction will conform to predictable, conflictual patterns[10]. It is in the glare of this constellation of anarchy (the condition in which the world exists) and uncertainty (the axis upon which it turns) that the deep logic of the security dilemma becomes apparent. Nonetheless, to fully appreciate how the structure of the international realm can compel two status-quo powers unintentionally towards conflict, two derivative dynamics relating to perception and misperception must be considered. First, actors are perennially and inescapably confronted by what philosophers have commonly referred to as the ‘other minds problem’. In essence, policymakers in one state are never able to entirely ascertain the true motivations and objectives of their counterparts in other states[11]. The mutual anxiety and mistrust which this gives rise to is compounded by a second, material problem – the inherent symbolic ambiguity of weaponry. Thomas Schelling points out that the meaning of a weapon is derived solely from the metaphysical plane[12]. In a nomadic community, for instance, a rifle can be a vital means of providing food, yet it can also be used “to spray bullets across a school in a mad killing spree”[13]. As the stakes involved in issues of national security strike at the very core of a state’s raison d’être, the difficulty of distinguishing defensive and offensive capabilities necessarily encourages decision-makers to “prepare for the worst”, even if they themselves bear no aggressive intent[14]. It is worth quoting Herbert Butterfield at length on this matter: “…you knowyourself that you mean him no harm, and that you want nothing from him save guarantees for your own safety; and it is never possible for you to realise or remember properly that since he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your intentions that you have.”[15] For students of the security dilemma this predicament – one which is informed by irresolvable uncertainty, the subjective, rather than objective, appraisal of other actors’ capabilities and intentions, and the need to respond in kind – is a precursor to the materialisation of what Booth and Wheeler call the security paradox and Jervis labels the spiral model. Because statecraft is impelled by fear under anarchy, two perfectly peaceable governments may still interpret each other’s self proclaimed defensive postures as being motivated by offensive aspirations. In a hypothetical scenario, if State A procures a new weapons system, the rational-consistency of realism and the security dilemma suggests that State B should counteract such a move, explaining its new stance with reference to State A’s original conduct. Knowing that its initial decision was wholly defensive in nature, State A will become suspicious of State B and thus react accordingly. State B faces the same dilemma of interpretation and response, and so it continues ad-finitum. Whilst each state begins with a nonaggressive desire to increase its own security, the chosen course of action to bring about such an outcome actually leads to mutual insecurity[16]. In the jargon of Strategic Studies, this is known as an action-reaction cycle and its implications for the explanatory usefulness of the security dilemma, and international relations in general, are significant. For if the potency of the international system to propel peacefully disposed nations into a “vicious circle of security and power accumulation” is so great, then history should be littered with countless examples of security-dilemma inspired wars[17]. In spite of the existence of a number of inter-state hostilities which fulfil such criteria, one particular case has preoccupied modern scholars of international relations, security, and history – namely the AngloGerman naval race of the early twentieth century. Commonly recognised to have begun with Admiral Tirpitz’s now famous 1897 request for a substantially expanded Kaiserliche-Marine, it is often cited as one of the principal antecedents which brought both countries to loggerheads in 1914[18]. The initial German resolution to augment their comparatively diminutive fleet had little, if anything, to do with Britain. Kaiser Wilhelm II was largely stirred by a self-protective desire to provide insurance against the possibility of a prospective adversary blockading the logistically crucial Hanseatic coastline, and was under no illusions as to the benefits of purposefully upsetting the delicate Balance of Power which existed in Europe at the time[19]. Nevertheless, due to the existential condition of inexorable uncertainty, the British were utterly incapable of perceiving this. In view of the fact that “economic and military preparedness designed to hold what one has is apt to create the potential for taking territory from others”, policymakers in Whitehall ascribed an array of aggressive intentions to Germany’s shipbuilding programme, ranging from the disruption of British trade to, somewhat ridiculously, a wholesale Teutonic invasion of the British Isles[20]. And thus an arms race was set in motion even though no conflict of interest truly existed in the first place. In classic security dilemma fashion, each subsequent move and countermove – calculated as they were to improve the security situation – was interpreted by the other side as evidence of harmful intent[21]. At no point were politicians in Berlin or London able to put themselves in their opposite number’s shoes. Indeed, the Germans were oblivious to the potential for their defensive policy choices to be unfavourably misconstrued, whilst the British “overlooked what the Germans knew full well; in every quarrel with England, German colonies and trade were…hostages for England to take”[22]. Watching from across the Atlantic, President Theodore Roosevelt summed up this quandary with a sense of irony only a third party can possess: “The Kaiser sincerely believes that the English are planning to attack him and smash his fleet. As a matter of fact, the English harbour no such intentions, but are themselves in a condition of panic terror lest the Kaiser form an alliance against them with France or Russia, or both, to destroy their fleet and blot out the British Empire from the map! It is as funny a case as I have seen of mutual distrust and fear bringing two peoples to the verge of chaos”[23]. Jack Snyder contends that it was the above dilemma more than anything which persuaded German defence-planners to prepare a two-front preventative attack, as they feared it was the “only alternative to encirclement”[24]. Although one must be careful not to treat the Anglo-German naval race in isolation from wider events, it is palpable that the whirlpool of reciprocal mistrust which fed and sustained it contributed considerably to the breakdown in relations between two previously disinterested Great Powers, and consequently to the eruption of war. And yet, if this disconsolate vision of international relations is so compelling, and meaningful inter-state cooperation therefore an elusive mirage, then the question must be asked, why “are we not all dead?”[25] Although historically evident, instances wherein the security dilemma results in armed conflict appear to be quite rare. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate as to whether the term has been too readily and broadly applied to explain wars which on closer inspection have perceptibly discrete causes. The founding father of the concept, John Herz, made a concerted effort to differentiate between the emergence of hostilities amongst actors with benign temperaments and those wars which flow directly from “policies that go beyond security proper”. Invoking the actions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he noted that when a regime has obviously expansionist tendencies, leaders in other nations do not face a dilemma of interpretation or response[26]. More recently, Shipping Tang has criticised Barry Posen’s hypothesis that ethnic-conflict in the Balkans during the early-1990s was inadvertent, charging that both the Croats and Serbs harboured deeply rooted malign intentions towards one another[27]. That is not to say that security dilemmas which produce conflicts of interest are uncommon – there is a preponderance of literature which convincingly demonstrates that inter-state tensions as varied as the early-Cold War, the fall-out over the Strategic Defence initiative, and Argentine-Brazilian nuclear enmity, fit this mould[28]. So, it is clear that in most cases there must be extenuating factors preventing the security dilemma gaining enough momentum to proceed towards its notional extremity. As Jervis points out, anarchy and uncertainty are not the only variables to take into account when discussing the propensity of states to fall victim to the security dilemma and spiral model. In an article written for World Politics in 1978, he added nuance to the tragic image of international relations by introducing two critical ideas – a) the relative costs of exploitation and b) the offence-defence balance. First, the geographical, technological, structural, and economic, context in which social-units exist fundamentally alters decision-makers attitudes in relation to cooperation and ‘defection’. A participant in the Stag Hunt who is starving will undoubtedly view the benefits of staying at their post very differently to a colleague who has already consumed a hearty luncheon. Similarly, if a state has defensible borders, a generously proportioned land mass, allies in abundance, and a well-protected military infrastructure, then its capacity to trust others and ignore indefinite and outwardly isolated signs of danger will be greatly enhanced[29]. Academics of a more liberal or constructivist leaning go as far as to suggest that this creates a space in which state bureaucracies develop security dilemma sensibility, gradually coming to understand each other’s counter-fear[30]. In turn, this permits the evolution of a set of integrated international institutions, communities, and regimes, which establish the “avoidance of force in the settlement of disputes” as a paradigmatic norm[31]. It is arguable that the longevity of trans-national groupings such as the European Union and NATO, wherein “militarised security competition appears to have been transcended indefinitely”, verifies such thinking[32]. Second, the ever shifting nexus between technical advancement, topography, and strategy, plays an important role in determining the incentives states have to act on their shared interests. When defense is widely perceived to have the advantage over offence, most states can inexpensively offset regional arms build-ups, therefore making accommodative settlements much easier to reach. When the converse is true, as it was in the years preceding the Great War, the common “fear of a surprise attack” is high, and the security dilemma is at its “most vicious”[33]. At this juncture, it is also pertinent to raise a third related issue which a number of thinkers have explored – the impact of the thermonuclear revolution and models of deterrence on the conduct of statecraft. Because defense against a nuclear attack is essentially impossible, if two states acquire invulnerable warhead delivery platforms, they gain the ability to annihilate the other side under any circumstances, thereby leaving neither with an incentive to exacerbate a crisis or launch a pre-emptive strike[34]. Somewhat counter-intuitively, a situation of Mutually Assured Destruction opens the door to “policies of mutual accommodation”, with both sides necessarily required to consciously rest “their security on each other’s vulnerability”[35]. The almost primordial fear which the prospect of Armageddon arouses amongst statesmen thus encourages the development of a more cautious and empathetic mindset than ‘kill or perish’ conceptions of the security dilemma allow for[36]. In light of the anarchical structure of international politics and the corresponding condition of existential uncertainty, it is inevitable that unintended conflicts of interest will emerge amongst security-seeking status-quo states. However, anarchy is not as fatalistically deterministic as offensive-realists assert. Despite the existence of empirical evidence which confirms that such a state of affairs can indeed eventuate in a spiral of mistrust, arms competition, and violent conflict, as in the case of the AngloGerman naval race, a number of psycho-material factors limit the frequency of such catastrophic resolutions. The complex interplay between military technology, the offence-defense balance, subjective context and international norms, curtails the severity of the security dilemma in most circumstances. Crucially, defensively oriented states are by their very nature less susceptible to bouts of paranoia in their relations with one another. This ensures that a) these states are more likely to avoid creating a security paradox in the first place and b) if they do, attempts at signalling reassurance are more prone to be successful. To a certain extent then, the security dilemma is what states make of it[37]. This has far-reaching repercussions, not just for the discipline of International Relations, but for the formulation of foreign policy itself. It is to be hoped that those in the corridors of power grasp this fact and act on it with the utmost expediency, lest this century repeat the bloody tragedy of the previous one.Link: Security FocusWar narratives cause securitized responses that hides what causes them in the first place---this makes war inevitable---vote Neg to interrogate their assumption about security.Ahmed 17 – Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development, M.A. in Contemporary War & Peace Studies and DPhil in International Relations from the School of Global Studies at Sussex University, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence, p. 1-13 [acronyms expanded in brackets] NCC2020Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social protest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement in the US and Western Europe, and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil unrest has continued to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. In some regions, civil unrest has coalesced into the collapse of incumbent governments or even the eruption of a prolonged state of internecine warfare, as is happening in Iraq-Syria and Ukraine- Crimea. To what extent is this apparent heightening of geopolitical instability new? Increasing public dissatisfaction with government is correlated with continued government diffi culties in meeting public expectations. Yet while policymakers and media observers have raced to keep up with events, they have largely missed the deeper causes of this new age of unrest—the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for economic growth, industrial food production, and the Earth’s climate stability.Contrary to widely reported claims across mainstream media of a new era of prosperity heralded by the US-led shale oil and gas boom, the proliferation of contemporary climate, food and economic crises have at their root a single common denominator: the fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization.This inevitable energy transition away from high quality fossil fuels to lower quality, more expensive energy forms—which will be completed well before the close of this century, and quite possibly much earlier—will force a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. The twenty-first century, in this context, is a pivotal one for humanity as industrial civilization pivots through a process of systemic transition, driven by the complex interplay between human societies and biophysical realities.Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. This, in turn, cannot be achieved without breaking the stranglehold of conventional models achieved through the hegemony of establishment narratives—dominated by fossil fuel interests and the banality of the mainstream media news cycle.The central thesis of this study is that the escalation of social protest and political instability around the world is causally related to the unstoppable thermodynamics of global hydrocarbon energy decline and its interconnected environmental and economic consequences. It offers, in this sense, a biophysical approach to international relations, and argues that geopolitics remains fundamentally embedded in biophysical processes. This is not to reduce geopolitics to the biophysical—far from it—but to recognize that the dynamics of the geopolitical cannot be dislocated from the dynamics of the biophysical, and that biophysical processes are increasingly driving geopolitical instability to a degree unrecognized by policymakers, the media, as well as social and natural scientists.Hydrocarbon energy decline can be understood as consisting of the following two intertwined processes: the inexorable reduction in industrial civilization’s production of net energy from hydrocarbon sources (fossil fuels) over the last decades; the acceleration of hydrocarbon energy production to attempt to make-up for this decline and sustain economic growth.This process has in turn had two major consequences, namely: climate change and the corresponding destabilization of the Earth System due to the increasing quantity of greenhouse gas emissions due to hydrocarbon energy dependence; and the permanent slowdown of global economic growth due to the increasing costs of energy production relative to GDP. Climate and economic crises are, in turn, acting as amplifying feedbacks on the process of hydrocarbon energy decline, and in themselves are acting synergistically to undermine global industrial food production while simultaneously impinging on socio-political stability and human well-being.While conventional policy and media approaches to socio-political instability tend to focus almost purely on ‘surface’ social symptoms—geopolitical competition, political corruption, economic mismanagement, ideological extremism, and so on—the deeper biophysical systemic drivers of instability are largely ignored or misunderstood. As such, missing from the vast bulk of conventional wisdom on escalating socio-political instability around the world is the crucial recognition of its central cause in a systemic process of hydrocarbon energy decline and concomitant civilizational transition toward an inevitable post-carbon future.Currently, climate change is rightly and consensually recognized by the scientific community, and has been accepted at least in principle by policymakers as a reality requiring an urgent collective response from human societies. However, despite growing recognition of the interconnected nature of these crises—illustrated through concepts such as the food-water-energy nexus—there remains a fundamental failure in the conceptualization of their interconnected nature in terms of the relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment, and relatedly, the relationship between human polities and the biophysical environment.This root failure of conceptualization is perhaps the most significant factor focusing on the role of human agency in driving the current convergence of global crises. The failure is compounded by the necessarily compartmentalized nature of scientific specialization, which has produced a vast volume of information, but little in the way of epistemological mechanisms to integrate that into knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. It is further compounded by the transmission of incorrect conceptual diagnoses of global crises through the global mainstream media. The perpetual transmission of false and inaccurate knowledge on the origins and dynamic of global crises has created a situation in which as such crises accelerate, the human species as a whole is disempowered from being able to correctly understand these crises and their symptoms, and thus unable to solve them.Yet to diagnose the intensifying perfect storm of climate, energy and economic crises requires a fundamental reconceptualization of their true nature as symptoms of an overall civilizational system which, increasingly, cannot be sustained by the biophysical environment.This study offers an empirically-grounded social scientific theoretical framework for developing a holistic approach to this perfect storm through the lens of what this author has called the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ (as opposed to a ‘clash of civilizations’). My approach is not to create yet another new statistical model to add to the plethora of models that exist, but to strike at a deeper lacuna within the discipline of international relations—to create the beginnings of an accurate, integrated transdisciplinary theoretical basis for such modelling, derived from a holistic analysis of the relevant empirical data.The study is divided into two main sections. The first consists of a general framework of the broad crises that this author considers to be integral to the biophysical processes driving geopolitical instability today. The second consists of a series of case studies which provide specifi c empirical data supporting and building on this general framework to test how and whether they are indeed acting out on local, national and regional levels as is my hypothesis. This opening section begins by building on this author’s previous work on the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an overarching analytical framework for the integrated examination of global climate, energy, food, economic and socio-political crises (Ahmed 2010 , 2011 ). This is achieved by establishing the inherent systemic interconnections between these crises on a global macro-level scale. The monograph then proceeds to explore how the general framework of biophysical factors aka the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ plays out at a micro-level within specifi c countries in key regions—the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia, and North America. This examination takes us to the crux of my argument and provides specific evidence that the biophysical processes discussed more generally in the opening are, in fact, already having concrete geopolitical impacts accelerating the destabilization of human societies across the world, in a manner that can now be detected through a holistic and transdisciplinary empirical analysis. This not only provides surprising empirical vindication for our hypothesis that biophysical processes are playing an integral causal role in the intensifi cation of political and geopolitical disruption on a global scale, it also provides us a basis to explore some tentative business-as-usual (BAU) forecasts.This permits further exploration of the intersection between the thermodynamics of escalating hydrocarbon energy decline and the accelerating disruption of global industrial civilization. As prevailing social, political and economic structures become increasingly dysfunctional against the strain of hydrocarbon energy decline, the resulting rupture manifests in an increasing frequency of social protest and violent conflict.Part of this study, then, identifi es how conventional governmental, industry and media narratives of these crises for the most part fail to accurately understand them, not just due to a lack of a holistic-systemic frameworks for examining these crises as interdependent—but due to a fundamental epistemological failure that has allowed mythological ‘theories’ of human progress in the form of neoclassical and neoliberal economics to become entrenched as the dominant cognitive paradigm. The most powerful hegemonic component of this ideological capture of human collective cognition occurs through the global institutions associated with the mainstream media. The principal problem here is a highly compromised ownership and editorial structure that ties media outlets to the very prevailing structures of fossil fuel-centric power complicit in global crisis acceleration. The preponderance of fossil fuel-centric interests in conventional media ownership has led to consistently inaccurate reporting on energy issues, and their relationships with economic, food and climate crises, as well as specifi c confl icts.Yet to some extent, and compounding the insular ideological approach of powerful government, industry and media institutions, there has been a similar failure from amongst experts in different fi elds of these crises, who have been unable to develop theoretical, conceptual and empirical frameworks to view their specialized data in its inherent interconnections with data from other fi elds. In other words, a lack of generalized systems training in our schools. Due to this problem, we are beginning to grasp only recently the extent to which geopolitical ruptures that overwhelm of the news of the day have been exacerbated by a convergence of crises studied largely separately in these disparate fi elds. There is, therefore, little understanding of how energy and resource depletion tangibly impact the political economies of different societies, and how these processes interact with the local impacts of global processes like climate change.This has led to a knowledge deficit—specifi cally, a whole systems knowledge defi cit comprising a paucity of reliable, actionable knowledge in the mainstream, exacerbating a sense of public apathy and confusion, and cementing a policymaking impasse among political leaders who remain subject to a fatal combination of intensive fossil fuel lobbying and media misinformation.Among the most critical solutions to the ‘Crisis of Civilization’, then, is a concerted grassroots mobilization to rectify the whole systems knowledge deficit . This could be achieved in many different ways—whether through responsible journalism or more informed policy formulation based on the effective communication of interdisciplinary scientifi c research—but the end goal is the same: mass public education with a view to catalyze social action that is systemically transformative. Without addressing the knowledge deficit, the self-reinforcing cycle of amplifying crisis feedbacks cannot be overturned.It is hoped that this study can begin contributing to addressing the whole systems knowledge defi cit by fi rstly, establishing a scientifi cally-grounded systems theory framework for integrating data from different fi elds for the study of international politics; secondly, beginning the process of recognizing major geopolitical ruptures in the context of systemic crises driven by biophysical processes; thirdly, outlining the basis for a major, urgent new transdisciplinary research program bringing together the natural and social sciences to develop a holistic theoretical-empirical model of global crisis convergence; which in turn can pave the way for a fourth major, urgent new transdisciplinary action-research program on mitigating the impact of global crisis convergence, while transitioning human civilization to new more viable political economic structures that subsist in parity with their biophysical contexts.2.1 The Human-Environment System as a Complex Adaptive SystemThe idea of a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ pivots around the goal of understanding human activity as a whole. It is premised on the fact that as a single biological species, human beings share common individual and social characteristics through which they interact with each other, with other species, and with the biophysical environment. Global civilization constitutes the full mechanism of social organization by which this nexus of activities and interactions operates.I use a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ framework to examine multiple, seemingly disparate global and local crises. This does not obviate the specifi c and distinctive dynamics of those crises, but permits examination of how these crises interrelate with one another in the context of the overarching global system of which they are part. The theorization of human civilization as a “complex adaptive system” derives from the application of complex systems theory as developed in relation to biological systems and ecosystems (Kauffmann; Dyke; Homer-Dixon; Diamond). A rich and dense literature demonstrates that complex systems are found across the natural sciences in physics, chemistry, and biology (Ross and Arkin 2009 ), as well as in ecology (May et al. 2008 ) and economics (Farmer et al. 2012 ).A system exists whenever a plurality of entities subsists in which each entity functions in some sort of relationship with the others. A complex system exists when the relations between these parts leads the system as a whole to display emergent properties and behavior which cannot be reduced solely to the nature of its different parts and their relationships. Those emergent properties can be codifi ed as overarching rules that characterize the system’s structure as a whole. In some cases this can be done mathematically, although this is a less useful approach when examining human societies.A complex adaptive system exists when the system as a whole is able to adapt— to generate a collective shift in its internal behavior in order to survive. Thus, while the relations between parts of a system generates the emergent structures that comprise the system as a whole, those relationships are, in turn, restrained and enabled by those wider structures. This circular relationship is integral to the system’s capacity to adapt to new environmental conditions. In time this is done by evolution; more immediately this can be done by behavioral changes or species shifts. Equally, due to the nested and interconnected nature of the components of a complex adaptive system, small perturbations in one part can have ramifying effects on other parts of the system, depending on how they are connected. This sort of internal positive feedback process means that the overall structure of a system can be greatly impacted by seemingly random occurrences—those structures can either be reinforced or undermined by these internal feedback processes.When such internal feedback processes reach certain thresholds, or ‘tipping points’, they can induce fundamental re-ordering of key structures in the system as a whole—the convergence of multiple tipping points, in turn, can generate a systemwide adaptive cycle of re-structuring, a ‘phase shift’, through which the system undergoes a transition to a new equilibrium (Holling 2001 ).The human-environment system is complex and adaptive because it represents a historically evolving civilizational form comprised of a vast interlocking array of nested sub-systems, including some from the earth’s geology, resources, oceans, and atmosphere; multiple living and non-living ecosystems across these domains; and human systems, comprised of psychological, cultural and ideological fi elds, relations of production and associated modes of energy extraction, technological and economic systems, and political structures.Thus, the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ framework is a systems approach that attempts to analyze the complex interrelationships between multiple global crises and human activities as a whole, thus understanding them not simply as discrete crises and activities in themselves, but as component factors of a wider global humanenvironmental system with its own emergent properties and behaviors.This approach recognizes that each of these crises pertains to a specifi c subsystem in itself, with distinctive features and patterns of behavior, but equally recognizes that each of these sub-systems do not exist in isolation. Rather, their mutual interrelationship generates emergent patterns characterizing the system as a whole. Those emergent structural features, in turn, exert causal regulatory effects that shape, enable and constrain the behaviors of the sub-systems.A systems approach thus views particular crises and associated human activities as discrete sub-systems which are, nevertheless, inherently interconnected as subsystems in an emergent human-environmental system, captured through the concept of a world-scale human civilization. It is in this respect that the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ as an analytical framework is able to systemically locate multiple crises as interconnected features of a wider world-scale crisis in human civilization as an emergent macro-structure. By integrating detailed trans-disciplinary examination of crisis sub-systems with analysis of their systemic interconnections within the world-scale human-environment system, a much clearer picture of the precise drivers, dynamics and potential trajectories of these crises is possible. This permits discernment of a birds-eye perspective of overall civilizational structures and their emergent direction.Examining human civilization as a complex adaptive system, therefore, permits multiple global crises to be understood through the lens of a range of powerful concepts with solid empirical basis in the biophysical sciences—the thresholds and tipping points of feedback processes; how interconnections between different crises can generate amplifying feedbacks with the potential to accelerate the breaching of tipping points; the extent to which different crises can be seen as properly systemic— that is, related fundamentally to the key global structures integral to the prevailing dynamic of human civilization; and how these crises relate to the system’s adaptive capacity, in particular, whether they are generating a major ‘phase change’ in the system itself.In particular, this allows analysis of human civilization to return to a scientifi c framework defi ned by the thermodynamics of the fossil fuel system, and the evolution and adaptation of species, bringing in critical insights from the physical and natural sciences that can inform the development of robust historical and sociological theories.2.2 The Energy Metabolism of Human CivilizationApplications of complex systems approaches to social, environmental and economic phenomena have largely neglected the most fundamental factor in the evolution and adaptation of complex systems: energy metabolism.Extensive research in the biological and ecological sciences demonstrates that an organism’s relation to the environment is mediated fundamentally through the mode and manner by which it extracts energy from the environment, to maintain and improve its distance from thermodynamic equilibrium. Living systems extract free energy from the sun, store it, and use it. Further, they can reproduce as well as collect, process, and exchange information in order to control and direct energy and matter they receive from their environments (Terzis and Arp 2011 ; Hall et al. 1992 ). According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, physical systems display a tendency to dissipate energy and thus transition from states of order to increasing disorder. Therefore, physicist Erwin Schr?dinger defi ned a living system as an embodiment of “negative entropy” as they “extract order” from their environments to survive, adapt and evolve. (Schrodinger 1944 )A living system or organism is thus defi ned by its ability to store energy under energy fl ow, before dissipation. It develops, maintains and reproduces, or renews, itself by mobilizing material and energy extracted from the environment, which is stored internally through cyclic non-dissipative processes coupled to irreversible dissipative processes. This permits the organism to survive precisely through the consumption and ordering of energy within systemic biological processes organized through genetic information protocols. The capacity to extract, store and mobilize stored energy is therefore integral to a reproducing life cycle. Eventually, of course, the energy must be irreversibly dissipated as required by the Second Law. But the increasing complexity of a living system is related directly to its capacity to extract, store and mobilize stored energy, and to thereby stave off the thermodynamic dissipation of energy. (Ho 1999 )Organisms which successfully adapt to changing or challenging environmental conditions do so through the superior processing of information about those external conditions through genetic modifi cation, refl ecting increased effi ciencies in energy extraction, storage and mobilization in relationship with the environment. (Schneider and Kay 1994 )The thermodynamics of living systems applies, of course, not just to any single individual organism, but simultaneously to collections of organisms inhabiting specifi c environments. While human beings are the most advanced—that is, complex— biological organisms known to science, human civilization constitutes a complex adaptive system which has been able to maximize energy extraction, storage and mobilization from its environment far more effi ciently and powerfully than ever before. The astonishing complexity of human civilization is related directly to its capacity to harness energy from the environment through numerous sub-systemic processes of social organization, thus maintaining increasing distance from thermodynamic equilibrium (Odum 1994 ).This framework allows for a more complete empirically-grounded theorization of what the contemporary escalation of global environmental and economic crises entails for the current trajectory of human civilization. Over its historical evolution, human civilization has demonstrated a relationship with its environment involving escalating energy use and energy dissipation, with wide-ranging consequences for the stability of the global human-environment system.Social power is an organic constitution grounded in an exploitative relationship with nature by which energy is extracted from natural resources, transformed into a commodity (through production) and eventually consumed. Energy is thus the very condition of production—but to examine the fl uctuating relationship between the two requires the recognition of social power through property : that is, the way access to land, resources and technology to enable energy production is mediated through property rights, which in turn are related to confi gurations of class (Wood 1981 ; Aston et al. 1987 ; Rioux and Dufour 2008 ).It is therefore necessary, in examining the energy trajectory of human civilization as a whole, to investigate inequalities in social power and class in the context of differentiated access to land, resources and technology between various human groups, and how this relates to the thermodynamics of energy as applied to human society as a complex adaptive system. This will enable us to properly grasp the processes of extraction, transformation and consumption of energy through labor, and varying relationships between society, labor, technology and natural resources, that are integral to diagnosing human civilization’s current predicament (Foster et al. 2010 ; Hall and Klitgaard 2012 ).The historical development of human civilization illustrates an accelerating trend in global net energy production driven by a series of increasingly sophisticated technological breakthroughs, each linked to fundamental shifts in the humanenvironment relations and corresponding socio-political and economic systems of organization. These civilizational phase-shifts toward more complex forms can be conceptualized in multiple overlapping ways.These phase-shifts have encompassed fundamental transitions in the energy metabolism of human societies—in terms of both the types of energy extracted, and the relations of production by which this energy is extracted, stored and mobilized in society through the creation of goods and services. These energy sources include our own muscle and that of animals, as well as wood, wind, water, coal, oil, and nuclear power (LePoire et al. 2015 ). The relations of production accompanying these phase shifts have included the following social-property relations: huntergatherer, nomadic, pastoral, agrarian, feudalism, slavery, agrarian capitalism, industrial capitalism, and neoliberal fi nance capitalism, which is rapidly moving to a new phase of late capitalism predominated by information technology and artifi cial intelligence (Ahmed 2009 ).It is also important to note that each new phase-shift does not necessarily constitute a clean break with previous shifts, but in the course of increasing complexity often builds on or incorporates older structures within a new, wider structural context. One useful way of understanding this process in an evolutionary fashion is through Arthur Koestler’s concept of nested self-organizing hierarchical systems which successively incorporate less complex systems to create higher scales of overarching complexity (Pichler 1999 ).While the latest phase shift of neoliberal fi nance capitalism has been able to generate an unprecedented level of wealth within the system, it has simultaneously developed an unprecedented degree of global inequality between the core—consisting of a transnational nexus of class power centred in the former G8—dominating the world’s productive resources including energy, raw materials, military and information technology; and the periphery—whose countries remains largely subordinated to the global structures institutionalized by the core (Ahmed 2009 ; Tainter 1990 ).2.3 The Physics of System FailureToday, human civilization under late capitalism maintains its increasing distance from thermodynamic equilibrium via the throughput of vast quantities of increasingly depleted fossil fuel reserves, along with other fi nite and increasingly scarce resources such as metal ores, radionucleotides, rare earth elements, phosphate fertilizer, arable land, and fresh water (Nekola et al. 2013 ).One indicator of the system’s growing complexity today is the measure of material throughput, or economic growth—Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Under capitalist social-property relations, GDP must continuously increase through the maximization of private sector profi ts, simply for businesses to survive in the competitive marketplace and for the economy to maintain its ability to meet the consumption requirements of a growing population. However, as the complexity of human civilization has advanced, the continual growth in material throughput is correlated with an escalating rate of depletion of energy and raw materials, as well as an acceleration in the dissipation of energy through intensifying greenhouse gas emissions.Robust scientifi c assessments now demonstrate that the continuation of those biophysical processes of environmental degradation in a business-as-usual scenario will, before the end of the twenty-fi rst century, fundamentally undermine the biophysical basis of human civilization in its current mode of material organization and structural complexity. Further, the uncontrolled energy releases generated by these biophysical processes are manifested in climate change, extreme weather events, and natural disasters (Earth System Disruption); and drives geopolitical competition, social unrest, and violent confl ict (Human System Destabilization).These manifestations of dissipative energy release can be seen as distinctive feedback processes resulting from human civilization’s accelerating exploitation of fossil fuel energy sources within the context of the biophysical limits of the environment. In turn, these two strands of systemic feedbacks—Earth System Disruption (ESD) and Human System Destabilization (HSD)—are occurring within a single, overarching human-environment system, and thus are already inherently interconnected, therefore feeding back into each other.This mutual feedback process creates an amplifying global systemic feedback in which: (1) ESD drives HSD, which in turn generates ‘security’ issues perceived through the lens of ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ analysis; (2) this invites traditional securitized human responses that focus on the expansion of existing military, political and economic power to stabilize existing structures of authority and advance prevailing mechanisms of energy extraction and mobilization; (3) the entrenchment and expansion of existing structures undermines human civilization’s capacity to pursue structural modifications to ameliorate, mitigate or prevent [Earth Systems Disruption] ESD, thus intensifying ESD; (4) the feedback process continues as ESD drives further [Human System Destabilization] HSD.The trajectory of this amplifying global systemic feedback, carried to its logical conclusion and assuming no intervening shift, is simply the protracted, cascading collapse of human civilization in its current form toward increasingly less complex, and therefore less resource-intensive confi gurations, corresponding to available resources and constrained within the environmental limits imposed by accelerating climate change (Tainter 1990).ImpactsImpact: Impact CalculusStructural violence outweighs – it causes larger scale impacts– ignoring it makes those larger impact inevitable - reject their facts because suffering cannot express in numbers – only centering impact calc at the grassroots level matters.Simon Springer 11, Otago geography professor, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies,” Political Geography (30) pp. 90-98) (Simon, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies,” Political Geography (30) pp. 90-98) NCC2020The confounding effects of violence ensure that it is a phenomena shot through with a certain perceptual blindness. In his monumental essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin (1986) exposed our unremitting tendency to obscure violence in its institutionalized forms, and because of this opacity, our inclination to regard violence exclusively as something we can see through its direct expression. Yet the structural violence resulting from our political and economic systems ( Farmer, 2004 and Galtung, 1969), and the symbolic violence born of our discourses ( Bourdieu, 2001 and Jiwani, 2006), are something like the dark matter of physics, ‘[they] may be invisible, but [they have] to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what might otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective [or direct] violence’ ( Zizek, 2008: 2). These seemingly invisible geographies of violence – including the hidden fist of the market itself – have both ‘nonillusory effects’ ( Springer, 2008) and pathogenic affects in afflicting human bodies that create suffering ( Farmer, 2003), which can be seen if one cares to look critically enough. Yet, because of their sheer pervasiveness, systematization, and banality we are all too frequently blinded from seeing that which is perhaps most obvious. This itself marks an epistemological downward spiral, as ‘the economic’ in particular is evermore abstracted and its ‘real world’ implications are increasingly erased from collective consciousness ( Hart, 2008). ‘The clearest available example of such epistemic violence’, Gayatri Spivak (1988: 24–25) contends, ‘is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’, and it is here that the relationship between Orientalism and neoliberalism is revealed. Since Orientalism is a discourse that functions precisely due to its ability to conceal an underlying symbolic violence (Tuastad, 2003), and because the structural violence of poverty and inequality that stems from the political economies of neoliberalism is cast as illusory (Springer, 2008), my reflections on neoliberalism, Orientalism, and their resultant imaginative and material violent geographies are, as presented here, purposefully theoretical. As Derek Gregory (1993: 275) passionately argues, ‘human geographers have to work with social theory… Empiricism is not an option, if it ever was, because the “facts” do not (and never will) “speak for themselves”, no matter how closely… we listen’. Although the ‘facts’ of violence can be assembled, tallied, and categorized, the cultural scope and emotional weight of violence can never be entirely captured through empirical analysis. After Auschwitz, and now after 9/11, casting a sideways glance at violence through the poetic abstractions of theory must be considered as an enabling possibility. This is particularly the case with respect to understanding the geographies of violence, as our understandings of space and place are also largely poetic (Bachelard, 1964 and Kong, 2001)Invisible suffering come first – only by analyzing inequality can we solve extinction Tamás Szentes 8, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society” ) []=gender corrected NCC2020It’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 [hu]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.Impact: Liberal WarsThe American empire uses liberal militarism to cause unending global war Brad Evans 11, Lecturer in Political Violence at the University of Leeds, Summer 2011, “The Liberal War Thesis: Introducing the Ten Key Principles of Twenty-First-Century Biopolitical Warfare,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 110, No. 3, p. 747-756 NCC2020When the historian Sir Michael Howard delivered the prestigious Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge University in 1987, he posed one of the most pertinent questions of our times: what is the relationship between liberalism and war?1 For many, the fact that this question was posed at all represented a remarkable political departure. In international politics, liberalism has conventionally been associated with the Kant-inspired virtues of perpetual peace, along with the commitment to uphold human rights and justice. Preaching peaceful cohabitation among the world of peoples, liberal advocates have therefore made claim to the superiority of their enlightened praxis on the basis that they enjoy a monopoly on the terms global security, peace, and prosperity. While liberals take this for granted, for Howard therein lay the dilemma: despite being shrouded in universalist and pacifist discourse, liberal practice has actually been marked historically by war and violence. Howard’s concern, not unlike criticisms of Carl Schmitt’s, was clear: “His target was the way in which the liberal universalization of war in pursuit of perpetual peace impacted on the heterogeneous and adversarial character of international politics, translating war into crusades with only one of two outcomes: endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cultures.”2Despite the importance of Howard’s initial provocation, he nevertheless failed to come to terms with the exact nature of liberal war-making efforts. He merely chided liberals for their naive faith in the human spirit, which, although admirable, was at best idealistic and at worst dangerous. Liberalism is not simply a set of ideals; neither is it some conscience of the political spirit. Liberalism is a regime of power that wages the destiny of the species on the success of its own political strategies. Before we map the implications of this for our understanding of war, an important point of clarification should be made. Unlike reified attempts in international relations thinking to offer definitive truths about war, what I present here as the liberal war thesis does not pretend to explain every single conflict. It does not deny the existence of geostrategic battles, and neither does it deny the fact that any single war can reveal a number of competing motivations. Like security, war can be written and strategically waged in many different ways depending on the key strategic referent. Wars can be multiple.So what, then, makes a war liberal? Here I offer ten fundamental tenets that set liberal war apart from conventional political struggles:1. Liberal wars are fought over the modalities of life itself. Liberalism is undoubtedly a complex historical phenomenon, but if there is one defining singularity to its war-making efforts, then it is the underlying biopolitical imperative, which justifies its actions in relation to the protection and advancement of modes of existence. Liberals continuously draw reference to life to justify military force.3 War, if there is to be one, must be for the protection and improvement of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favor. More recently, for instance, it has underwritten the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation that is seen to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response.4 If liberal peace can therefore be said to imply something more than the mere absence of war, so it is the case that liberal war is immeasurably more complex than the simple presence of military hostilities. With war appearing integral to the logic of peace insofar as it conditions the very possibility of liberal rule, humanity’s most meaningful expression actually appears through the battles fought in its name. It would be incorrect, however, to think that this logic represents a recent departure.5 Life has always been the principal object for liberal political strategies. Hence, while the liberal way of rule is by definition biopolitical, as it revolves around the problems posed by species life, so it is the case that liberal ways of war are inherently biopolitical, as they, too, are waged over the same productive properties that life is said to possess. The reason contemporary forms of conflict are therefore seen to be emergent, complex, nonlinear, and adaptive is not incidental. Mirroring the new social morphology of life, the changing nature of conflict is preceded by the changing ontological account of species being that appears exponentially more powerful precisely because it is said to display post-Newtonian qualities.2. Liberal wars operate within a global imaginary of threat. Ever since Immanuel Kant imagined the autonomous individual at peace with the wider political surroundings, the liberal subject has always been inserted into a more expansive terrain of productive cohabitation that is potentially free of conflict. While this logic has been manifest through local systems of liberal power throughout its history, during the 1990s a global imaginary of threat appeared that directly correlated liberal forms of governance with less planetary endangerment. This ability to collapse the local into the global resulted in an unrivaled moment of liberal expansionism.6Such expansion did not, however, result from some self-professed planetary commitment to embrace liberal ideals. Liberal interventionism proceeded instead on the basis that localized emergency and crises demanded response. Modes of incorporation were therefore justified on the grounds that although populations still exist beyond the liberal pale, for their own betterment they should be included. This brings us to the martial face of liberal power. While liberalism is directly fueled by the universal belief in the righteousness of its mission, since there is no universally self-evident allegiance to the project, war is necessarily universalized in its pursuit of peace: “However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims.”7Impact: Turns CaseImpact turns case, and solvency claims are too reductive--- Global competition and security logic ---NOT unethical people---produce conflict and insecurity. Marcelo de Araujo 14, professor for Ethics at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, “Moral Enhancement and Political Realism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(2): 29-43 NCC2020Some 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 me that this objection misses the point of the moral enhancement idea. Many people, across different countries, already share 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 effective and safe – may also help us in coping with the threat of devastating wars in the future. The assumption that there is a relationship 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; Raki? 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 from 1932, that the main cause of wars is a human tendency to “hatred and destruction” (in German: ein Trieb zum Hassen und Vernichtung). Freud went as far 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” (?ber 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 should be explained by means of a theory about human nature. In a reply to Savulescu and Persson, Sparrow correctly argues that “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 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 the 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 “structural realism”) is, first, that the states are the main, if not the only, relevant actors in the context of international relations; and 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 (Mearsheimer 2001, 18). According to Waltz and Mearsheimer, it is this structure that compels individuals to act as they do 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 Mearsheimer depart from “human nature realism,” their version of political realism has also sometimes been called “neo-realism” (Booth 1991, 533). Thus, even if 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 the third world war by mistake (Cirincione 2008, 382).3 But under the crushing pressure of having to decide in such a short 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 accident is likely to increase (Myers 2014). What has to be changed, therefore, is not human moral dispositions, but the 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 structure of the system of states. While moral enhancement may possibly have desirable results in some areas of human cooperation that do not badly threaten our security – such as donating food, medicine, and money to poorer countries – it will not motivate political leaders to dismantle 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 this world. The word “structure” denotes merely a political arrangement in which there are no powerful law-enforcing institutions. And in the absence of the 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 view, however, addressing major threats to the survival of humankind in the future by means of 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.Impact: WarSecurity logic makes it’s own enemies. This drives wars towards eliminating fake threats. The impact is extinction. Evans 16 – Brad Evans, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, “Liberal Violence: From the Benjaminian Divine to the Angels of History,” Theory & Event, Volume 19, Issue 1 NCC2020Liberal War as Divine ViolenceDespite universal claims to peaceful co-habitation, liberal regimes have been compelled to make war on whatever threatens it40 . This is why the liberal account of freedom has depended upon a lethal principle, which discursively wrapped in the language of rights, security and justice, inaugurated planetary state of warfare and siege. It has promoted an account of freedom that, in the process of taking hold of the problem of the planetary life of political subjects, linked human potentiality to the possibility of its ruination. If liberal violence has then produced a necessary lethal corollary in its mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species in order to alleviate unnecessary suffering; so it has also needed to foster a belief in the necessity of violence in the name of that suffering and vulnerability to which it continually stakes a claim.The Liberal wars of the past two decades in particular have revealed a number of defining principles41 . Aside from relying upon technological supremacy and universal claims to truth, they have been overwhelmingly driven by a bio-political imperative, which has displaced concerns with Sovereign integrities with forms of violence carried out in the name of an endangered humanity. In this regard, they have destroyed the Westphalia pretence, seeing the catastrophes of our global age in fact as a condition of possibility to further the liberal will to rule. Since incorporation in this setting has proceed on the basis that all life should necessarily be included within its strategic orbit, the veritable evisceration of any sense of “the outside” (as conceived in terms of its political imaginary) has led to the blurring of all conventional demarcations between friends/enemies, citizens/soldiers, times of war/times of peace. What is more, as life itself became increasingly central to questions of security, issues of development as broadly conceived would no longer be regarded as peripheral to the war effort. It would in fact become a central motif as most notably articulated in the strategic mantras “War by Other means” and “War for Hearts and Minds”. Not only would this point to new forms of de-politicisation which, less about Schmittean exceptionalism, were more explicable in terms of the fundamental political and social transformation of societies. It would also lead to the production of violent subjects, as the recourse to violence became sure testament to a conception of humanity realised through the wars fought in its name. Liberal violence, in other words, proved to be unbounded, unlimited and without conventional Sovereign warrant – namely revealing of the fundamental principles of what Benjamin once elected to term “the divine”.Diagnosing the liberal wars of the past two decades as a form of divine violence offers a more disturbing reading of the violence of the liberal encounter. If the violence of political realism, at least in theory, appreciated the value of limits and boundaries, what seems to define the lethality of liberal freedom has been a commitment to war without boundaries, hence limitless. As Dillon and Julian Reid acutely observed:[L]iberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species ... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of war ... Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be able to say how much killing is enough... [However] it has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing’42 .This brings us to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature43 . Reworking the well-rehearsed liberal peace thesis, for Pinker, the reason we have become less warlike today can be account for in terms of our liberal maturity. Leaving aside the evident theological undertones to Pinker’s work, along with the numerous empirical flaws in his thesis, his not so original thesis at least accredits its all too Euro-centric sources of inspiration on matters of civility: ‘The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism’. John Gray has been rightly suspicious of the entire project and claims being made here:The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient... No doubt we have become less violent in some ways. But it is easy for liberal humanists to pass over the respects in which civilisation has retreated. Pinker is no exception. Just as he writes off mass killing in developing countries as evidence of backwardness without enquiring whether it might be linked in some way to peace in the developed world, he celebrates “re-civilisation”... without much concern for those who pay the price of the re-civilising process44 .Gray showed his evident concerns here with the promissory nature of liberal violence. Indeed, what he elsewhere terms the violence of the liberal missionary, reposes Nietzsche’s further instance that ‘god is dead and man has killed him’ with a devastating humanistic critique45 . Such violence, in the end, however has proved to be politically, ethically and economically narcissistic. Just as liberal advocates in the zones of crises now increasingly find themselves operating within fortified protectorates as part of a great separation from the world46 , this has been matched, albeit it ways that initially appear disconnected, by new forms of violence which also takes place almost exclusively at a distance. Indeed, as liberal actors increasingly give up on the idea that the world may be transformed for the better, new modalities of violence are emerging which seem to be more logically in fitting with the new politics of catastrophe that increasingly defines our terrifyingly normal times. As the promise of violence and catastrophe now appears inescapable, insecurity is becoming normalised, dystopian realism becoming the prevailing imaginaries for political rule, and once cited claims to emancipation, unending progress and lasting security for peoples all but abandoned47.The politics of catastrophe and its relationship to “end of times” narratives adds another layer to our theological enquiry. As Jacob Taubes once noted48 , there is perhaps something theologically different at work here between the pre-modern apocalyptic movements and the catastrophic reasoning now defining the contemporary moment. For all their nihilism and monotheistic servitude, at least the apocalyptic movements of yesteryear could imagine a better world than already existed. There is therefore a vast difference between the subjects which names its disaster ‘apocalypse’ to that which reads disaster in terms of ‘catastrophe.’49 Unlike apocalypse, there is no beyond the catastrophic. Its mediation on the “end of times” is already fated. Catastrophe denies political transformation. It demands instead a forced partaking in a world that is deemed to be insecure unto the end. The upshot being, as all things become the source of endangerment, the human becomes the source of our veritable undoing.Angels of HistoryEvery war produces its casualties. Some of these stand out in terms of the sheer body count. The horror of mass warfare reduced to the most banal forms of inhuman quantification. Others, no less important, are its political and philosophical losses. What is increasingly clear is that the past two decades of liberal warfare, punctured but not initially determined by the tragedy of the events of September 11th 2001, ultimately put the very concept of war into question. The reluctance to officially declare war, even when our involvement in the politically motivated violence appears to be all too evident, now demands a move beyond the dominant frames which have shaped discussions for the past two decades. There is an important caveat to address here. What happened during last decade of the Global Wars on Terror cannot simply be inserted into a post 9/11 frames for analysis. Much of what passed for post 9/11 justice or military excessiveness was slowly maturing in the global borderlands for some considerable time. If there is a departure it needs to be accounted for against this broader post-Cold War humanitarian sensibility through which liberalism absorbed local crises into its political fabric to further condition its violent interventions.It has been all too easy for political and social theorists to put the blame for the violence and atrocities of the Global Wars on Terror onto the shoulders of George Bush and Dick Cheney. This has allowed liberals to appropriate Schmitt as one of their own, hence reducing the entire war effort to the reductionist measures of “US hegemony/exceptionalism”. Such retreats back into state centric models have not only proved unhelpful in terms of questioning the normalization of violence, they have failed to grasp the complexity of war – especially how questions of universality, economy, power and the formation of political subjectivities can be rethought through violent encounters. What is more, the limits of these analyses have been further evidenced by the complete lack of engagement with political theology, failing to recognize the violence of universal ambitions, along with the need to put the contemporary legacy of Kant on trial. Let us not forget Tony Blair and Barack Obama have embodied the liberal Kantian idea of political leadership better than any others throughout the history of liberalism. Any change in liberal fortunes must be understood in this context.We have witnessed in recent times profound changes in the violent cartography of what is a post-Iraq liberal influence. Instead of actively and one-sidedly engaging the world, humanely, violently or otherwise, what we are now encountering are new political arrangements shaped by forms of distancing and technological realignment. Just as liberal agents in the dangerous borderland areas increasingly find themselves operating within fortified protectorates as part of a great separation from the world, this is matched, albeit it ways that initially appear disconnected, by new forms of violence that also take place at a distance. The political and philosophical significance of this should not be underestimated. The technological and strategic confluence between the remote management of populations (notably surveillance) and new forms of violence are indicative of the narcissism of a liberal project that reeks of the worst excesses of technological determinism. Instead of looking with confidence towards a post-liberal commitment to transforming the living conditions of the world of peoples, what has taken its place is an intellectually barren landscape offering no alternative other than to live out our catastrophically fated existence. This is instructive regarding how we might envisage “the end of liberal times” as marked out and defined by this incommensurable sense of planetary siege. It also demands new thinking about the relationship between violence, technology and theology in these uncertain times.The liberal wars of the past decade have been premised on two notable claims to superiority. The first was premised on the logic of technology where it was assumed that high-tech sophistry could replace the need to suffer casualties. The second was premised upon a more humanitarian ethos, which demanded local knowledge and engagement with dangerous populations. The narcissistic violence of the Global War on Terror has put this secondary vision into lasting crises as the violence of liberal encounter has fatefully exposed any universal commitment to rights and justice. Not only did we appear to be the principle authors of violence, thereby challenging the notion that underdevelopment was the true cause of planetary endangerment, populations within liberal societies have lost faith in worldly responsibilities. Metaphysical hubris displaced by a catastrophic reasoning that quite literally places us at the point of extinction. Violence as such has assumed non-locatable forms as liberalism is coming to terms with the limits to its territorial will to rule. Physically separated from a world it no longer understands, it is now left to the digital and technological recoupment of distance to shape worldly relations with little concern for human relations.Drone violence is particularly revealing of this shift in the liberal worldview. While the first recorded drone strike was authorised by President George Bush in Pakistan on 18th June 2004, it has been during the Presidency of Obama that the use of the technology has become the more favoured method for dealing with recalcitrant elements in the global borderlands. Indeed, it seems, whilst the Bush administration favoured extraordinary rendition, detention and torture, the Obama policy for preventing the growth of inmates in camps such as Guantanamo has been their execution. Hence inhumane torture and barbarity replaced by the more dignified and considerate method of targeted assassination! While debates on drone violence tend to centre on questions its legality, especially whether it fits within established rules of war, little attention is given to the wider political moment and how the violence points to the changing nature of liberal power and its veritable retreat from the world of people.Whereas Bush and Blair launched a one-sided territorial assault on Iraq and Afghanistan in order to promote ‘civilisation’, Obama has waged his war in the deregulated atmospheric shadows where technological supremacy allows for the continuation of uninhibited forms of violence, while addressing the fact that the previous interventions failed by any given measure. Hence, this time, out of respect for public sensibilities a ‘precise’ or ‘surgical’ form of violence is delivered remotely to its distant adversaries. We should not forget however that the technologies, infrastructures and aesthetics essential for remote warfare are essentially the same as those that support the economy and consumer society. Targeted drone-strikes and the advertising that maintains the consumer hothouse essentially rely on the same computer-based technologies and algorithmic sense-making tools. Put another way, how Amazon mechanically predicts your next book purchase is not fundamentally different from how adversarial behavioural patterns are isolated in authoring a signature-kill.AffirmativeAff: Alt FailsSolving problems depends on having a political strategy—their alternative does not workTara McCormack 10, Lecturer, International Politics, University of Leicester, CRITIQUE, SECURITY AND POWER: THE POLITICAL LIMITS TO EMPANCIPATORY APPROACHES, New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 58-59. NCC2020Contemporary critical and emancipatory approaches reject the possibility of reaching an objective evaluation of the world or social reality because they reject the possibility of differentiating between facts and values. For the contemporary critical theorists, theory can only ever be for someone and for some purpose. As this is so then quite logically critical theorists elevate their own values to be the most important aspect of critical theory. As a result of the rejection of the fact/value distinction we see within the work of contemporary critical theorists a highly unreflective certainty about the power of their moral position. Critical theorists argue that all theory is normative, they offer in its place better norms: ones, as we have seen, that will lead to emancipation and will help the marginalised. The claims made for the central role of the values of the theorist reveal the theoretical limits of critical and emancipatory theory today. Yet even good or critical theory has no agency, and only political action can lead to change. Theory does of course play an important role in political change. This must be the first step towards a critical engagement with contemporary power structures and discourses. In this sense, we can see that it is critical theory that really has the potential to solve problems, unlike problem-solving theory which seeks only to ensure the smooth functioning of the existing order. Through substantive analysis the critical theorist can transcend the narrow and conservative boundaries of problem-solving theory by explaining how the problematic arises. Unlike problem-solving theory, critical theory makes claims to be able to explain why and how the social world functions as it does, it can go beyond the ‘given framework for action’. The critical theorist must therefore be able to differentiate between facts (or social reality) and values, this ability is what marks the critical theorist apart from the traditional or problem-solving theorists, who cannot, because of their values and commitment to the existing social world, go beyond the ‘given framework for action’. If we cannot differentiate between our desires or values or norms (or our perspective, to put it in Cox’s terms) and actually occurring social and political and historical processes and relationships, it is hard to see how we can have a critical perspective (Jahn, 1998: 614). Rather, through abolishing this division we can no longer draw the line between what we would like and everything else, and thereby contemporary critical theories are as much of a dogma as problem-solving theories. Contemporary critical theorists are like modern-day alchemists, believing that they can transform the base metal of the unjust international order into a golden realm of equality and justice through their own words. For contemporary critical theorists, all that seems that the crucial step towards progress to a better world order is for the theorist to state that their theory is for the purposes of emancipation and a just world order.We have to transform systems from the inside out – otherwise it’s just empty criticism.McCormack, PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster, 2010(Tara, Critique, Security and Power: The political limits to emancipatory approaches, pg 59-61) NCC2020In 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.Radical security kritiks don’t have a blueprint--- the plan makes one.Loader, Oxford criminology professor, 2007(Ian, “Civilizing Security”, guessoumiss.files.2011/08/civilizing-security.pdf) NCC2020The strands of radical thought outlined in this chapter offer a cogent critique of the state and its securitizing practices. It is a critique that appears able to capture important aspects of a historical record that has seen states time and again, in both authoritarian and democratic contexts, allocate the benefits and burdens of policing in ways that systematically protect the security interests of powerful constituencies at the expense of those of the poor and dispossessed. It supplies, in addition, a cogent account of the dangers of placing security at the ideological heart of government, of the capacity of security politics to colonize public policy and pervade social life in ways that threaten democratic values and sustain fear-laden, other-disregarding forms of political subjectivity and collective identity. In these respects, this variant of state scepticism offers a critique of the operation and effects of state power that in many significant respects we share (N. Walker 2000; Loader 2002). But it also poses what are undoubtedly some pro- found challenges to the position we wish here to construct and defend. If we are to make a persuasive case for both the good of security, and the indispensability of the state to the production of that good, then we need to find a means of rising to them. These objections then are far from trivial, and we have not devoted this chapter to them simply in order to knock them down. But they nonetheless arise from a standpoint that is not itself without shortcomings, as we hope to show in meeting them. As a prelude to the more sustained effort along these lines that we offer in part II, let us consider briefly what these shortcomings are. For analytic purposes, they may usefully be put into three groups. This radical variant of state scepticism tends, first of all, to underplay the openness of political systems and the theoretical and political prospects that this affords. It displays, in particular, a structural fatalism that overlooks the overlap between the production of specific and general order, such that disadvantaged groups and communities have a considerable stake not only in controlling state power, but also in using public resources (including policing resources) as a means of generating more secure forms of economic and social existence. It also remains insufficiently attentive to how the mix between general and specific order (the extent, in other words, to which policing is shaped by common as well as factional interests) is conditioned by political struggle and the varieties of institutional settlement to which this gives rise, thereby varying over time and between polities. Much the same point, moreover, can be directed at the radical critique of the violence that underpins liberal political orders that aim to be free of such violence. One finds here a quite proper insistence on the troubling conundrum that democratic polities ultimately depend upon coercion to enforce collective decisions and protect democratic institutions. But this point is hammered home in terms that are overly sweeping and reductionist - often, as in the writings of Agamben (2004a), as a philosophical claim that invites but resists sociological scrutiny. If 'there is always a violence at the heart of every form of political and legal authority' (Newman 2004:575), upon what grounds can we distinguish between, or develop a critique of, the security-seeking practices of particular states - and why would we bother? Radical anti-statism evinces, secondly, a preference for social and political criticism over social and political reconstruction. It favours a politics that privileges the monitoring, exposure and critique of the sys- tematic biases of state power {as, for instance, in the indefatigable efforts of the British-based NGO Statewatch), one that implicitly or expressly holds that 'security' is so stained by its uncivil association with the (military and police) state that the only available radical strat- egy is to destabilize the term itself, while contesting the practices that are enacted under its name (Dalby 1997: 6; see, also, Dillon 1996: ch. 1). There can, from this vantage point, be no progressive democratic politics aimed at civilizing security. Rather, one is left with a politics of critique, and a failure of political imagination, that leaves radically underspecified the feasible or desirable alternatives to current institutional configurations and practices, or else merely gestures towards the possibility of transcendent forms of non-state communal ordering - as in George Rikagos's (2002: 150) claim that 'the only real alternatives to current policing practices are pre-capitalist, non-commodified security arrangements'. Finally, one finds what we think of as a one-sided appraisal of the sources of inequality and insecurity in the world today. This leftist anti- statist sensibility tends, in the ways we have demonstrated, towards an account of social injustice that views it as the product of the state's malign and coercive interventions rather than of its impotence and neglect. Here one finds a curious parallel with the neo-liberalism con- sidered in the last chapter - the state remains the problem. But one also encounters a critique of security politics that views it as tied to the pro- duction of authoritarian government - as if security is in some essential fashion inimical to democracy and human rights. Here the radical critic begins to inhabit similar ground to that occupied by what we characterized in chapter 1 as the 'security lobby'. They assess the landscape very differently and commit to diametrically opposed political purposes. But they cling commonly and tenaciously to the belief that security stands opposed to liberty. Our aim, in part II, is to move beyond these positions and opposi- tions: first, by retrieving the idea of security as a public good that is axiomatic both to the production of other goods (most directly, liberty) and to the constitution of democratic political communities; second, by arguing that the production of this good demands not the wholesale critique and transcendence of state forms, but more robust regulatory interventions by democratized state institutions. We must first, however, factor into our positive case two further critiques of the state, starting with the claim that it is a cultural monolith.Blaming security logic for everything is incorrect—not all security logic is violent. Focusing on base assumption forecloses the possibility for internal institutional reform. Nunes, Warwick international studies professor, 2012(Joao, “Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies”, Security Dialogue, 43.4, SAGE NCC2020In the works of these authors, one can identify a tendency to see security as inherently connected to exclusion, totalization and even violence. The idea of a ‘logic’ of security is now widely present in the critical security studies literature. Claudia Aradau (2008: 72), for example, writes of an ‘exclusionary logic of security’ underpinning and legitimizing ‘forms of domination’. Rens van Munster (2007: 239) assumes a ‘logic of security’, predicated upon a ‘political organization on the exclusionary basis of fear’. Laura Shepherd (2008: 70) also identifies a liberal and highly problematic ‘organizational logic’ in security. Although there would probably be disagreement over the degree to which this logic is inescapable, it is symptomatic of an overwhelmingly pessimistic outlook that a great number of critical scholars are now making the case for moving away from security. The normative preference for desecuritization has been picked up in attempts to contest, resist and ‘unmake’ security (Aradau, 2004; Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 2007). For these contributions, security cannot be reconstructed and political transformation can only be brought about when security and its logic are removed from the equation (Aradau, 2008; Van Munster, 2009; Peoples, 2011). This tendency in the literature is problematic for the critique of security in at least three ways. First, it constitutes a blind spot in the effort of politicization. The assumption of an exclusionary, totalizing or violent logic of security can be seen as an essentialization and a moment of closure. To be faithful to itself, the politicization of security would need to recognize that there is nothing natural or necessary about security – and that security as a paradigm of thought or a register of meaning is also a construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance through practice. The exclusionary and violent meanings that have been attached to security are themselves the result of social and historical processes, and can thus be changed. Second, the institution of this apolitical realm runs counter to the purposes of critique by foreclosing an engagement with the different ways in which security may be constructed. As Matt McDonald (2012) has argued, because security means different things for different people, one must always understand it in context. Assuming from the start that security implies the narrowing of choice and the empowerment of an elite forecloses the acknowledgment of security claims that may seek to achieve exactly the opposite: alternative possibilities in an already narrow debate and the contestation of elite power.5 In connection to this, the claims to insecurity put forward by individuals and groups run the risk of being neglected if the desire to be more secure is identified with a compulsion towards totalization, and if aspirations to a life with a degree of predictability are identified with violence. Finally, this tendency blunts critical security studies as a resource for practical politics. By overlooking the possibility of reconsidering security from within – opting instead for its replacement with other ideals – the critical field weakens its capacity to confront head-on the exceptionalist connotations that security has acquired in policymaking circles. Critical scholars run the risk of playing into this agenda when they tie security to exclusionary and violent practices, thereby failing to question security actors as they take those views for granted and act as if they were inevitable. Overall, security is just too important – both as a concept and as a political instrument – to be simply abandoned by critical scholars. As McDonald (2012: 163) has put it, If security is politically powerful, is the foundation of political legitimacy for a range of actors, and involves the articulation of our core values and the means of their protection, we cannot afford to allow dominant discourses of security to be confused with the essence of security itself. In sum, the trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations. The politicization of security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security ideas and practices; however, it has paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the meaning of security itself. By foreclosing the possibility of alternative notions of security, this imbalanced politicization weakens the analytical capacity of critical security studies, undermines its ability to function as a political resource and runs the risk of being politically counterproductive. Seeking to address these limitations, the next section revisits emancipatory understandings of security.Aff: Policy FirstThe solution-oriented approach of the affirmative is better at teaching us to fix problems in the long-termJohn Hird 17, Dean, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and Professor, Political Science and Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “How Effective Is Policy Analysis?” DOES POLICY ANALYSIS MATTER?: EXPLORING ITS EFFECTIVENESS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE, ed. L.S.Friedman, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017, p. 75-76. **edited for language NCC2020Classical policy analysis, however absent from actual policy making, remains an important vehicle for teaching policy analysts the connections between their analysis and the policymaking world in which their recommendations would live. Even if it implies more power than analysts will ever have, classical policy analysis teaches that politics, law, implementation, social structures, organizational behavior, and other factors are critical to policy outcomes and must play key roles in thinking through possible ways to address policy problems. Bringing policy ideas to fruition, bridging the worlds of research and policy making, is a critical skill for analysts to develop.In addition, policy schools are instilling in prospective policy analysts the structure and habits of mind to engage successfully in the policy enterprise. 28 Teaching disciplined thinking for public service is important. Policy analysts not only have a problem-oriented, interdisciplinary approach to policy and the ability to synthesize and bring policy relevance to problems that social scientists are not trained for, but they understand the "rational lunacy [inconsistency] of policy-making systems" (Weiss 2009).In the absence of written classical policy analyses, policy analysts become their human embodiment. Their training will provide a mental picture of how a classical policy analysis should be performed. They can derive elements of policy analysis from writing position papers, briefing policy makers, and controlling meetings. They anticipate counterarguments and frame their analyses recognizing alternative options. In short, the mental map of a policy analysis allows good policy analysts not only to be effective in their jobs but also to advance into the public debate the appropriate elements of a policy analysis. Further, the problem orientation of policy analysis focuses at least some attention on social problems, not just political expediency. The role of policy analysts is not merely to translate research for policy makers, but to use creative means to turn available knowledge about the implications of various policy options into actionable policy recommendations appropriate for their clients. This is a subtle skill requiring attention to both political realities and the best available research.Finally, prospective policy analysts are instructed repeatedly about the importance of their relationship to the client(s), yet far less attention is paid to the other part of the policy analyst's relationship: to the community of knowledge producers. Policy analysts play critical roles as intermediaries between "custodians of the knowable" and policy makers. Their training should include the ability to understand and interpret the academic literature on a topic at a far deeper level than most journalists have the time or, often, the analytic skill set to uncover. Identifying and connecting pertinent knowledge and analysis with policy makers should be a core principle of a public policy education. Policy analysts may offer the central means to provide policy makers with the key elements of classical policy analysis, though not in the way, through written reports, it was originally conceived. Creating a profession for committed, accomplished, and well-trained individuals to participate in the world of public policy may be among the most important contributions of policy analysis education.Doing actual policies are more important than ideological critiqueMolly Cochran 99, Assistant Professor, International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology, “From Moral Imagination to International Public Spheres: The Political and Institutional Implications of Pragmatic Critique,” NORMATIVE THEORY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 272. NCC2020To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist debates continue, while we are still unsure as to what we can legitimately identify as a feminist ethical/political concern, while we still are unclear about the relationship between discourse and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we proceed with analysis of both the material (institutional and structural) as well as the discursive. This holds not only for feminists, but for all theorists oriented towards the goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present social sciences climate of epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/political concerns hang in the balance. We cannot afford to wait for the meta-theoretical questions to be conclusively answered. Those answers may be unavailable. Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alternative institutional order to appear before an emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have before us a chicken and egg question of which comes first: sorting out the metatheoretical issues or working out which practices contribute to a credible institutional vision. The two questions can and should be pursued together, and can be via moral imagination. Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material conditions which limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought and examining what yields. In this respect, I believe international ethics as pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.Aff: Link Ans—ChinaAttempting IR predictions about China is both possible and desirable---even if inaccurate---because giving up on threat assessment makes the security dilemma inevitable.Joseph K. Clifton 11, Claremont McKenna College, “Disputed Theory and Security Policy: Responding to the "Rise of China”,” 4-25-2011, NCC2020First, motives can be known. Mearsheimer is correct in observing that assessing motives can be difficult, but this does not mean that the task is impossible. There clearly are ways of finding out information about the goals of states and the means with which they plan to achieve them. One of the most important roles of intelligence analysts, for example, is to determine state interests and expected behavior based on obtained information. The possibility that information may be flawed should not lead to a rejection of all information. People make decisions based on less than perfect knowledge all of the time. This ability to know motives extends to future motives, because an analyst can use information such as historical trends to observe consistencies or constant evolutions of motives. Prediction of the future is necessarily less certain in its accuracy, but the prediction can still be made.104 Second, even if there is still some uncertainty of motives, the rational response is not to assume absolute aggression. Assuming aggressive motive in a situation of uncertainty ignites the security dilemma, which could actually decrease a state’s security. Mearsheimer calls this tragic, but it is not necessary. An illustrative example is Mearsheimer’s analysis of the German security situation were the United States to withdraw its military protection. Mearsheimer argues that it would be rational for Germany to develop nuclear weapons, since these weapons would provide a deterrent, and it would also be rational for nuclear European powers to wage a preemptive war against Germany to prevent it from developing a nuclear deterrent. 105 This scenario is not rational for either side because it ignores motives. If Germany knows that other states will attack if it were to develop nuclear weapons, then it would not be rational for it to develop nuclear weapons. And if other states know that Germany’s development of nuclear weapons is only as a deterrent, then it would not be rational to prevent German nuclear development. The point is that the security dilemma exists because of a lack of motivational knowledge, so the proper response is to try to enhance understanding of motives, not discard motivational knowledge altogether. Misperception is certainly a problem in international politics, but reducing misperception would allow states to better conform to defensive realist logic, which results in preferable outcomes relative to offensive realism. 106 Assessing motives is vital in the case of the rise of China, because mutually preferable outcomes can be achieved if China is not an aggressive power, as offensive realism would have to assume, but is actually a status quo power with aims that have limited effect on the security of the U.S. and other potentially affected countries. I do not mean here to claim with certainty that China is and will always be a status quo power, and policymakers likely have access to more intentional information than what is publicly known. At the very least, valuing motivational assessments empowers policymakers to act on this knowledge, which is preferable because of the possibility of reducing competition and conflict.Aff: Impact Ans—Liberal ViolenceGlobal liberal civil war is an ahistorical mythTeschke, Sussex IR professor, 2011(Benno-Gerhard, “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory”, International Theory, ) NCC2020For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification and de-formalization of war in the international construction of liberal-constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt's ‘spaceless universalism’. In this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify Schmitt's long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and de-politicizations’ (Schmitt 1993). But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of a succession of confrontations between the carrier-nations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now. For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist heartland were grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence. For this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal-capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Gro?raum – was not deeply influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political–existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these confrontations were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity. Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt, Suharto's Indonesia, Pahlavi's Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which were and are actively managed and supported by the West as anti-liberal Schmittian states of emergency, with concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical stability and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested state-building projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/enemy groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories of analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power and the eventual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These are conflicts within a world, which seem to push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’, which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American supremacy possible in the first place.Misunderstands liberalism and how fear operates in it-we use it productively. Williams, Ottawa public and international affairs, 2011(Michael, “Securitization and the liberalism of fear”, Security Dialogue, 42.4-5, SAGE) NCC2020In contrast to the narrowly rationalistic liberalism that is the focus of the critiques alluded to above, the liberalism of fear has a number of affinities with securitization theory.4 It is resolutely anti-utopian. It is, in a philosophical sense, non-foundationalist. It is sceptical, seeing a world where violence (actual or potential) is and will remain an ineradicable part of political life. It sides with what Emerson once called the ‘party of memory’ in contrast to the ‘party of hope’ (see Shklar, 1998: 8), insisting on facing up to the worst things that human beings have shown themselves capable of doing to one another, and trying to avoid them. It is suspicious of and generally eschews grand moral visions and philosophical or theo-political schemas, which it tends to see as sources of obscurantism and conflict rather than emancipation and progress. It has no ‘strong’ ontology, in either a rationalist or a social constructivist (self–other) sense.5 It rejects the identification of liberalism with an abstract rationalism, a narrow utilitarianism, Kantian formalism, a programme of indisputable natural rights or a flat proceduralism.6 In sum, it is a vision of liberalism that contrasts sharply with the thin version often put forth by both proponents and critics of liberalism in international relations7 – and in many debates over securitization theory. Yet, if the liberalism of fear is sceptical, it is not cynical. Nor is it without a place to stand. In place of essentialist visions of individuals or schemes of indisputable rights, it advocates a focus on cruelty and fear. It is, in Stanley Hoffmann’s (1998: xxii) nice phrase, a vision based on the ‘existential experience of fear and cruelty’, concentrating on humanity’s shared capacity to feel fear and to be victims of cruelty.8 Perhaps most importantly in this context, it turns this focus on fear into a positive principle of liberal politics. As Shklar (1998: 10–11) argues, the liberalism of fear does not, to be sure, offer a summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive, but it certainly does begin with a summum malum which all of us know and would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear that it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself. To that extent, the liberalism of fear makes a universal and especially a cosmopolitan claim, as it historically has always done. In this vision, fear is central to liberal politics, but in a way very different from those visions that see fear, emergency and ‘security’ as the defining ‘outside’ of liberal societies, as the antithesis of normal politics, or, as suggested in other analyses, as the constitutive realm or radical otherness or enmity that stabilizes and/or energizes otherwise decadent or depoliticized liberal orders.9 For the liberalism of fear, fear cannot and should not be always and in every way avoided. For one thing, it is an inescapable part of life, something that often helps preserve us from danger. More complexly, fear can also be a crucial element in preserving as well as constructing a liberal order, for one of the major things to be feared in social life is the fear of fear itself. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it in one of her most evocative phrasings: To be alive is to be afraid, and much to our advantage in many cases, since alarm often preserves us from danger. The fear we fear is of pain inflicted by others to kill and maim us, not the natural and healthy fear that merely warns us of avoidable pain. And, when we think politically, we are afraid not only for ourselves but for our fellow citizens as well. We fear a society of fearful people. This vision of liberal politics fears the politics of fear. It fears above all collective concentrations of power that make possible ‘institutionalized cruelty’, particularly when they are abetted or accompanied by a politics of fear. Thus, while the liberalism of fear fears all concentrations of power, it fears most the concentration of power in that most fearsome of institutions in the modern world – the state; for while cruelty can reflect sadistic urges, ‘public cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power’ (Shklar, 1998: 11). A degree of fear and coercion is doubtless a condition of the operation of all social orders; but, as its first order of concern, the liberalism of fear focuses on restraining fear’s excesses. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it: A minimal level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream of an end to public, coercive government. The fear it does want to prevent is that which is created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary and police agents in any regime. The liberalism of fear is far from rejecting the state’s role in the provision of social goods, including security. Indeed, these may be essential in overcoming socially derived cruelties of many kinds.10 But, it is continually alert to the state’s potential to do the opposite.11 Here, then, is a vision of politics where fear is not confined to the realm of security; nor is fear wholly negative. Such a vision shares with the Copenhagen School the fear that fear in politics is dangerous. But, Shklar’s multidimensional analysis of fear allows us to see how fear can work as a counter-practice against processes of securitization. Fear operates in normal politics, and the fear of fear – that is, the fear of the power of the politics of security and its consequences – is a core part of liberal theory and practice. Fear is not a one-way street to extremity, nor does it operate only in emergency situations. Instead, the fear of fear can act as a bulwark against such processes. In other words, the fear of fear can within ‘normal’ or even ‘securitized’ politics act to prevent or oppose a movement toward a more intense politics of fear – countering a shift toward ‘security’ in its more extreme manifestations.12 The liberalism of fear is not a comprehensive description of ‘actually existing’ liberal societies. It is at one and the same time an attempt to elucidate a liberal philosophy – a critical political philosophy with the practical intent of fostering and supporting an understanding of agency and judgement – and an exposition of social and political dynamics that can characterize liberal polities. It is part of a liberal tradition of thought that has had important impacts on the development of liberal political orders, and its effects can often be seen in the security politics of liberal societies. Accordingly, the liberalism of fear can help us discern some of the dynamics of security within those polities, while at the same time suggesting principles for a politics of security. In practice, as I have suggested above, the liberalism of fear links the domains of ‘normal’ and ‘security’ politics that the Copenhagen School tends to separate. Viewing the two as part of a continuum reveals how the fear of fear can counter or restrain securitizing moves in liberal societies. This practical continuity operates at the level of individual mores, social norms, and political and legal institutions. Indeed, it is the relationship between these three – and particularly the ways in which rules and norms operate at the individual and social levels (what the Copenhagen School would call ‘securitizing actors’ and the ‘audience’) as well as in formal institutions – that is crucial for analysing important dimensions of security politics in liberal societies. As Nomi Lazar (2009: 51, 114–33) has argued, if we restrict our understanding of rules – and the breaking free of them – solely to the legal domain, we risk missing the multiple social and institutional practices that may inhibit the politics of emergency. For instance, to the degree that individual and social groups recognize the fear of fear as a key part of their political visions and values, they will exercise a degree of suspicion toward securitizing acts, and can even act to restrain successful securitizations. Similarly, the structure of liberal societies and governments, with plural centres of political and social power, provides potential institutional and societal sites of resistance to securitization. Consider in this light Mark Salter’s recent and revealing analysis of ‘failed securitizations’ in US counter-terrorism policies. Examining the rejection of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme that ‘sought to data-mine library records to create profiles of potential terror suspects’, he notes that ‘this limitation on the freedom of speech and invasion of privacy was rejected by librarians, civil libertarians, and others outside the authority of the state. The existential threat of terrorism to the US was accepted by the protestors, but the colonization of this sector of private life was rejected as being outside of the security purview of the state’ (Salter, 2011: 125).13 In this case, the fear of terrorism, and its successful securitization within the technified language and logic of certain specialist institutions, was outweighed by the fear of the threat that policies like the TIA could pose to liberal-democratic politics. Fear is here a productive and countervailing power within normal politics, and a means of defending the latter against an intensifying and intrusive politics of fear and securitization. These dynamics can also function as important parts of what Lene Hansen (forthcoming: 16n10) has insightfully called the ‘strategic self-moderation’ of security actors, referring to cases where the language and logic of security is avoided rather than embraced. If we adopt the insights above, we might surmise that such restraint sometimes emerges from multiple sources related to the liberalism of fear, which can arise from the mores of individual actors or can be part of socially and institutionally embedded values and structures of appraisal that set the wider context influencing (and even constraining) their decisions. Consider in this light the Copenhagen School’s account of securitization. As Buzan et al. (1998: 24) put it: If one can argue that something overflows the normal political logic of weighing issues against each other, this must be because it can upset the entire process of weighing as such: ‘if we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant because we will not be here or will not be free to handle it in our own way’. Thereby, the actor has claimed a right to handle the issue through extraordinary means, to break the political rules of the game. This is more than simply the description of a process. Viewed politically, and especially within a context (and context is clearly vital here) influenced by the liberalism of fear, the recourse to securitizing speech acts is not straightforward, cost-free or beyond reflection. It is a political act, the potential consequences of which need to be weighed by any actor. Consequently, attempted securitizations can be constrained by an actor’s own reluctance to mobilize fear in light of the potential consequences for other values, such as those of a liberal political order. Potentially securitizing actors can also be constrained by their knowledge that a decision to attempt to securitize an issue will be judged (both at the time and, possibly, retrospectively). Declarations of the need for a politics of emergency are rarely taken lightly by other actors, and making them can come with significant risks to one’s political credibility and sense of judgement – something that is heightened when the political context is at least partly informed by the fear of fear. In both cases, the politics of fear and the fear of fear co-mingle, cross-cut and even compete with each other, with the result that the fear of fear as a political principle and a mode of judgment plays an important part in the security politics of liberal societies. These dynamics point to a second area where the liberalism of fear can play a restraining role in securitization. Since it sees the abuse of power as a continual possibility, the liberalism of fear seeks its controlled dispersal and stresses the importance of pluralism in combating its potential excesses. Socially, multiple centres of power provide sites from which securitizations can be contested and resisted. Importantly, however, this is a pluralism that is conscious of the limits of the facile political rationalism that so exercised critics of liberalism throughout the first half of the 20th century, and that has had such an important influence on the development of the discipline of international relations as a whole and parts of securitization theory in particular.14 Both in its philosophic foundations and in its historical awareness of past liberal failings, the pluralism of the liberalism of fear is markedly distant from that of its ‘depoliticized’ predecessors. This alternative vision of liberalism provides an intriguingly different connection between the Copenhagen School and classical realism, for while the lion’s share of attention in this area has been devoted to their shared concerns with the nature of ‘the political’ and the role of enmity in countering the potentially debilitating effects of liberal pluralism, this has tended to obscure the ways in which classical realists such as Morgenthau sought to counter and restrain the role of fear and enmity in political life rather than embracing it. And, intriguingly, one of the chief instruments that they advocated in this battle was pluralism. In contrast to the idea (all too automatically accepted in some discussions of securitization theory) that liberal pluralism was inescapably atomizing and socially debilitating, and that liberal societies were inevitably forced to call upon a politics of enmity in order to recover and secure their properly ‘political’ foundations, classical realists presented a much more subtle and sophisticated vision of the merits of pluralism and its role in supporting solidarity within a liberal society (Tjalve, 2007). As William Scheuerman has shown in his revealing recovery of this ‘progressive’ dimension of realism, pluralism could help offset the politics of fear and could be valued by citizens for precisely this reason. As he puts it: For Progressive Realists, as for some astute present-day analysts, social integration was at least as much a matter of ‘doing’ as ‘being’: concrete social practices which generated meaningful cooperation and relations of trust could prove even more vital than shared notions of collective destiny…. Progressive Realists underscored the pivotal role of a pluralistic social order in which one could identify a rich variety of cross-cutting social cleavages and loyalties, which they thought most likely to mitigate intense conflict. Under the proper conditions, social pluralism potentially civilized conflict: social actors could learn that a rival in one social arena might be an ally or even a friend in another (Scheuerman, 2011: 174–5). This concern with the merits of pluralism as a mechanism for limiting fearful power, as well as for restraining the politics of fear, also finds clear expression in liberalism’s stress on institutional pluralism. Here, the rule of law, the division of power between different institutions of government, the desire that they check and balance each other, and the dispersal of power among a wide range of civil society actors also provide important bulwarks against securitization in a liberal society. Consider again in this context Salter’s (2011: 128) treatment of the fate of TIA when, despite the endeavours of George W. Bush’s administration, as a result of initiatives ‘spearheaded by library, privacy, and libertarian groups, funding for the TIA (whether terrorist or total) was halted by the US Senate in July 2003’. Here, social and institutional pluralism combine to render difficult, and potentially even to reverse, emergency decisions characteristic of securitization.15 As Jef Huysmans (2004) has articulately demonstrated, the admonition to ‘mind the gap’, to prevent any of the institutions of a liberal-democratic polity from usurping the roles of the others – something particularly worrisome when the politics of security is involved – is a vital component of a liberal-democratic polity. The importance of the fear that this might happen, the institutional positions, principled resources and public perceptions that actors may be able to draw on, or be constrained by, as a consequence of this fear, and the combined role of these elements in countering the logics of extremity and emergency in liberal societies should not be underestimated. The rule of law provides similar lessons. While the aftermath of 9/11 and the actions of George W. Bush’s administration have led many to see securitized liberal societies as embracing a ‘permanent emergency’ and adopting a generalized politics of exception, it is not at all clear that these appraisals do not reflect a series of a priori claims about the supposed (philosophic) necessity of enmity in (and for) liberal polities more than they do careful and concrete analysis of the actual practices in those polities.16 Despite the rhetoric and, in many ways, the efforts of the Bush administration to ‘break free from rules’, it is at best questionable that it was in fact able completely to do so – and the significant opposition to its policies from social actors as well as in challenges in a variety of legal forums demonstrate the limits of its securitizing acts as clearly as they do their pervasiveness. Securitization theory has shown relatively little interest in the legal dynamics and debates surrounding emergency powers, an engagement with them seemingly closed off either by an acceptance that issues like Guantanamo Bay already reside in the domain of ‘security’ or by a preference for claims about the decisionistic nature of law and the exceptionality of Schmittian-inspired legal theory and visions of sovereignty.17 But, if we take fear seriously, law – and especially the ‘laws of fear’ (Sunstein, 2005; see also Ackerman, 2006) – becomes a crucial battleground in the politics of securitization. The actors involved in these struggles are not the security professionals of state security institutions and their associates analysed by Didier Bigo and others, but they are professionals of security in the wider sense of the politics of fear – and the fear of fear. Despite the seemingly general acceptance by the political institutions and much of the population of the USA that Al-Qaeda was indeed an existential threat, the use of all extraordinary means was not accepted, nor did the situation resemble a ‘generalized exception’ brought about through the claims of security. Take the use of torture as a policy, for instance. As Salter (2011: 126) points out, and numerous political and legal analyses have gone to great lengths to assess, in the USA ‘the courts and the populace rejected the use of torture for interrogation – even if it was accepted by some part of the military and bureaucratic establishment’. Salter sees this as calling for a new category in securitization theory: the acceptance of existential threat, but the failure to authorize extraordinary powers. I speculate that it might also be assessed in terms of a struggle within and over the politics of fear, and the existence and operation of countervailing practices and powers. The liberalism of fear may thus help explain how these practices function, with both the attitudes of individuals and the institutional pluralism with which they are entwined providing restraints upon the logic of security and significant points of resistance against the powerful (but not all-powerful) actors who attempted to mobilize it. Debates over securitization have often centred on the politics of security: on whether to securitize or desecuritize, and on analysis of the sociological, institutional or political conditions and contexts that facilitate or inhibit acts of securitization. For the Copenhagen School, ‘security’ is a highly political act. It is also a potentially dangerous one. As extremity, a breaking free from the rules of normal politics, security is something we are advised to be careful about. Security is not only about identifying threats or dangers, or articulating fears; it is also a political act that we need to approach with caution for fear of the possibility of a politics of extremity, with the unforeseeable and potentially dangerous consequences that it brings. I have tried to suggest here that in order to comprehend more fully the politics of security in liberal societies, securitization theory must come to terms with the role of fear in politics. Too sharp a distinction between the sphere of normal politics and the sphere of security not only risks limiting our understanding of how issues move along a continuum between the two: it may also blind us to how the fear of fear is a part of normal politics, and part of the resources and strategies of resistance against securitizing acts, even within seemingly securitized domains. The Copenhagen School generally reserves the concept of ‘desecuritization’ for practices that shift issues out of the logics of threat (and fear) that it identifies with security (W?ver, 1995). The innovative and often sound argument here is that it is difficult to shift a relationship defined by threats and dangers while staying within its logics: to argue that something is not a threat is still likely to be caught within representations defined by threats. However, the liberalism of fear calls attention to an important alternative dynamic: that the fear of fear can in a specific sense be seen as a desecuritizing move – a countervailing logic against processes of intensification within ‘normal’ politics as well as within ‘security’ politics. At the risk of becoming overly baroque, this strategy might accurately be termed ‘the securitization of securitization’, and its impact on desecuritization deserves greater exploration. In this regard, a focus on security as practice, and particularly on the relationship between securitizing acts and their reception, is crucial.18 Fear is not synonymous with security (or insecurity);19 nor is fear a quantitatively defined process of intensification operating within a single modality – it is more than just a temperature gauge of degrees of security logics in both normal and emergency politics. Fear is part of the practice of security, and it is thus susceptible to reversal within its own logics. Indeed, one of the most important consequences of viewing security as part of practices of fear concerns how, paradoxically, fear can itself be mobilized to counter processes of securitization without merely adding to the quantum of fear in a society, as though all of fear’s modalities and the strategies they enable could be reduced to a single logic. None of this is to deny the power of security, the permanent possibility of enmity in politics, its seductions and its dangers, and the worrying place and pervasiveness of security and attempted securitizations in liberal (and almost all other) societies around the globe (Abrahamsen, 2005). What the liberalism of fear does deny, however, is the necessity of such a situation. It is a deeply political endeavour, one that can enrich our understanding of securitization at the same time that securitization theory might provide analytic tools supporting its endeavours. This is not to say that the liberalism of fear does not itself pose challenges for the politics of security that require critical attention;20 however, putting the nature of liberalism into question within securitization theory, instead of allowing a particular vision of it to operate as a background assumption licensing a raft of further assertions about the supposedly necessary nature of the relationship between liberalism, security and ‘the political’, allows us to undertake a more subtle and hopefully revealing examination of the politics of securitization. In the name of not being naive about liberalism and its limits, debates over securitization may well have developed a paradoxical naivety about liberal politics. Too easily adopting Schmittian or other critiques as a basis risks reifying securitization theory’s insights into taken-for-granted assumptions about the necessary relationship between liberalism and security. As I have tried to suggest, the liberalism of fear provides a powerful and potentially fruitful counter to this tendency. The liberalism of fear does not advocate a wider politics of fear. A critically aware fear of fear and its possibility for strategic manipulation in either direction does not equal a further deepening of the politics of fear. It is instead a political stance that constantly questions the claims and decisions that are made in the name of countering fears, and that is constantly cautious about the possibilities created by the politics of fear. In both cases, it seeks to force discussion concerning whether and to what extent such policies or practices can be justified. It is pessimistic in the sense of a hyper-active concern with the potential for cruelty in all human affairs – including, and perhaps especially, in the domain of security. But, it is neither cynical nor despairing. Accordingly, it may also provide a set of previously untapped political and ethical resources that would further increase the salience of securitization theory.Their K of “intervention” is asinine---they collapse a core difference between neoconservative militarism and liberalismJim Arkedis 11, the director of the National Security Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a principal fellow of the Truman National Security Project "Not All Interventions Are The Same" March 28 articles/2011/03/28/not_all_interventions_are_the_same?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full* NCC2020"Liberal interventionists are just 'kinder, gentler' neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionists on steroids," political scientist and blogger Stephen M. Walt, commenting on calls for U.S. involvement in Libya, asserted recently on this website, echoing a false equivalence that has sadly become a common conceit among foreign-policy thinkers. It was inevitable that pundits would compare the invasion of Iraq (an idea promoted by neoconservatives) to the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya (an idea promoted by liberal interventionists). Yet obscuring the difference between these two schools of thought threatens more than the vanity of a group of academics: It places the coherence and stability of the United States' long-term grand strategy in jeopardy. While Walt, a self-identified "realist," develops a more sophisticated version of this false equivalence, there are, of course, obvious fundamental differences between neocons' triumphal nationalism and liberals' conviction that America can best advance its interests and values in cooperation with other democracies. Walt concedes the distinction, only to accuse liberals of being more cunning than neocons about concealing their will to power: "[T]he former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance." In Walt's estimation, intervention is intervention, no matter the avowed motives behind a given mission, or the various circumstances that can justify the use of force. Because George W. Bush and Barack Obama have each initiated a military action, it follows for Walt that neocons and "liberal interventionists" see the world much the same way. This is bunk. Traumatized by U.S. blunders in Iraq, realists now misapply that war's lessons to Obama's decision to join international efforts to protect Libyans from the wrath of a mad dictator. While the president is being attacked by everyone from John Boehner to Dennis Kucinich, it is critical to set the record straight. Because Walt uses the terms "liberal interventionist" or "liberal hawk" pejoratively, I'll refer to "progressive internationalism" instead. Progressive internationalists aren't hard-core lefties, but rather progressives in the original sense of the word: pragmatic liberals. We are ideological moderates rooted in classically liberal understandings of individual liberty and equality of opportunity -- at home and abroad -- who believe the world's problems should be solved through tough-minded diplomacy and negotiation, whenever possible. Further, the terms "hawk" or "interventionist" imply an overreliance on the military. Walt accuses both neocons and progressive internationalists of looking at every problem as a nail to be pounded by the hammer of U.S. military might. While progressive internationalists certainly support a strong military as the bedrock of America's foreign policy, they also know that international affairs in the 21st century seldom present black-and-white binary decisions of the sort that Bush mistakenly sought to resolve with a good whack. This no doubt brings to mind Iraq, and I cannot go further without acknowledging the elephant in the room: Yes, many progressive internationalists did support the decision to invade Iraq. (In 2003, I was a civilian counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Defense and did not take a public position on that action.) In hindsight, I believe constructive critique of my colleagues is warranted and they have learned much in Iraq's wake. The only point I offer in their defense is this: It's just hard to imagine that an Al Gore administration -- which would have been stocked full of progressive internationalists -- would have ginned up that ideological charge to war. Progressive internationalists recognize that U.S. foreign policy is now a holistic enterprise that must first summon all sources of national power to deal with what goes on within states as well as between them -- direct and multilateral diplomacy, development aid to build infrastructure and civil society, trade to promote growth, intelligence collection, and law enforcement, to name a few -- and only then turn to force as the final guarantor of peace and stability. Neocons, however, disdain multilateral diplomacy and overestimate the efficacy of military force. Their lopsided preoccupation with "hard power" creates an imposing facade of strength, but in fact saps the economic, political, and moral sources of American influence. By overspending on the military and allowing the other levers of American power to atrophy, neocons misallocate precious U.S. national resources in two ways -- leaving the United States with too little of the "smart power" capacities desperately needed in war zones like Afghanistan and an overabundance of "hard power" capacities it will never use. The trick is to carefully cultivate both, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen have championed since Obama took power. Walt allows some daylight between neocons and progressive internationalists in their willingness to defer to international institutions, but he again misses the true difference. He rightly characterizes neocons' disdain for multilateral talking shops (see: John Bolton) but wrongly suggests progressives are insincere in embedding U.S. power in international institutions. The fact is that we do indeed believe that international institutions make the world a safer place for the United States and other democracies by entrenching liberal norms around the globe. Can it really be an accident that America is embroiled in conflicts across the Middle East, a region whose countries are least touched by liberal democracy and adherence to internationalism? Progressive internationalists believe the United States should be the unquestioned vanguard of democratic values, and that American leadership is strengthened when granted a sense of legitimacy that attracts others to our cause. Without a doubt, unilateral application of force in self-defense is a legitimate exercise of power, but legitimacy can evaporate under two circumstances: when America's actions betray its core values or when America acts offensively without an international mandate and the backing of close allies. My organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, in a 2003 manifesto on progressive internationalism, argued that "the way to keep America safe and strong is not to impose our will on others or pursue a narrow, selfish nationalism that betrays our best values, but to lead the world toward political and economic freedom." Neocons, by contrast, pursue security interests at the expense of American values and damage U.S. legitimacy while doing so. That was George W. Bush: He betrayed American values and alienated core international partners by torturing prisoners, denying them any sense of due process, and falsifying a threat to justify an effectively unilateral invasion of a Muslim country. He strove for the mere appearance of legitimacy, forging ham-fisted, bribed coalitions of the somewhat willing. The Obama administration's actions in Libya are surely legitimate. The president chose to intervene after securing active support from the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Gulf Cooperation Council, not to mention the U.N. Security Council. The international community's near-unanimity is an acknowledgement of the "responsibility to protect" (or R2P), a U.N. norm that obliges the international community to defend innocents in the face of humanitarian atrocities. Realists like Walt disdain R2P because shielding other human beings from mass murder does not fit within the realists' narrow band of core American interests. To them, America's blood, attention, and treasure are not worth spending unless there is an immediate quid pro quo payoff in terms of national security. Ironically for Walt, realists are closer to neoconservatives on this score: Bush and Cheney meshed realism with neoconservatism when they sold the Iraq invasion as a quick and painless exercise of overwhelming American power that would render an immediate payoff in the form of a decapitated threat and an instantaneous "beacon of democracy" in the Middle East. Progressive internationalists, like neocons, would define R2P as a core national interest, and we would both advocate strongly for the protection of innocent civilians who yearn to express their individual freedoms. We believe protecting civilians from murderous dictators creates a more stable international community and a safer America while promoting universal human rights and values. But though our ends are similar, our thresholds for intervention, our military methodology, and our justifications for action could not be more different. Neoconservatives' disdain for smart power and realists' shortsighted interpretation of core U.S. interests are poor uses of national resources. In contrast, progressive internationalists seek to use all of America's might to shape an international environment more congenial to the country's true interests and democratic values. These differences are hardly trivial. Conflating them, as Walt does, is a transparent attempt to reframe U.S. foreign-policy debates around a choice between intervention and nonintervention. But time and again, the American people stubbornly refuse to make those choices in a moral vacuum. This leaves the United States with a messy, imprecise, unscientific approach to international politics, just like its approach to domestic politics. Yes, this pragmatic progressive tradition has sometimes proved chaotic in practice, but Obama should be commended, not chastised, for aligning American interests and values, seeking international legitimacy, and looking to shape the world as both more democratic and ultimately safer.Aff: Impact Ans—Representations[for reference] this is what a slippery slope is NCC2020You said that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen. The problem with this reasoning is that it avoids engaging with the issue at hand, and instead shifts attention to extreme hypotheticals. Because no proof is presented to show that such extreme hypotheticals will in fact occur, this fallacy has the form of an appeal to emotion fallacy by leveraging fear. In effect the argument at hand is unfairly tainted by unsubstantiated conjecture.Their impact is a slippery slope---justifying something is empirically not the same as causing it. Stacie E. Goddard & Ronald R. Krebs 15, Goddard, Jane Bishop Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College; Krebs, Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, “Securitization Forum: The Transatlantic Divide: Why Securitization Has Not Secured a Place in American IR, Why It Should, and How It Can,” Duck of Minerva, 9-18-2015, NCC2020Securitization theory has rightly garnered much attention among European scholars of international relations. Its basic claims are powerful: that security threats are not given, but require active construction; that the boundaries of “security” are malleable; that the declaration that a certain problem lies within the realm of security is itself a productive political act; and that “security” issues hold a trump card, demanding disproportionate resources and silencing alternative perspectives. Securitization thus highlights a familiar, even ubiquitous, political process that had received little attention in the international relations or comparative foreign policy literatures. It gave scholars a theoretical language, if not quite a set of coherent theoretical tools, with which to make sense of how a diverse set of issues, from migration to narcotics flows to global climate change, sometimes came to be treated as matters of national and global security and thereby—and this is where securitization’s critical edge came to the fore—impeded reasoned political debate. No surprise that, as Jarrod and Eric observe, securitization has been the focus of so many articles in the EJIR—and even more in such journals as the Review of International Studies and Security Dialogue. But there are (good) substantive and (not so good) sociological reasons that securitization has failed to gain traction in North America. First, and most important, securitization describes a process but leaves us well short of (a) a fully specified causal theory that (b) takes proper account of the politics of rhetorical contestation. According to the foundational theorists of the Copenhagen School, actors, usually elites, transform the social order from one of normal, everyday politics into a Schmittian world of crisis by identifying a dire threat to the political community. They conceive of this “securitizing move” in linguistic terms, as a speech act. As Ole Waever (1995: 55) argues, “By saying it [security], something is done (as in betting, a promise, naming a ship). . . . [T]he word ‘security’ is the act . . .” [emphasis added]. Securitization is a powerful discursive process that constitutes social reality. Countless articles and books have traced this process, and its consequences, in particular policy domains. Securitization presents itself as a causal account. But its mechanisms remain obscure, as do the conditions under which it operates. Why is speaking security so powerful? How do mere words twist and transform the social order? Does the invocation of security prompt a visceral emotional response? Are speech acts persuasive, by using well-known tropes to convince audiences that they must seek protection? Or does securitization operate through the politics of rhetorical coercion, silencing potential opponents? In securitization accounts, speech acts often seem to be magical incantations that upend normal politics through pathways shrouded in mystery. Equally unclear is why some securitizing moves resonate, while others [are ignored] fall on deaf ears. Certainly not all attempts to construct threats succeed, and this is true of both traditional military concerns as well as “new” security issues. Both neoconservatives and structural realists in the United States have long insisted that conflict with China is inevitable, yet China has over the last 25 years been more opportunity than threat in US political discourse—despite these vigorous and persistent securitizing moves. In very recent years, the balance has shifted, and the China threat has started to catch on: linguistic processes alone cannot account for this change. The US military has repeatedly declared that global climate change has profound implications for national security—but that has hardly cast aside climate change deniers, many of whom are ironically foreign policy hawks supposedly deferential to the uniformed military. Authoritative speakers have varied in the efficacy of their securitizing moves. While George W. Bush powerfully framed the events of 9/11 as a global war against American values, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a more gifted orator, struggled to convince a skeptical public that Germany presented an imminent threat to the United States. After thirty years as an active research program, securitization theory has hardly begun to offer acceptable answers to these questions. Brief references to “facilitating conditions” won’t cut it. You don’t have to subscribe to a covering-law conception of theory to find these questions important or to find securitization’s answers unsatisfying. A large part of the problem, we believe, lies in securitization’s silence on the politics of security. Its foundations in speech act theory have yielded an oddly apolitical theoretical framework. In its seminal formulation, the Copenhagen school emphasized the internal linguistic rules that must be followed for a speech act to be recognized as competent. Yet as Thierry Balzacq argues, by treating securitization as a purely rule-driven process, the Copenhagen school ignores the politics of securitization, reducing “security to a conventional procedure such as marriage or betting in which the ‘felicity circumstances’ (conditions of success) must fully prevail for the act to go through” (2005:172). Absent from this picture are fierce rhetorical battles, where coalitions counter securitizing moves with their own appeals that strike more or less deeply at underlying narratives. Absent as well are the public intellectuals and media, who question and critique securitizing moves sometimes (and not others), sometimes to good effect (and sometimes with little impact). The audience itself—whether the mass public or a narrower elite stratum—is stripped of all agency. Speaking security, even when the performance is competent, does not sweep this politics away. Only by delving into this politics can we shed light on the mysteries of securitization. We see rhetorical politics as constituted less by singular “securitizing moves” than by “contentious conversation”—to use Charles Tilly’s phrase. To this end, we would urge securitization theorists, as we recently have elsewhere, to move towards a “pragmatic” model that rests on four analytical wagers: that actors are both strategic and social; that legitimation works by imparting meaning to political action; that legitimation is laced through with contestation; and that the power of language emerges through contentious dialogue. We are heartened that our ambivalence about securitization—the ways in which we find it by turns appealing and dissatisfying—and our vision for how to move forward have in the last decade been echoed by (mostly) European colleagues. These critics have laid out a research agenda that would, if taken up, produce more satisfying, and more deeply political, theoretical accounts. In our own work, both individual and collective, we have tried to advance that research agenda. So long as securitization theorists resist defining the theory’s scope and mechanisms, and so long as it remains wedded to apolitical underpinnings, we think it unlikely to gain a broad following on this side of the pond. Second, securitization has been held back by another way in which it is apolitical—this time thanks to its Schmittian commitments and political vision. Successful securitization, in seminal accounts, replaces normal patterns of politics with the world of the exception, in which contest has no place. They imagine security as the ultimate trump card. But, in reality, the divide is not nearly so stark. Security does not crowd out all other spending priorities—or states would spend on nothing but defense and “securitized” issues. Nor does simply declaring something a matter of national security guarantee its funding—or global climate change counter-measures, including research on renewable energies, would be well-funded. Nor are security issues somehow aloof from politics: politics has never truly stopped “at the water’s edge.” Securitization considers only the politics of security. Its strangely dichotomous optic cannot see or make sense of the politics within security. In ignoring the politics within security, securitization is of course in good company. Realists of all stripes have paid little attention to domestic political contest, except as a distraction from structural imperatives. But while realism is unquestionably a powerful first-cut, this inattention to the politics within security is also among the reasons so many have found it wanting. As Arnold Wolfers long ago observed, some degree of insecurity is the normal state of affairs. But “some may find the danger to which they are exposed entirely normal and in line with their modest security expectations while others consider it unbearable to live with these same dangers.” And states, he further argues, do not actually maximize security—almost ever. “Even when there has been no question that armaments would mean more security, the cost in taxes, the reduction in social benefits, or the sheer discomfort involved have militated effectively against further effort” (1962:151, 153). A securitization perspective renders all this politics within security inexplicable. And yet, as Wolfers saw half a century ago, it is crucial.Aff: A2 “Epistemology First”Evaluate the benefits of the plan before our assumptions – knowledge is always contextual kritiks should be focuses on the specifics action of the 1AC– focusing debate on our assumptions in the abstract is intellectually lazy and makes managing violence impossible – turns the k Lake, Poli Sci Prof @ University of California San Diego, 14 (David, “Theory is dead, long live theory: The end of the Great Debates and the rise of eclecticism in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19(3) 567–587, ) NCC2020*ableism corrected In the end, I prefer progress within paradigms rather than war between paradigms, especially as the latter would be inconclusive. The human condition is precarious. This is still the age of thermonuclear weapons. Globalization continues to disrupt lives as countries realign their economies on the basis of comparative advantage, production chains are disaggregated and wrapped around the globe, and financial crises in one country reverberate around the planet in minutes. Transnational terrorism threatens to turn otherwise local disputes into global conflicts, and leave everyone everywhere feeling unsafe. And all the while, anthropomorphic change transforms the global climate with potentially catastrophic consequences. Under these circumstances, we as a society need all the help we can get. There is no monopoly on knowledge. And there is no guarantee that any one kind of knowledge generated and understood within any one epistemology or ontology is always and everywhere more useful than another. To assert otherwise is an act of supreme intellectual hubris. This is not a plea to let a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand intellectual flowers bloom. Scholars working in cloistered isolation are not likely to produce great insights, especially when the social problems besetting us today are of such magnitude. All knowledge must be disciplined. That is, knowledge must be shared by and with others if it is to count as knowledge. Positivists and post-positivists are each working hard to improve and clarify the standards of knowledge within their respective paradigms. This is an important turn for both, as it will facilitate progress within each even as it raises barriers to exchange across approaches. So, if not a thousand flowers, it is perhaps better for teams of scholars to tend a small number of separate gardens, grow what they can best, and share when possible with the others and, especially, the broader societies of which they are part. Do not mourn the end of theory, if by theory we mean the Great Debates in International Relations. Too often, the Great Debates and especially the paradigm wars became contests over the truth status of assumptions. Declarations that ‘I am a realist’ or pronouncements that ‘As a liberal, I predict …’ were statements of a near quasi-religious faith, not conclusions that followed from a falsifiable theory with stronger empirical support. Likewise, assertions that positivism or post-positivism is a better approach to understanding world politics are similarly [misleading] blinding. The Great Debates were too often academic in the worst sense of that term. Mid-level theory flourished in the interstices of these debates for decades and now, with the waning of the paradigm wars, is coming into its own within the field. I regard this as an entirely positive development. We may be witnessing the demise of a particular kind of grand theory, but theory — in the plural — lives. Long may they reign.Prefer our epistemology – theirs reduces interests to ideas which is more reductionist than the AFF Kitchen, Deputy Director of the LSE IDEAS United States International Affairs Programme, 10 (Nicholas, “Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation,” Review of International Studies 36(1): pp. 117-143) NCC2020An alternative structural approach suffered the same difficulty in reverse. Social constructivism discards the rationalist, materialist philosophical assumptions of international relations altogether to conclude that the very meaning of power and the content of interests are functions of ideas.27 Although this approach has been useful in establishing the importance of identities alongside interests in establishing durable expectations of behaviour between states,28 the epistemological basis of the constructivist approach is a form of structural idealism or ‘idea-ism’ that stands in direct opposition to the core claims of realism and many of the most basic assumptions of historical and political scholarship.29 This rejection of the rationalist ‘conceptual tool kit’30 leads to the same problem of reductionism of ideas and interests as realism suffers in mirror-image. Wendt’s claim that when IR scholars explain ‘state action by reference to interests, they are actually explaining it by reference to a certain kind of idea’ appears to deny that there are empirically knowable material facts per se. Similarly, if material interests are actually explained by ideas, it is difficult to comprehend exactly how “the true ‘material base’ can still have independent effects’.31 If, as constructivism contends, ideas are ‘inextricably involved in the production of interests’32 it is futile to distinguish between the two. So although constructivism can help us understand that identities, norms and rules are endogenous to system structure, in doing so the distribution of material capabilities is regarded as an essentially exogenous factor. Where neorealism states that ideas don’t matter, constructivism tells us that material capabilities aren’t important. The unavoidable conclusion is that where structural realism reduced ideas to interests, social constructivism reduces interests to ideas. Neither can capture the sense in which both ideas and interests play roles – sometimes competing, sometimes complementary – in formulating the direction of states’ foreign policy and the structure of the international system.Ideas don’t change foreign policy – their “epistemology” focus hide the role political institutions play in making certain ideologies popular– link arguments overwhelm the alt Kitchen, Deputy Director of the LSE IDEAS United States International Affairs Programme, 10 (Nicholas, “Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation,” Review of International Studies 36(1): pp. 117-143)*ableism modified NCC2020Fundamentally the state is made up of individuals. Individuals construct systems, institutions and bureaucracies; individuals lead and follow; individuals make decisions. On what basis do individuals decide which ideas to hold? The first is the quality of the idea itself – its internal coherence, its congruence with known realities. The second key to success resides in the speaker himself – his intellectual status, his eloquence of advocacy. Thus the power of an idea to persuade others at any one moment in history resides both in itself, and in the power of those who hold it. The causal effect of ideas on policies has tended to be displaced onto the political effects of individuals in IR theory, so that the persuasiveness of ideas is assumed rather than examined, and treated as constant.77 It is however, important to recognise that some ideas are ‘better’ than others, and are more likely to progress into the policymaking arena, where institutional factors may then come into play. This is not to deny the crucial role of forces exogenous to them that push certain ideas to heart of policymaking. Whilst the degree to which ideas generate popular support may provide them with power mediated through public opinion, ideas can take a shortcut to policy success if they have the backing of individuals and institutions that themselves have power. The character of these ‘couriers’ of ideas that may be as important, if not more so, than anything intrinsic to the idea itself.78 At the individual level then, neoclassical realism understands that the ideas held by powerful actors within the state matter. Whilst the intrinsic power of a particular idea makes its progress into such positions more likely, the ideas that will impact most upon foreign policy are those held by those in decision-making positions in the state and those who directly advise them. Thus as Mead notes, ‘It matters who the President is. If Theodore Roosevelt and not Woodrow Wilson had been President when World War I broke out, American and world history might have taken a very different turn.’79 The second location at which ideas may impact at the unit level occurs when individuals with shared ideas coalesce into groups, organisations, and common practices within the state to form institutions that operate in both formal and informal sectors of the policymaking process. The formation of institutions reflects the fact that ideas that are somehow embedded in particular structures are possessed of greater power. Institutions can act as couriers for ideas in three ways.80 ‘Epistemic communities’ of experts have the policy-relevant knowledge to exert influence on the positions adopted by a wide range of actors. The extent of the influence of such groups is dependent on their ability to occupy influential positions within bureaucracies from where they may consolidate their power, thereby institutionalising the influence of the community.81 However, their ability to infiltrate bureaucratic posts will depend – at least in part – on the receptiveness of the existing bureaucratic order to their ideas.82 A second means by which institutions act as couriers is by the encasing of ideas in formal rules and procedures at the creation of the institution itself. Once they have become embedded in this way, those ideas with which the institution was founded can continue to influence policy even though the interests or ideas of their creators may have changed. Thus, ‘when institutions intervene, the impact of ideas can be prolonged for decades or even generations.’83 In both of these ways, ‘ideas acquire force when they find organizational means of expression’.84 The third way in which ideas can impact is through the structural arrangements institutions create. These structures set up road-blocks and throughroutes which determine the ease with which ideas can gain access to the policy process. Indeed, the structure of the institutional framework may determine the political and administrative ‘viability’ of particular ideas, that is, their ability to appeal to current conditions. Institutional structure therefore ensures that policymakers only have access to a limited set of ideas, whether those are percolated up to them or searched for by them.85 In this way, the ideas that form what some refer to as ‘strategic culture’ may provide a reliable guide to a state’s likely reaction to shifts in the structure of the international system.86 Underlying both individuals and institutions are the ideas contained in the broader cultural context within which the state is located. Ideas that are embedded in social norms, patterns of discourse and collective identities become accepted, ‘instinctual’ parts of the social world and are experienced as part of a natural objective reality.87 In this way cultural variables subconsciously set the limits and terms of debate for both individuals and institutions, and so have ‘a profound effect on the strategic behaviour of states.’88 Mediated through institutions and individuals who are [ignore] blinded to potential alternatives, ideas embedded in national culture therefore have the potential to explain ‘why some states act contrary to the structural imperatives of the international system.’89 The power of ideas therefore rests on ‘the ability of believers in ideas to alter the costs and benefits facing those who are in a position to promote or hinder the policies that the ideas demand.’90 In the process of foreign policy ‘engineering’, organisations and the ideas they espouse or represent vie with one another for dominance and autonomy.91 Decisions taken reflect the process of formulating the choices to be presented.92 Throughout the process of making foreign policy powerful ideas – whether that power resides in their couriers or is internal to the ideas themselves – are prevailing over weaker ideas.93 ................
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