Topshelf

1NC
The 1ac sustains the referent object of security - this makes warfare, threat
construction and human insecurity inevitable. Be suspect of their specific scenarios national security is a ploy created through a culture of fear.
Lal 7 - Master of Arts in International Relations (Preerna, 2007,
http://gwu.academia.edu/PrernaLal/Papers/646118/Critical_Security_Studies_Deconstructing_the_National_Securit
y_State)
Under the lens of critical theory, there are many problems with the current framework of national security. First, security

is a
paradox for the more we add to the national security agenda, the more we have to fear. As
Barry Buzan (1991, 37) points out in People, States and Fear, the security paradox presents us with a cruel irony in that to be secure
ultimately, would mean being unable to escape. Thus, to

secure oneself, one would need to be trapped in a

timeless state, for leaving this state would incur risks. The curren t neo-realist realization of
national security is quite narrow and does not take into account threats to human welfare,
health, social problems, and domestic sources of insecurity . However, in Security: A New Framework of Analysis,
several CSS theorists put forward the case for widening the field of security studies and separating these into five different sectors under
state control: military, politics, environment, society and economy (Buzan, De Wilde and Waever 1998, 21-23). But, since these

wideners leave the referent object of security as the state, widening the field of security studies becomes even
more troubling because it risks more state control over our lives, the militarization of social issues
such as drugs and crime, which would further legitimize and justify state violence, leaving us all the
more insecure. Accordingly, it becomes clear that a mere re-definition of security away from its current neorealist framework does not solve the security dilemma if the referent object of security is left
unchanged. This goes to prove that it is the state as the referent object that requires questioning in
terms of its supposed provision of security rather than the problems with widening the field of security. Without
a state-centric concept of security, there would be no national security agenda left to widen, as
our security concerns would be human-centered, hence, the paradox of security would dissipate. A second
part of the security paradox is that security and insecurity are not binary opposites. On a micro-level, if security
is the state of being secure, than insecurity should be the state of not being secure. However, what we do feel secure about is neither part
of the national security agenda nor a conscious thought or feeling. The state of being secure is thus, not conceptualized as an absence of
insecurity. On a policymaking level, Robert Lipschutz (1995, 27), Associate Professor of Politics at University of California, Santa Cruz,
notes in On Security that our

desire to achieve security through the acquisition of arms and a national

serves to insecure those whom we label and treat as threats.

This encourages the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and
offensive posturing by those we wish to secure ourselves against, causing us to
feel more insecure as the end result of our search for security. More recently, when George
missile defense system,

W. Bush

included North Korea in his illogical Axis of Evil and named it as a threat to the
United States, the peripheral state had no nuclear capability and would never have thought to use the threat of weapons of mass
destruction to blackmail Western powers into giving aid. However, alarmed at the thought of being the next
Afghanistan or Iraq, North Korea retaliated within a year by revealing its nuclear arsenal.
The United States watched helplessly as one more previously benign nation became a real security problem. As a consequence ,

imagined enemies become real threats due to the ongoing threat construction by the
state, and this poses the security dilemma of creating self-fulfilling prophecies in the
current framework of security. Our notion of security is what the state says it is, rather than what we feel it is. Yet,

this entrenched view of security is epistemologically flawed, which is our second dilemma;
meaning that our

knowledge of security as it is defined is based in certain realist assumptions that do

not hold up under scrutiny. Our perception of what and from whom we need to be secured is not based on the actual threats
that exist, but on the threats that we are told to perceive by the state. Thus, terrorists, drugs, illegal immigrants, Third
World dictators, rogue states, blacks, non-Christians, and the Other, are considered as threats to
the national security apparatus, and consequently, as threats to the individual American .

This state construction of threats pervades our minds, causing a trickledown effect that encourages a culture of fear, where the only limit to the
coming danger is our imagination. Lipschutz (2000, 44-45) concludes in After Authority: War, Peace, and
Global Politics in the 21st Century, the national security state is brought down to the level of the household, and each one arms itself
against the security dilemma posed by its neighbor across the hedge of fence. Lipschutz seems to be saying that it

is national
security that eventually encourages the creation of a dichotomy between the self and the
Other in our everyday lives. Indeed, it is the discourse of security by the rulers and elites, which creates and
sustains our bipolar mindset of the world. A final dilemma presented by the current security framework is that
security is ontologically unstable, unable to exist on its own, requiring the creation of certain conditions and categories, specifically, the
creation of the Other. James Der Derian (1995, 25), Associate Professor of Political Science at U Mass (Amherst), notes in On Security
that we are taught to consider security as an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security
because there currently happens to be a widespread belief in it. Yet,

national security is a highly unstable

concept and changes over time, with the construction of new threats and enemies. Due to its
unstable nature, security can then, be considered as a constant fluid that is constructed and
re-defined by the discourse of the state and security elites. Ole Waever, a senior researcher at the
Center for Peace and Conflict Research, contends that the very act of uttering security places it on the security agenda, thereby giving

that in naming a certain development

a security problem, the state can claim a special right, one that in the final
instance, always be defined by the state and its elites (1995, 55). This process is termed as
the state and its elite, power over the issue. In On Security, he notes

securitization,

which simply means treating an event or issue as a problem of national security

rather than first questioning whether it should even be treated as a security issue. Such an
act serves the interests of the state and its elites, starting with security discourse by the
state, which constructs and perpetuates state identity and existence.

Their presencing of apocalypse is a necessary technique of control which colonizes

the debate and makes debating the merits of their policy fundamentally a nonstarter.
de Goede & Randalls 09 (Marieke, Department of European Studies, Univ of Amsterdam,
and Samuel, Dept of Geography, University College London, Precaution, preemption: arts and
technologies of the actionable Future, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009,
volume 27, pages 859-878)
If humans are the ones to blame, then humans can also attain control through reducing emissions or speculative geoengineering strategies.
Geoengineering approaches are claimed to be necessary as a precaution (eg Connor and Green, 2009), making available a set of emergency
technologies in case the unthinkable starts to occur (Fleming, 2007). Questions

of politics and ethics are frequently swept

aside by a banal, technocratic focus on risks. These `ultimate solutions', whilst not new ideas especially
in military circles (Fleming, 2007), are enlivened by the dramatizations of apocalyptic futures in which
the only way to act seems to be to adopt spectacular techniques of/for control. The
possibility of annihilation is made banal through its institutional preparation and

routinized imagination (Masco, 2006). This technological response is also deeply redemptive in its
potential to recover perfection (Noble, 1997). One of the political questions to be raised in relation to this new banality of
catastro- phe, as we will discuss below, is whether it is able to foster enchantment, understood as the ``profound and empowering attachment to
life'' that, according to Bennett (2001, page 160), is required for ethical political engagement. The apocalyptic

futures are also

stage-managed in practised responses to the threat of terrorism or climate change: terrorism through, for example, London scenarios of a
terrorist strike and climate change through the search for criteria to measure climate change preparedness across the world. This is bolstered by,
for example, the 1-in-1000- year tidal flood event exercise (Exercise Triton) held in the UK in 2004 or the ATLANTIS project led by Thomas
Downing at the Stockholm Environment Institute branch in Oxford. These

calculations and imaginations produce

citizens sensitive to the concerns of the policy makers, but, at the same time, desensitized to thinking critically about
these issues. Local councils have seized on the opportunities to use dystopic images to engage citizens in broader agendas of recycling and
reductions in energy consumption.(7) Whilst there is not space in this paper to discuss in much detail the ways in which subjects are constituted
through contemporary terrorist and climate change policies, this is nonetheless a critical point. Isin (2004), for example, discusses the `neurotic
citizen' as one who is constituted as neurotic, insecure, and anxious by the rational and affective governmental politics within a variety of
domains including security and the environment. We become terrorist-conscious or climate-change-conscious consumers, encouraged to eschew
war diamonds, oil, or air-freighted goods (Campbell, 2005; Le Billon, 2006). The

neurotic citizen is promised the

impossible, absolute security from terrorism and climate change, but despite these active attempts is
unable to address his or her insecurities (indeed, Sutton Council also distributed leaflets to house- holds showing local
landmarks of ponds and trees with the admonishment to ``Protect Sutton, help Stop Climate Change'', with a list of `things you can do' on the
reverse). The implication of this is that the

neurotic citizen is no longer a rational subject amenable to

rational pleas, but, rather, always already an affective subject, where affec- tive politics are
implicated through and in the creation of these subjects (Isin, 2004). For our purposes, the troubling conclusion
is the possibility of an affective subject that is peculiarly susceptible to pleas to manage
future climate and terror insecurities with little consideration of the nature of political engagement
and commitment that policies to manage these insecurities might engender . Finally, it is easy to
assume that disasters must always have negative repercussions, but disaster (and disaster imaginaries) can be immensely profitable
and not just for risk management consultancies.(8) Klein (2007), for example, illustrates the ways in which natural and economic disasters
offer opportunities for enforcement of and profits for `disaster capitalism'. Climate change `events'
(whether biophysical or, for example, business symposiums) offer marketable opportunities for financial products such as catastrophe bonds or
hurricane derivatives (Randalls, 2009) and advertising opportunities for companies as diverse as oil giant BP and clothing company Diesel. Here,

imagination for disaster is used to sustain interest in and profit from perceived future
climatic risks, ones that must be not only anticipated but also exploited. Drawing authority from perceived climate science (whether warranted
or not), these crises become opportunities that must be continually relegitimated by further
warnings of crises to keep the market value of climate sufficiently high. In other words, these imaginaries do not just
generate environmental or government responses; they represent commercial opportunities
too. Whilst uncertainty may have been disabling in the sense of generating coordinated international action on reducing emissions, climate
the

uncertainties, as with terrorism, have successfully generated business innovation, governmental regulation, and manifold surveillance practices.
Politics We have argued that preemption in contemporary security practice, and precaution in contemporary environmental practice display
important affinities and historical entan- glements, through the ways in which they imagine apocalypse and deploy arts and technologies that
render this imagination banal.We now turn to examine more explic- itly the political implications of the importance of precautionary principles
and the resulting quests for knowledge. We argue that three broad political outcomes can be considered. First, terrorist and climate change
policies may be performative, bringing into being the very realities they seek to avoid. Second, the

imagination of apocalypse
may depoliticize debates, smuggling other policies in under their rubric; and, third, they may
delegitimate positions in the debates. If apocalypse is also about the imagination of a
paradise (Enzensberger, 1978; Kumar, 1995), an emergent new order, then the irony of contemporary
debates is that they fail to engage in significant political imagination. Thus, we suggest that the
banality of apocalypse in these debates fosters a disenchantment that is itself depoliticizing. Masco
writes: ``What does it mean when the `state of emergency' has so explicitly become the rule
when in order to prevent an apocalypse the governmental apparatus has prepared so

meticulously to achieve it?'' (2006, page 12, emphasis in original). First, then, it is important to emphasize
that governments not only are anticipating the worst, but also, in trying to prevent that
nightmare, act in ways that increase the possibility of its occurrence. This phantasmagoria
is thus imagined and made real. Thus, with regard to the politics of security preemption, Massumi
(2007, 16) recounts its logic as follows: ``It is not safe for the enemy to make the first move. You have to
move first, to make them move ... .You test and prod, you move as randomly and
unpredictably and ubiquitously as they do... .You move like the enemy, in order to make the
enemy move.'' That such reasoning is not purely theory was demonstrated by the events surrounding the arrest of six New Jersey men
accused of plotting to kill soldiers at Fort Dix in 2007. Reports of the arrest uncovered that the `disrupted plot' was actively encouraged by a
police informer, posing as an Egyptian radical. It was the informer who offered to broker a planned weapons purchase, and who, according to
New York Times journalist Kocieniewski (2007), ``seemed to be pushing the idea of buying the deadliest items, startling at least one of the
suspects.'' In another example of the performativity of security preemption, it is

now widely acknowledged that the

preemptive strike on Iraq fostered alliances between al Qaeda and Iraqi violent groups that
did not exist before the war. Indeed, terrorism expert Richardson (2006, page 166) calls the discursive conflation of the threats of
Saddam Hussein and bin Laden a ``self-fulfilling prophecy''.

The alternative is to embrace our untimely intervention into the 1AC refuse the
question of what we should do, and instead embrace a counter-discourse.
Calkivik 10.
PhD in Poli Sci @ Univ Minnesota (Emine Asli, 10/2010, "DISMANTLING SECURITY," PhD dissertation submitted to Univ Minnesota for
Raymond Duvall, http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/99479/1/Calkivik_umn_0130E_11576.pdf)
It is this self-evidence of security even for critical approaches and the antinomy stemming from dissident voices reproducing the language of
those they dissent from that constitutes the starting point for this chapter, where I elaborate on the meaning of dismantling security as untimely
critique. As mentioned in the vignette in the opening section, the

suggestion to dismantle security was itself deemed

as an untimely pursuit in a world where lives of millions were rendered brutally insecure by poverty,
violence, disease, and ongoing political conflicts. Colored by the tone of a call to conscience in the face of the ongoing
crisis of security, it was not the time, interlocutors argued, for self-indulgent critique. I will argue that it is the element of being
untimely, the effort, in the words of Walter Benjamin, to brush history against the grain that gives critical
thinking its power.291 It might appear as a trivial discussion to bring up the relation between time and critique because conceptions of
critical thinking in the discipline of International Relations already possess the notion that critical thought needs to be untimely. In the first
section, I will tease out what this notion of untimeliness entails by visiting ongoing conversations within the discipline about critical thought and
political time. Through this discussion, I hope to clarify what sets apart dismantling security as untimely critique from the notion of untimeliness
at work in critical international relations theory. The latter conception of the untimely, I will suggest, paradoxically calls on critical thought to be
on time in that it champions a particular understanding of what it means for critical scholarship to be relevant and responsible for its times.

This notion of the untimely demands that critique be strategic and respond to political
exigency, that it provide answers in this light instead of raising more questions about which questions could be raised or what
presuppositions underlie the questions that are deemed to be waiting for answers. After elaborating in the first section such strategic conceptions
of the untimeliness of critical theorizing, in the second section I will turn to a different sense of the untimely by drawing upon Wendy Browns
discussion of the relation between critique, crisis, and political time through her reading of Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History.292
In contrast to a notion of untimeliness that demands strategic thinking and punctuality, Browns exegesis provides a conception of historical
materialism where critique

is figured as a force of disruption , a form of intervention that

reconfigures the meaning of the times and contest[s] the very senses of time invoked to
declare critique untimely.293 Her exposition overturns the view of critique as a selfindulgent practice as it highlights the immediately political nature of critique and reconfigures the meaning of what
it means for critical thought to be relevant.294 It is in this sense of the untimely, I will suggest, that dismantling security as a critique
hopes to recover. I should point out that in this discussion my intention is neither to construct a theory of critique nor to provide an exhaustive
review and evaluation of the forms of critical theorizing in International Relations. Rather, my aim is to contribute to the existing efforts that
engage with the question of what it means to be critical apart from drawing the epistemological and methodological boundaries so as to think
about how one is critical.295 While I do not deny the importance of epistemological questions, I contend that taking time to think about the

meaning of critique beyond these issues presents itself as an important task. This task takes on additional importance within the context of
security studies where any realm of investigation quickly begets its critical counterpart. The rapid emergence and institutionalization of critical
terrorism studies when studies on terrorism were proliferating under the auspices of the so-called Global War on Terror provides a striking
example to this trend. 296 Such instances are important reminders that, to the extent that epistemology and methodology are reified as the sole
concerns in defining and assessing critical thinking297 or wrong headed refusals298 to get on with positive projects and empirical research gets
branded as debilitating for critical projects, what is erased from sight is the political nature of the questions asked and what is lost is the chance to
reflect upon what it means for critical thinking to respond to its times. In his meditation on the meaning of responding and the sense of
responsibility entailed by writing, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that all writing is committed. 299 This notion of commitment diverges from the
programmatic sense of committed writing. What underlies this conception is an understanding of writing as responding: writing is a response to
the voice of an other.In Nancys words, [w]hoever writes responds 300 and makes himself responsible to in the absolute sense.301
Suggesting that there

is always an ethical commitment prior to any particular political

commitment, such a notion of writing contests the notion of creative autonomy premised on the idea of a free, self-legislating subject who
responds. In other words, it discredits the idea of an original voice by suggesting that there is no voice that is not a response to a prior response.
Hence, to respond is configured as responding to an expectation rather than as an answer to a question and responsibility is cast as an anticipated
response to questions, to demands, to still-unformulated, not exactly predictable expectations.302 Echoing Nancy, David Campbell makes an
important reminder as he suggests that as international relations scholars we are always already engaged, although the sites, mechanisms and
quality of engagements might vary.303 The

question, then, is not whether as scholars we are engaged or not, but

what the nature of this engagement is. Such a re-framing of the question is intended to highlight the political nature of all
interpretation and the importance of developing an ethos of political criticism that is concerned with assumptions, limits, their historical
production, social and political effects, and the possibility of going beyond them in thought and action.304 Taking as its object assumptions and
limits, their historical production and social and political effects places the relevancy of critical thought and responsibility of critical scholarship
on new ground. It

is this ethos of critique that dismantling security hopes to recover for a

discipline where security operates as the foundational principle and where critical thinking
keeps on contributing to securitys impressing itself as a self-evident condition. Critical Theory and Punctuality
Within the context of International Relations, critical thoughts orientation toward its time comes out strongly in Kimberley Hutchingss
formulation.305 According to Hutchings, no matter what form it takes, what

distinguishes critical international

relations theory from other forms of theorizing is its orientation towards change and the
possibility of futures that do not reproduce the hegemonic power of the present .306 What this
implies about the nature of critical thought is that it needs to be not only diagnostic, but also self-reflexive. In the words of Hutchings, all critical
theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role
of critical theory in the present and future in international politics. 307 Not only analyzing the present, but also introducing the question of the
future into analysis places political time at the center of critical enterprise and makes the problem of change a core concern. It is this question of
change that situates different forms of critical thinking on a shared ground since they all attempt to expose the way in which what is presented as
given and natural is historically produced and hence open to change. With their orientation to change, their

efforts to go against
the dominant currents and challenge the hegemony of existing power relations by showing how contemporary
practices and discourses contribute to the perpetuation of structures of power and
domination, critical theorists in general and critical security studies specialists in particular take on an untimely
endeavor. It is this understanding of the untimely aspect of critical thinking that is emphasized by Mark Neufeld, who regards the
development of critical approaches to security as one of the more hopeful intellectual
developments in recent years.308 Despite nurturing from different theoretical traditions and therefore harboring fundamental
differences between modernist and postmodernist commitments, writes Neufeld, scholars who are involved in the critical project nevertheless
share a common concern with calling into question prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are
organized. 309 The

desire for changethrough being untimely and making the way to alternative futures that would no longer
resemble the presenthave led some scholars to emphasize the utopian element that must
accompany all critical thinking. Quoting Oscar Wildes aphorisma map of the world that does not
include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, Ken Booth argues for the need to restore the role and reputation of
utopianism in the theory and practice of international politics. 310 According to Booth, what goes under the banner of realismethnocentric
self-interest writ large311 falls far beyond the realities of a drastically changed world political landscape at the end of the Cold War. He
describes the new reality as an egg-box containing the shells of sovereignty; but alongside it a global community omelette [sic] is cooking.312
Rather than insisting on the inescapability of war in the international system as political realists argue, Booth argues for the need and possibility
to work toward the utopia of overcoming the condition of war by banking on the opportunities provided by a globalizing world. The point that
critical thought needs to be untimely by going against its time is also emphasized by Dunne and Wheeler, who assert that, regardless of the form
it takes, critical

theory purport[s] to think against the prevailing current and that [c]ritical

security studies is no exception to this enterprise.313 According to the authors, the function of critical approaches
to security is to problematize what is taken for granted in the disciplinary production of
knowledge about security by resist[ing], transcend[ing] and defeat[ing] theories of security,
which take for granted who is to be secured (the state), how security is to be achieved (by
defending core national values, forcibly if necessary) and from whom security is needed (the
enemy).314 While critical theory in this way is figured as untimely, I want to suggest that this notion of untimeliness gets construed
paradoxically in a quite timely fashion. With a perceived disjuncture between writing the world from within a discipline and acting in it placed at
the center of the debates, the performance of critical thought gets evaluated to the extent that it is punctual and in synch with the times. Does
critical thought provide concrete guidance and prescribe what is to be done? Can it move beyond mere talk and make timely political
interventions by providing solutions? Does it have answers to the strategic questions of progressive movements? Demanding that critical
theorizing come clean in the court of these questions, such conceptions of the untimely demand that critique respond to its times in a responsible
way, where being responsible is understood in stark contrast to a notion of responding and responsibility that I briefly discussed in the
introductory pages of this chapter (through the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and David Campbell). Let me visit two recent conversations ensuing
from the declarations of the contemporary crisis of critical theorizing in order to clarify what I mean by a timely understanding of untimely
critique. The first conversation was published as a special issue in the Review of International Studies (RIS), one of the major journals of the
field. Prominent figures took the 25th anniversary of the journals publication of two key textsregarded as canonical for the launching and
development of critical theorizing in International Relationsas an opportunity to reflect upon and assess the impact of critical theory in the
discipline and interrogate what its future might be. 315 The texts in question, which are depicted as having shaken the premises of the static world
of the discipline, are Robert Coxs 1981 essay entitled on Social Forces, States, and World Orders316 and Richard Ashleys article, Political
Realism and Human Interests.317 In their introductory essay to the issue, Rengger and Thirkell-White suggest that the essays by Cox and
Ashleyfollowed by Andrew Linklaters Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations318 represent the breach in the dyke of
the three dominant discourses in International Relations (i.e., positivists, English School, and Marxism), unleashing a torrent [that would] soon
become a flood as variety of theoretical approaches in contemporary social theory (i.e., feminism, Neo-Gramscianism, poststructuralism, and
post-colonialism) would get introduced through the works of critical scholars.319 After elaborating the various responses given to and resistance
raised against the critical project in the discipline, the authors provide an overview and an assessment of the current state of critical theorizing in
International Relations. They argue that the central question for much of the ongoing debate within the critical camp in its present statea
question that it cannot help but come to terms with and provide a response toconcerns the relation between critical thought and political
practice. As they state, the fundamental philosophical question [that] can no longer be sidestepped by critical International Relations theory is
the question of the relation between knowledge of the world and action in it.320 One of the points alluded to in the essay is that forms of
critical theorizing, which leave the future to contingency, uncertainty and the multiplicity of political projects and therefore provide less
guidance for concrete political action321 or, again, those that problematize underlying assumptions of thought and say little about the potential
political agency that might be involved in any subsequent struggles322 may render the critical enterprise impotent and perhaps even suspect.
This point comes out clearly in Craig Murphys contribution to the collection of essays in the RISs special issue. 323 Echoing William Wallaces
argument that critical theorists tend to be monks,324 who have little to offer for political actors engaged in real world politics, Murphy argues
that the promise of critical theory is partially kept because of the limited influence it has had outside the academy towards changing the
world.Building a different world, he suggests, requires more than isolated academic talk; that it demands not merely words, but deeds.325
This, according to Murphy, requires providing knowledge that contributes to change.326 Such knowledge would emanate from connections
with the marginalized and would incorporate observations of actors in their everyday practices. More importantly, it would create an inspiring
vision for social movements, such as the one provided by the concept of human development, which, according to Murphy, was especially
powerful because it embodied a value-oriented way of seeing, a vision, rather than only isolated observations.327 In sum, if critical theory is to
retain its critical edge, Murphys discussion suggests, it has to be in synch with political time and respond to its immediate demands. The second
debate that is revelatory of this conception of the timing of critical theoryi.e., that critical thinking be strategic and efficient in relation to
political timetakes place in relation to the contemporary in/security environment shaped by the so-called Global War on Terror. The theme that
bears its mark on these debates is the extent to which critical inquiries about the contemporary security landscape become complicit in the
workings of power and what critique can offer to render the world more legible for progressive struggles.328 For instance, warning critical
theorists against being co-opted by or aligned with belligerence and war-mongering, Richard Devetak asserts that critical international theory has
an urgent need to distinguish its position all the more clearly from liberal imperialism.329 While scholars such as Devetak, Booth,330 and
Fierke331 take the critical task to be an attempt to rescue liberal internationalism from turning into liberal imperialism, others announce the
crisis of critical theorizing and suggest that critical writings on the nature of the contemporary security order lack the resources to grasp their
actual limitations, where the latter is said to reside not in the realm of academic debate, but in the realm of political practice.332 It is amidst these
debates on critique, crisis, and political time that Richard Beardsworth raises the question of the future of critical philosophy in the face of the
challenges posed by contemporary world politics.333 Recounting these challenges, he provides the matrix for a proper form of critical inquiry
that could come to terms with [o]ur historical actuality.334 He describes this actuality as the thick context of modernity (an epoch, delimited
by the capitalization of social relations, which imposes its own philosophical problematicthat is, the attempt, following the social
consequences of capitalism, to articulate the relation between individuality and collective spirit335 ), American unilateralism in the aftermath of
the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the growing political disempowerment of people worldwide. Arguing that contemporary return of
religion and new forms of irrationalism emerge, in large part, out of the failure of the second response of modernity to provide a secular solution
to the inequalities of the nation-state and colonization,336 he formulates the awaiting political task for critical endeavors as constructing a world
polity to resist the disintegration of the world under the force of capital.It is with this goal in mind that he suggests that responsible scholarship
needs to rescue reason in the face irrational war337 and that intellectuals need to provide the framework for a world ethical community of law,
endowed with political mechanisms of implementation in the context of a regulated planetary economy.338 He suggests that an aporetic form of
thinking such as Jacques Derridasa thinking that ignores the affirmative relation between the determining powers of reason and history339

would be an unhelpful resource because such thinking does not open up to where work needs to be done for these new forms of polity to
emerge.340 In other words, critical thinking, according to Beardsworth, needs to articulate and point out possible political avenues and to orient
thought and action in concrete ways so as to contribute to progressive political change rather than dwelling on the encounter of the incalculable
and calculation and im-possibility of world democracy in a Derridean fashion. In similar ways to the first debate on critique that I discussed,
critical thinking is once again called upon to respond to political time in a strategic and efficient manner. As critical inquiry gets summoned up to
the court of reason in Beardsworths account, its realm of engagement is limited to that which the light of reason can be shed upon, and its politics
is confined to mapping out the achievable and the doable in a given historical context without questioning or disrupting the limits of what is
presented as realistic choices. Hence, if untimely critical thought is to be meaningful it has to be on time by responding to political exigency in
a practical, efficient, and strategic manner. In contrast to this prevalent form of understanding the untimeliness of critical theory, I will now turn to
a different account of the untimely provided by Wendy Brown whose work informs the project of dismantling security as untimely critique.
Drawing from her discussion of the relationship between critique, crisis, and political time, I will suggest that untimely

critique of
security entails, simultaneously, an attunement to the times and an aggressive violation of their
self-conception . It is in this different sense of the untimely that the suggestion of dismantling security needs to be situated. Critique and
Political Time As I suggested in the Prelude to this chapter, elevating security itself to the position of major protagonist and extending a
call to dismantle security was itself declared to be an untimely pursuit in a time depicted
as the time of crisis in security. Such a declaration stood as an exemplary moment (not in the sense of illustration or allegory,
but as a moment of crystallization) for disciplinary prohibitions to think and act otherwiseperhaps the moment when a doxa exhibits its most
powerful hold. Hence, what

is first needed is to overturn the taken-for-granted relations between

crisis, timeliness, and critique. The roots krisis and kritik can be traced back to the Greek word krin, which meant to
separate, to choose, to judge, to decide.341 While creating a broad spectrum of meanings, it was intimately related to politics as it
connoted a divorce or quarrel, but also a moment of decision and a turning point. It was also used as a jurisprudential term in the sense of
making a decision, reaching a verdict or judgment (kritik) on an alleged disorder so as to provide a way to restore order. Rather than being
separated into two domains of meaningthat of subjective critique and objective crisiskrisis and kritik were conceived as interlinked
moments. Koselleck explains this conceptual fusion: [I]t wasin the sense of judgment, trial, legal decision, and ultimately court that
crisis achieved a high constitutionalstatus, through which the individual citizen and the community were bound together. The for and against
wastherefore present in the original meaning of the word and thisin a manner that already conceptually anticipated the appropriate judgment. 342
Recognition of an objective crisis and subjective judgments to be passed on it so as to come up with a formula for restoring the health of the
polity by setting the times right were thereby infused and implicated in each other.343 Consequently, as Brown notes, there could be no such
thing as mere critique or untimely critique because critique always entailed a concern with political time: [C]ritique as political krisis
promise[d] to restore continuity by repairing or renewing the justice that gives an order the prospect of continuity, that indeed ma[de] it
continuous.344 The breaking of this intimate link between krisis and kritik, the consequent depoliticization of critique and its sundering from
crisis coincides with the rise of modern political order and redistribution of the public space into the binary structure of sovereign and subject,
public and private.345 Failing to note the link between the critique it practiced and the looming political crisis, emerging philosophies of history,
according Koselleck, had the effect of obfuscating this crisis. As he explains, [n]ever politically grasped, [this political crisis] remained
concealed in historico-philosophical images of the future which cause the days events to pale.346 It is this intimate, but severed, link between
crisis and critique in historical narratives that Wendy Browns discussion brings to the fore and re-problematizes. She turns to Walter Benjamins
Theses on the Philosophy of History and challenges conventional understandings of historical materialism, which conceives of the present in
terms of unfolding laws of history.347 According to Brown, the practice

of critical theory appeals to a concern

with time to the extent that [t]he crisis that incites critique and that critique engages itself signals a rupture of
temporal continuity , which is at the same time a rupture in political imaginary .348 Cast in these terms, it is a
particular experience with time, with the present, that Brown suggests Benjamins theses aim to capture. Rather than an unmoving or an
automatically overcome present (a present that is out of time), the

present is interpreted as an opening that calls

for a response to it. This call for a response highlights the idea that, far from being a luxury, critique is non-optional in its nature. Such an
understanding of critical thought is premised on a historical consciousness that grasps the present historically so as to break with the
selfconception of the age. Untimely

critique transforms into a technique to blow up the present

through fracturing its apparent seamlessness by insisting on alternatives to its closed
political and epistemological universe .349 Such a conception resonates with the distinction that iek makes
between a political subjectivity that is confined to choosing between the existing alternatives
one that takes the limits of what is given as the limits to what is possibleand a form of subjectivity that creates the
very set of alternatives by transcend[ing] the coordinates of a given situation [and]
posit[ing] the presuppositions of one's activity by redefining the very situation within
which one is active.350 With its attempt to grasp the times in its singularity, critique is cast neither as a breaking free from the

conceives
the present as historically contoured but not itself experienced as history because not necessarily
continuous with what has been.352 It is an attitude that renders the present as the site of nonutopian possibility since it is historically situated and constrained yet also a possibility since it is not historically
foreordained or determined.353 It entails contesting the delimitations of choice and challenging the
confinement of politics to existing possibilities . Rather than positing history as existing objectively outside of
weight of time (which would amount to ahistoricity) nor being weighed down by the times (as in the case of teleology).351 It

narration, what Browns discussion highlights is the intimate relation between the constitution of political subjectivity vis--vis the meaning of
history for the present. It alludes to the power of historical discourse, which Mowitt explains as a power to estrange us from that which is most
familiar, namely, the fixity of the present because what

we believe to have happened to us bears concretely

on what we are prepared to do with ourselves both now and in the future.354 Mark Neocleous
concretizes the political stakes entailed in such encounters with historywith the deadfrom the
perspective of three political traditions: a conservative one, which aims to reconcile the dead with the
living, a fascist one, which aims to resurrect the dead to legitimate its fascist program , and
a historical materialist one, which seeks redemption with the dead as the source of hope
and inspiration for the future.355 Browns discussion of critique and political time is significant for highlighting the
immediately political nature of critique in contrast to contemporary invocations that cast it as a self-indulgent practice, an untimely luxury, a
disinterested, distanced, academic endeavor. Her attempt

to trace critique vis--vis its relation to political

time provides a counter-narrative to the conservative and moralizing assertions that shun
untimely critique of security as a luxurious interest that is committed to abstract ideals rather
than to the reality of politicsi.e., running after utopia rather than modeling real world solutions. Dismantling
security as untimely critique entails a similar claim to unsettle the accounts of what the times are
with a bid to reset time.356 It aspires to be untimely in the face of the demands on critical
thought to be on time; aims to challenge the moralizing move , the call to conscience that arrives in
the form of assertions that saying no! to security , that refusing to write it, would be
untimely . Rather than succumbing to the injunction that thought of political possibility is to be confined within the framework of security,
dismantling security aims to open up space for alternative forms, for a different language
of politics so as to stop digging the hole politics of security have dug us and start building
a counter-discourse. Conclusion As an attempt to push a debate that is fixated on security to the limit and explore what it means to
dismantle security, my engagement with various aspects of this move is not intended as an analysis raised at the level of causal
interpretations or as an attempt to find better solutions to a problem that already has a name. Rather, it tries to recast what is
taken-for-granted by attending to the conceptual assumptions, the historical and systemic
conditions within which the politics of security plays itself out. As I tried to show in this chapter, it also
entails a simultaneous move of refusing to be a disciple of the discipline of security . This
implies overturning not only the silent disciplinary protocols about which questions are
legitimate to ask, but also the very framework that informs those questions. It is from this perspective
that I devoted two chapters to examining and clarifying the proposal to dismantle security as a claim on time. After explicating, in Chapter 4, the
temporal structure that is enacted by politics of security and elaborating on how security structures the relation between the present and the future,
in this chapter, I approached the question of temporality from a different perspective, by situating it in relation to disciplinary times in order to
clarify what an untimely critique of security means. I tried to elaborate this notion of the untimely by exploring the understanding of untimeliness
that informs certain conceptions of critical theorizing in International Relations. I suggested that such

a notion of the untimely

paradoxically calls on critical thought to be on time in the sense of being punctual and
strategic. Turning to Wendy Browns discussion of the relation between critique and political time, I elaborated on the sense of
untimely critique that dismantling security strives fora critique that goes against the times that are

saturated by the infinite passion to secure and works toward taking apart the architecture
of security

2NC Impact O/V

The security politics of the 1AC align along national security lines which present the
state as the referent object who a.) Determines who constitutes a threat, and b.) acts
as the horizon of possibilities in which bodies are counted as worth grieving for.
This relegation of security to the level of the nation state is an epistemological
maneuver which
1.) Leads to Great Power War - because it renders the state the stage by which the
great charade of warfare and power politics can take place, as opposed to simply a
useful heuristic to resolve the needs of the polis.
2.) Creates a self-fufilling prophecy and creates the conditions for the spread of
weapons of mass destruction and the construction of Other states as actors whose
citizens have interests diametrically opposed to our own which causes global war
and widespread structural violence, thats Lal.
This impact calculous also effaces structural violence in the pursuit of the pure
functioning of the war machine, these impacts should come first b/c they are conflict
mulitpliers and are rountinely ignored by policy makers..
Nixon 10 (Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pp 1-14)
When Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, advocated thai the bank develop a scheme to export rich nation garbage, toxic
waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa, he did so in the calm voice of global managerial reasoning.' Such a scheme. Summers
elaborated, would help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity. Underlying his plan is an overlooked but crucial subsidiary benefit that
he outlined: offloading rich-nation toxins onto the world's poorest continent would help ease the growing pressure from rich-nation
environmentalists who were campaigning against garbage dumps and industrial effluent thai they condemned as health threats and found
aesthetically offensive. Summers thus rationalized his poison-redistribution ethic as offering a double gain: it would benefit the United States and
Europe economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nation environmentalists. Summers' arguments assumed a direct link
between aesthetically unsightly waste and

Africa as an out-of-sighl continent, a place remote from green

activists' terrain of concern . In Summers' win win scenario for the global North, the African recipients ot his plan were triply
discounted: discounted as political agents, discounted as long-term casualties of what 1 call in this book "slow violence," and discounted as
cultures possessing environmental practices and concerns of their own. I begin with Summers' extraordinary proposal because it captures the
strategic and representational challenges posed by slow violence as it impacts the environments and the environ-mentalism of the poor. Three
primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need

to rethink politically,
imaginatively , and theoretically what 1 call "slow violence." By slow violence 1 mean a violence that occurs
gradually and out of sight , a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time
and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and
spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility . We need, I believe, to
engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but
rather incremental and accretive , its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the
relative invisibility of slow violence . Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift,
biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermath s of wars, acidifying oceans, and

a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable

representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The
long dyings the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result
from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in
human memory . Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass
destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and
been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries
with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted
assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we
complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is
newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account
for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond
to a variety of social afflictions from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and. in particular,
environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to
the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential ,
operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in
situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually
degraded. Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft . Palling bodies,
burning towers , exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and pageturning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries,
cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats arc all
cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the
media venerate the spectacular , when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived
immediate need , a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and
narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are
anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to
the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world ? How can we turn the long
emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and
warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to
some of the most critical challenges of our time? This book's second, related focus concerns the environ mentalism
of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence .
Their unseen poverty is compounded hy the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates
so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the
vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously
exacerbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called "disposable people." 2 It
is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent environmentalist!! of the poor, particularly
(though not exclusively) across the so-called global South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults
on resources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or through activism that has reached across
national boundaries in an effort to build translocal alliances. "The poor" is a compendious category subject to almost infinite local variation as
well as to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation. Confronted with the militarization of both
commerce and development, impoverished communities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience. How much
control will, say, a poor hardwood forest community have over the mix of subsistence and market strategies it deploys in attempts at adaptive
survival? How will that community negotiate competing definitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth when the guns, the bulldozers, and
the moneymen arrive? Such communities typically have to patch together threadbare improvised alliances against vastly superior military,
corporate, and media forces. As such, impoverished resource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments are
seamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threat not as a planetary abstraction but as a set of
inhabited risks, some imminent, others obscurely long term. The status of environmental activism among the poor in the global South has shifted

significantly in recent years. Where green or environmental discourses were once frequently regarded with skepticism as neocolo-nial. Western
impositions inimical to the resource priorities of the poor in the global South, such attitudes have been tempered by the gathering visibility and
credibility of environmental justice movements that have pushed back against an antihuman environmenialism that too often sought (under the
banner of universalism) to impose green agendas dominated by rich nations and Western NGOs. Among those who inhabit the front lines of the
global resource wars, suspicions that environmentaUsm is another guise of what Andrew Ross calls "planetary management" have not. of course,
been wholly allayed.1 But those suspicions have eased somewhat as the spectrum of what counts as environmenialism has broadened. Western
activists are now more prone to recognize, engage, and learn from resource insurrections among the global poor that might previously have been
discounted as not properly environmental.' Indeed, 1 believe that the fate of environ mentalismand more decisively, the character of the
biosphere itselfwill be shaped significantly in decades to come by the tension between what Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier have
called "full-stomach' and "empty-belly" environmenialism.' The challenge of visibility that links slow violence to the environmen-talism of the
poor connects directly to this hook's third circulating concernthe complex, often vexed figure of the

environmental writer-

activist . In the chapters that follow 1 address not just literary but more broadly rhetorical and visual challenges posed by slow violence;
however, 1 place particular emphasis on combative writers who have deployed their imaginative agility and worldly ardor to help amplify the
media marginalized causes of the environmentally dispossessed. I have sought to stress those places where writers and social movements, often in
complicated tandem, have stralcgized against attritional disasters that afflict embattled communities. The writers I engage arc geographically
wide rangingfrom various parts of the African continent, from the Middle East. India, the Caribbean, the United States, and Britainand work
across a variety of forms. Figures like Wangari Maathai. Arundhati Roy. lndra Sinha. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Abdulrah-man Munif. Njabulo Ndebcle,
Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Carson, and June Jordan are alive to the inhabited impact of corrosive transnational forces, including
petro-imperialism. the megadam industry, outsourced toxicity, neocolonial tourism, antihuman conservation practices, corporate and
environmental deregulation, and the militarization of commerce, forces that disproportionately jeopardize the livelihoods, prospects, and memory
banks of the global poor. Among the writers 1 consider, some have testified in relative isolation, some have helped instigate movements for
environmental justice, and yet others, in aligning themselves with preexisting movements, have given imaginative definition to the issues at stake
while enhancing the public visibility of the cause. Relations between movements and writers are often fraught and fric-tional. not least because
are
enraged by injustices they wish to see redressed, injustices they believe they can help
expose, silences they can help dismantle through testimonial protest, rhetorical
inventiveness, and counterhistories in the face of formidable odds . Most are restless, versatile writers

such movements themselves are susceptible to fracture from both external and internal pressures.* That said, the writers I consider

ready to pit their energies against what Edward Said called "the normalized quiet of unseen power."" This normalized quiet is of particular
pertinence to the hushed havoc and injurious invisibility that trail slow violence. In this book, I

have sought to address our

inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense
their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans and outside the
purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media . The insidious workings of slow violence
derive largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time. In
an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special
effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV . Chemical and radiological violence,
for example, is driven inward, somatized into cellular dramas of mutation thatparticularly in
the bodies of the poorremain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated. From a narrative
perspective, such invisible, mutagenic theater is slow paced and open ended, eluding the tidy closure, the containment, imposed by the visual
orthodoxies of victory and defeat. Let me ground this point by referring, in conjunction, to Rachel Carson's Silenl Spring and Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth. In 1962 Silent Spring jolted a broad international public into an awareness of the protracted, cryptic, and indiscriminate
casualties inflicted by dichlorodiphenyltrichlo-roethane (DDT). Yet. just one year earlier, Fanon. in the opening pages of Wretched of the Earth,
had comfortably invoked DDT as an affirmative metaphor for anticolonial violence: he called for a DDT-filled spray gun to be wielded as a
weapon against the "parasites" spread bv the colonials' Christian church." Fanon's drama of decolonization is, of course, studded with the overt
weaponry whereby subjugation is maintained {"by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons") or overthrown ("by the searing bullets and
bloodstained knives") after "a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists."' Yet his temporal vision of violenceand of what
Aime Cesaire called "the rendezvous of victory"was uncomplicated by the concerns thai an as-yet inchoate environmental justice movement
(catalyzed in part by Silent Spring) would raise about lopsided risks that permeate the land long term, blurring the clean lines between defeat and
victory, between colonial dispossession and official national self determination.11 We can ccr lainly read Fanon, in his concern with land as
property and as fount of native dignity, retrospectively with an environmental eye. But our theories of violence today must be informed by a
science unavailable to Fanon, a science that addresses environmentally embedded violence that is often difficult to source, oppose, and once set in
motion, to reverse. Attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space arc marked above all by displacements temporal,
geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and

displacements smooth the way for amnesia , as places are rendered

irretrievable to those who once inhabited them, places that ordinarily pass unmourned in
the corporate media. Places like the Marshall Islands, subjected between 1948 and 1958 to sixty-seven American atmospheric

environmental costs. Such

nuclear "tests," the largest of them equal in force to 1.000 I liroshima-sizcd bombs. In 1950 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the
Marshall Islands "by far the most contaminated place in the world," a condition that would compromise independence in the long term, despite
the islands' formal ascent in 1979 into the ranks of self-governing nations." The island republic was still in pan governed by an irradiated past:

well into the 1980s its history of nuclear colonialism, long forgotten by the colonizers, was still delivering into the world "jellyfish babies"
headless, eyeless, limbless human infants who would live for just a few hours.11 If, as Said notes, struggles over geography are never reducible
to armed struggle but have a profound symbolic and narrative component as well, and if, as Michael Watts insists, we must attend to the "violent
geographies of fast capitalism." we

need to supplement both these injunctions with a deeper understanding of the

slow violence of delayed effects that structures so many of our most consequential
forgetting *." Violence, above all environmental violence, needs to be seenand deeply consideredas a contest not
only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time. Wc need to bear in mind Faulkner's dictum that "the past is
never dead. It's not even past." His words resonate with particular force across landscapes permeated by slow violence, landscapes of
temporal overspill that elude rhetorical cleanup operations with their sanitary beginnings and endings.1'1 Kwamc Anthony Appiah famously
asked. "Is the 'Post-' in "PostcoloniaF the 'Post-' in 'Postmodern'?" As environmentalists wc might ask similarly searching questions of the "post"
in postindustrial, post Cold War, and post-conflict." For if the past of slow violence isnevcrpast. so too the post is never fully post: industrial
particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements wc inhabit and in our very bodies, which cpidcmiologically and ecologically are
never our simple contemporaries.'" Something similar applies to so-called postconflict societies whose leaders may annually commemorate, as
marked on the calendar, the official cessation of hostilities, while ongoing intcrgcncrational slow violence (inflicted by, say. uncxplodcd
landmines or carcinogens from an arms dump) may continue hostilities by other means. Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein
the present feels more abbreviated than it used toat least for the world's privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers
that often compound the sensation of not having enough lime. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our
rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under ncoliberalism, the gult between enclaved rich and outcast
poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become a sell justifying, propulsive
ethic that renders uneventful" violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The attosecond pace
of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in
an insatiable and often insensate quest for quicker sensation. The oxymoronic notion of slow violence poses a number of challenges;
scientific, legal, political, and representational. In the long arc between the emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes
and the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view as the casualties incurred typically pass untallied and unremembered. Such discounting in
turn makes it far more difficult to secure effective legal measures for prevention, restitution, and redress. Casualties

from slow
violence are moreover, out of sync not only with our narrative and media expectations but also with the swift seasons of
electoral change. Politicians routinely adopt a "last in, first out" stance toward environmental issues, admitting them when limes are
flush, dumping them as soon as times get tight. Because preventative or remedial environmental legislation typically targets slow violence, it
cannot deliver dependable electoral cycle results, even though those results may ultimately be life saving. Relative to bankable pocket-book
actionsthere'll be a tax rebate check in the mail next Augustenvironmental payouts seem to lurk on a distant horizon. Many politicians
and indeed many votersroutinely treat

environmental action as critical yet not urgent. And so generation

rare exceptions, in
the domain of slow violence "yes, but not now, not yet" becomes the modus operandi. How
can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe when the political rewards of their actions will
not accrue to them but will be reaped on someone else's watch decades, even centuries, from now?
after generation of two- or four-year cycle politicians add to the pileup of deferrable actions deferred. With

How can environmental activists and storytellers work to counter the potent political, corporate, and even scientific forces invested in immediate
self-interest, procrastination, and dissembling? We see such dissembling at work, for instance, in the afterword to Michael Crichton's 2004
environmental conspiracy novel, Slate of Fear, wherein he argued that we needed twenty more years of daia gaihcringon climate change before
any policy decisions could be ventured.1* Although the National Academy of Sciences had assured former president George W. Bush that
humans were indeed causing the earth to warm. Bush shopped around for views that accorded with his own skepticism and found them in a
private meeting with Crichton, whom he described as "an expert scientist.*' To address the challenges of slow violence is to confront the
dilemma Rachel Carson faced almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she eloquently called "death by indirection."'" Carson's
subjects were biomagnification and toxic drift, forms of oblique, slow-acting violence that, like climate change, pose formidable imaginative
difficulties for writers and activists alike. In struggling to give shape to amorphous menace, both Carson and reviewers of 5ilcn( Spring resorted
to a narrative vocabulary: one reviewer portrayed the book as exposing "the new, unplottcd and mysterious dangers wc insist upon creating all
around us,"" while Carson herself wrote of "a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure."10 To confront slow violence

The
representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention
to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To
intervene representation-ally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous
calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency. Seven
requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time.

years after Rachel Carson turned our attention to ihe lethal mechanisms of "death by indirection," Johan Gaining, the influential Norwegian
mathematician and sociologist, coined the term "indirect or structural violence."'' Gakung's theory of structural violence is pertinent here because
some of his concerns overlap with the concerns that animate this book, while others help throw inio relief the rather different features I have
soughi to highlight by introducing the term "slow violence." Structural violence, forGaltung, stands in opposition to the more familiar personal
violence thai dominates our conceptions of what counts as violence per sc." Galtung was concerned, as I am, with widening the field of what
constitutes violence. He soughi to foreground ihe vast structures thai can give rise to acts of personal violence and constitute forms of violence in
and of themselves. Such structural violence may range from the unequal morbidity that results from a commodificd health care system, to racism
itself. What I share with Gal-tung's line of thought is a concern with social justice, hidden agency, and certain forms of violence that are
imperceptible. In these terms, for example, we

can recognize that the structural violence embodied by a

neoliberal order of austerity measures, structural adjustment, rampant deregulation,

corporate megamergers, and a widening gulf between rich and poor is a form of covert
violence in its own right that is often a catalyst for more recognizably overt violence . For an
expressly environmental example of structural violence, one might cite Wangari Maathai's insistence that the systemic burdens of national debt to
the IMF and World Bank borne by many so-called developing nations constitute a major impediment to environmental sustainability.JI So. too,
feminist earth scientist Jill Schneiderman, one of our finest thinkers about environmental time, has written about the way in which environmental
degradation may "masquerade as inevitable."14 For all the continuing pertinence of the theory of structural violent t and for all the modifications
the theory has undergone, the notion bears the impress of its genesis during the high era of structuralist thinking that tended toward a static
determinism. We see this, for example, in Gakung's insistence that "structural violence is silent, it does not showits is essentially static, it is the
tranquil waters."1* In contrast to the static connotations of structural violence, I have sought, through the notion of slow violence, to foreground
questions of time, movement, and change, however gradual. The explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence allows us to keep front and center
the representational challenges and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence but by imperceptible change whereby vio
lence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time. Time

becomes an actor in complicated ways, not

least because the temporal tern plates of our spectacle-driven, 24/7 media life have shifted
massively since Galtung first advanced his theory of structural violence some forty years
ago. To talk about slow violence, then, is to engage directly with our contemporary politics
of speed. Simply put. structural violence is a theory that entails rethinking different notions of causation and agency with respect to violent
effects. Slow violence, by contrast, might well include forms of structural violence, but has a wider
descriptive range in calling attention, not simply to questions of agency, but to broader ,
more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted slowly over time. The shift in the relationship
between human agency and time is most dramatically evident in our enhanced understanding of the accelerated changes occurring at two scalar
extremesin the life-sustaining circuits of planetary biophysics and in the wired brain's neural circuitry . The idea of
structural violence predated both sophisticated contemporary ice-core sampling methods and the emergence of cyber technology. My concept of
slow violence thus seeks to respond both to recent, radical changes in our geological perception and our changing technological experiences of
time. Let me address the geological aspect first. In 2000, Paul Crutzen. the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, introduced the term "the
Anthropo-cene Age" (which he dated to James Watt's invention of the steam engine). Through the notion of "the Anthropocene Age." Crutzen
sought to theorize an unprecedented epochal effect: the massive impact by the human species, from the industrial era onward, on our planet's life
systems, an impact that, as his term suggests, is geomorphic, equal in force and in long-term implications to a major geological event.* Crutzen's
attempt to capture the epochal scale of human activity's impact on the planet was followed by Will Steffen's elaboration, in conjunction with
Crutzen and John McNeill, of what they dubbed the Great Acceleration, a second stage of the Anthropocene Age that they dated to the midtwentieth century. Writing in 2007. Steffen ct al. noted how "nearly three-quarters of the anthropogenically driven rise in COt concentration has
occurred since 1950 (from about 310 to 380 ppm), and about half of the total rise (48 ppm) has occurred in just the last 30 years."-7 The
Australian environmental historian Libby Robin has put the case succinctly: "We have recently entered a new geological epoch, the
Anthropocene. There is now considerable evidence that humanity has altered the biophysical systems of Earth, not just the carbon cycle . . . but
also the nitrogen cycle and ultimately the atmosphere and climate of the whole globe."" What, then, are the consequences for our experience of
time of this newfound recognition thai we have inadvertently, through our unprecedented biophysical species power, inaugurated an
Anthropocene Age and are now engaged in (and subject to) the hurtling changes of the Great Acceleration? Over the past two decades, this highspeed planetary modification has been accompanied (at least for those increasing billions who have access to the Internet) by rapid modifications
to the human cortex. It is difficult, but necessary, to consider simultaneously a geologically-paced plasticity, however relatively rapid, and the
plasticity of brain circuits reprogrammed by a digital world that threatens to "info-whelm" us into a state of perpetual distraction. If an awareness
of the Great Acceleration is (to put it mildly) unevenly distributed, the experience of accelerated connectivity (and the paradoxical disconnects
that can accompany it) is increasingly widespread. In an age of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult yet increasingly urgent that
we focus on the toll exacted, over time, by the slow violence of ecological degradation. We live, writes Cory Doctorow, in an era when the
electronic screen has become an "ecosystem of interruption technologies.''" Or as former Microsoft executive Linda Stone puts it, we now live in
an age of "continuous partial attention.?" Fast is faster than it used to be, and story units have become concomitantly shorter. In this cultural
milieu of digitally speeded up time, and foreshortened narrative, the intergenerational aftermath becomes a harder sell. So to render slow violence
visible entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts
to recast "glacial"-once a dead metaphor for "slow-as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss. Efforts

to make forms of
slow violence more urgently visible suffered a setback in the United States in the aftermath
of 9/11, which reinforced a spectacular, immediately sensational, and instantly hyper-visible
image of what constitutes a violent threat . The fiery spectacle of the collapsing towers was
burned into the national psyche as the definitive image of violence , setting back by years attempts to rally
public sentiment against climate change, a threat that is incremental, exponential, and far less sensationally visible. Condoleezza
Rice's strategic fantasy of a mushroom cloud looming over America if the United States failed
to invade Iraq gave further visual definition to cataclysmic violence as something explosive
and instantaneous , a recognizably cinematic, immediately sensational, pyrotechnic event . The
representational bias against slow violence has, furthermore, a critically dangerous impact on

what counts as a casualty in the first place. Casualties of slow violence-human and
environmental-are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted. Casualties of
slow violence become light-weight, disposable casualties, with dire consequences for the ways wars are remembered,
which in turn has dire consequences for the projected casualties from future wars. We can observe this bias at work in the way wars, whose lethal
repercussions spread across space and time, are tidily bookended in the historical record. Thus, for instance, a 2003 New York Times editorial on
Vietnam declared that" during our dozen years there, the U.S. killed and helped kill at least 1.5 million people.'?' But that simple phrase "during
our dozen years there" shrinks the toll, foreshortening the ongoing slow-motion slaughter: hundreds of thousands survived the official war years,
only to slowly lose their lives later to Agent Orange. In a 2002 study, the environmental scientist Arnold Schecter recorded dioxin levels in the
bloodstreams of Bien Hoa residents at '35 times the levels of Hanoi's inhabitants, who lived far north of the spraying." The afflicted include
thousands of children born decades after the war's end. More than thirty years after the last spray run, Agent Orange continues to wreak havoc as,
through biomagnification, dioxins build up in the fatty tissues of pivotal foods such as duck and fish and pass from the natural world into the
cooking pot and from there to ensuing human generations. An Institute of Medicine committee has by now linked seventeen medical conditions to
Agent Orange; indeed, as recently as 2009 it uncovered fresh evidence that exposure to the chemical increases the likelihood of developing
Parkinson's disease and ischemic heart disease." Under such circumstances, wherein long-term risks continue to emerge, to bookend a war's
casualties with the phrase "during our dozen years there" is misleading: that small, seemingly innocent phrase is a powerful reminder of how our
rhetorical conventions for bracketing violence routinely ignore ongoing, belated casualties.

2NC Alt Overview

The alternative is a critical intervention characterized by its untimeliness this
functions as a critical rupture which is epistemologically valuable. Do not be held
hostage by case outweighs arguments there are always times for reflection and it is
precisely voting negative for our alternative which renders the ability to say No to
security both possible and timely.
Even if we lose the framework debate, dont settle for the affs tinkering with
Military Policy - instead affirm a Utopian Interruption.
First, this impulse is mutually exclusive with withdrawal.
Figal, 3 -- University of Delaware history professor
[Gerald, Ph.D in East Asian languages and history from the University of Chicago, Waging
Peace on Okinawa, in Islands of Discontent, ed. By Laura Hein & Mark Selden, p. 65-67,
accessed 10-13-15]
Waging Peace on Okinawa The ubiquitous conversion of war experience into peace mobilization in
Okinawa finds no better expression in contemporary popular culture than in pop singer Kina Shoukichi's White Ship
of Peace Project. Inverting the image of Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" (kurofune), which he
identifies with the forceful introduction of a war-prone modernity and the threatening
presence of U.S. military bases in Japan, Kina's metaphorical "White Ship" (shirofune) aimed "to
reciprocate the visit by Perry's Black Ships" in 1853 and "bring to the USA a message of peace
for the future."1 Kina and companyforty Okinawans, several "Native Americans and enlightened Caucasians," and an additional ninety
Japanese (including several Buddhist monks and three Ainu) who later joined the group in New York Cityrealized this trip in the form of a
musical peace caravan that began on 23 November 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley ("historical place for many civilian
movements"), and ended at the Onondaga Iroquois Nation in upstate New York on 11 December. Along the way their bus stopped at Alcatraz
Island for an "Unthanksgiving Day" gathering, the Ute Reservation in Utah, the Pine Ridge Reservation/Wounded Knee in South Dakota, various
peace activist centers across the Midwest, and the United Nations, where on 9 December Kina

promoted the White Ship's

slogan"Lay down your weapons, take up musical instruments" (subete no bukki o gakki ni, from his
book of the same title)by presenting the representative of the UN secretary-general with a sanshin, as if to
suggest that true UN peacekeeping missions should arm their troops with this traditional Okinawan
instrument rather than rifles. In Kina's vision of an idyllic Okinawa, which is formed around an
imagined premodern indigenous spirit of peace among neighbors, the military personnel stationed in
Okinawa would turn into musicians , practicing live music rather than live artillery firing.
(For more on Kina, see Roberson's chapter in this volume.) Kina is not alone in employing tropes of conversion
when campaigning for peace in Okinawa and beyond . The White Ship of Peace is but one
playful manifestation of the very serious business of constructing what was described at the Second
National Symposium for War Ruins Preservation (Senso iseki hozon zenkoku shinpojiumu) as a "fortress of peace" in Okinawa. This
symposium, held on 21 June 1998 in the southern Okinawan town of Haebaru and attended by approximately three hundred participants from
throughout Japan, concluded that it

was important to preserve old battle sites as "not merely symbols for the
recollection of war" but as "symbols of peace."2 As a representative of the Okinawa Peace Network put it, preserved
battle sites will be the "'living witnesses' that pass on local war experience in place of the Battle of Okinawa
survivors who are quickly passing away."3 Indeed, preservation activity has surged over the last decade upon the realization that indiscriminate
development since reversion (1972) has reduced the number of battle site ruins to about 100 according to an Okinawa Peace Network survey.
This statistic can be appreciated by recognizing that virtually the entire main island of Okinawa was turned into one big battle site during the

three-month campaign (late March to July 1945) that resulted in over two hundred thousand deaths, including about ninety-four thousand
Okinawan noncombatants.4 This preservation effort, supported by the teaching and practice of "battle ruin archeology" (senseki kSkogaku), has
paralleled systematic training and mobilization of a younger generation of "peace guides" (heiwa gaido) in Okinawa to replace the "war
experience storytellers" (senso taiken kataribe), who will represent only about 5 percent of the population in Okinawa Prefecture by 2005.5 This
chapter reflects on the ways in which war-related tours conducted by volunteer peace guides and catering primarily to mainland high school study
tours have been framed in relation to history education and peace discourses, on the one hand, and popular commercial battle site tours and
veterans' group pilgrimages, on the other. My interest is not only in how "war

tourism" is reconfigured as "peace

tourism" a la Kina's transformation of Black Ships into White Ships and guns into sanshin. At
the intersection of concerted Okinawan peace pro- motiona politicized reaction to the wartime past as much as it is hailed as the universal hope
of the futureand general tourisman industry that many in Okinawa are betting their economic futures ontensions strain beneath the
seemingly serene surfaces. While providing an overview of the peace courses and discourses in which Okinawa's peace guides find themselves
situated, I want to highlight the contests over representations of the war past that gave rise to this form of war (peace) tourism program and that
continue to provide much of its impetus. A controversy that broke out over the exhibit content of the new Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum
before it opened to the public on 1 April 2000 (the fifty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of the island) is testimony to ongoing "peace wars"
in Okinawa and is very much a part of the historical, political, and pedagogical contexts of peace guides. I will thus end with a brief report on this
issueone that emerged, in a sense, as an Okinawan version of the "history wars" fought at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in 1995
between candid historical representation and selective patriotic commemoration of the atomic attack on Hiroshima carried out by the B-29 Enola
Gay.6

Second, our pedagogy allows us to un-learn war.

Cady 10 (Duane L., prof of phil @ hamline university, From Warism to Pacifism: A
Moral Continuum, pp. 23-24)
The slow but persistent rise in awareness of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual- orientation, and
class oppression in our time and the beginning efforts of liberation from within oppressed
groups offer hope that even the most deeply held and least explicitly challenged predispositions of culture
might be examined. Such examinations can lead to changes in the lives of the oppressed. Perhaps
even those oppressed by warism will one day free themselves from accepting war as an
inevitable condition of nature. Two hundred years ago slavery was a common and well- established
social institution in the United States. It had been an ordinary feature of many societies dating to ancient and perhaps prehistoric
times. Slavery was taken for granted as a natural condition for beings thought to be inferior to
members of the dominant group. And slavery was considered an essential feature of our nations
economy. Within the past two centuries, attitudes toward slavery have changed dramatically. With these
fundamental shifts in normative lenses came fundamental shifts in the practice and legality
of slavery. These changes have been as difficult as they have been dramatic, for former slaves, for former slave- holders, and for culture at
large. While deep racial prejudices persist to this day, slavery is no longer tolerated in modern
societies. Slavery- like conditions of severe economic exploitation of labor have become embarrassments to dominant groups in part because

slavery is universally condemned. The point is that the most central values of cultures
thought to be essential to the very survival of the society and allegedly grounded in the
natural conditions of creationcan change in fundamental ways in relatively short
periods of time with profound implications for individuals and societies. John Dewey beautifully links this point
to the consideration of warism: War is as much a social pattern [for us] as was the domestic slavery which the
ancients thought to be immutable fact.9 The civil rights movement has helped us see that human worth is not
determined by a racial hierarchy. Feminism has helped us realize again that dominant attitudes about people are more likely values we choose
rather than innate and determined features of human nature. It is historically true that men have been more actively violent and have received
more training and encouragement in violence than have women.10 Dominant attitudes of culture have explained this by reference to what is
natural for males and natural for females. By questioning the traditional role models for men and women, all of us be- come more free to

Parallel to racial and

gender liberation movements, pacifism questions taking warism for granted. Pacifists seek
an examination of our unquestioned assumption of warism to expose it as racism and
choose and create the selves we are to be; we need not be defined by hidden presumptions of gender roles.

sexism have been examined and exposed. Just as opponents of racism and sex-

ism consider the oppression of nonwhites

and women, respectively, to be wrong, and thus to require fundamental changes in society, so opponents of warism pacifists of various sorts
consider war to be wrong, and thus to require fundamental changes in society.

Third, it solves the aff: [explain]

2NC Framework
The role of the judge should be an educator pushing students to propose Utopia.
Most predictable the majority of coaches and judges work in education,.
Their F/W argument link to the k it assume the same model of technical-oriented
rationality which discounts epistemological inquiry as not timely the impact is
global warfare and structural violence thats above.
The permutation of letting them weigh the aff against the Kritik is bad, a.) it
presumes we should be using this space for short-term action which we already
impact turned, and b:) presumes an emergency frame which discounts alternative
viewpoints.
Dillon & Reid 9
[Michael, Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, England and Julian, Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, The
Liberal Way of War, page number below, CMR/WD]

Many have observed that the societies of the Atlantic basin are now increasingly ruled by fear; that there is a
politics of fear. But they interpret this politics of fear in politically naive ways, as the outcome of deliberate machination by political and economic elites. They may well be correct to

what is perfectly evident, also, is that the elites themselves are also governed by the very
grids of intelligibility furnished by the account of life as an emergency of emergence. It is not
simply a matter, therefore, of leaders playing on fears. The leadership itself is in the grip of a conjugation of
government and rule whose very generative principle of formation is permanent
emergency. In other words, fear is no longer simply an affect open to regular manipulation by leadership
cadres. It is, but it is not only that, and not even most importantly that. More importantly (because this is not a condition that can be resolved simply by 'throwing
the rascals out'), in the permanent emergency of emergence, fear becomes a generative principle of formation for rule.
The emergency of emergence therefore poses a profound crisis in western understandings of the
political, and in the hopes and expectations invested in political as opposed to other forms of life. Given the wealth, and given the vast
military preponderance in weapons of mass destruction and other forms of globally deployed military
capability of the societies of the Atlantic basin, notably, of course, the United States, this poses a world crisis as well. In short, then,
this complex adaptive emergent life exists in the permanent emergency of its own emergence. Its politics of security and war, which is to say its very foundational
politics of rule as well, now revolve around this state of emergency . Here, that in virtue of which a 'we' comes to belong together, its very
generative principle of formation (our shorthand definition of politics), has become this emergency. What happens, we also therefore ask of the
biopoliticization of rule, when emergency becomes the generative principle of formation of community and rule? Our answer has already been given. Politics becomes
subject to the urgent and compelling political economy, the logistical and technical
dynamics, of war. No longer a 'we' in virtue of abiding by commonly agreed rules of government, it becomes a 'we' formed by the
rule of the emergency itself; and that is where the political crisis, the crisis of the political itself in the west, lies,
since the promise always invested in western understandings of the political is that a 'we'
can belong together not only in terms of agreeing to abide by the rule of its generative
principles of formation but also by the willingness to keep the nature and operation of
those generative principles of formation under common deliberative scrutiny. You cannot,
however, debate emergency. You can only interrogate the utile demands it makes on you, and all the epistemic challenges it poses, acceding to those demands
according both to how well you have come to know them, and how well you have also adapted your affects to suffering them, or perish. The very exigencies of
emergency thus militate profoundly against the promise of 'politics' as it has been commonly
understood in the western tradition; not simply as a matter of rule, but as a matter of self-rule in which it was possible to debate the nature of the self in terms of the good
some degree. But

the very idea of the self has disappeared from view in this conflation of
life with species life. The only intelligence, the only self-knowledge, the only culture which qualifies in
the permanence of this emergency is the utilitarian and instrumental technologies said to
be necessary to endure it. We have been here before in the western tradition, and we have experienced the challenges of this condition as tyranny (Arendt
1968). The emergency of emergence, the generative principle of formation, the referential
matrix of contemporary biopolitics globally, is a newly formed, pervasive and insidiously
complex, soft totalitarian regime of power relations; made all the more difficult to contest
precisely because, governing through the contingent emergency of emergence, it is a governing through the transactional
freedoms of contingency itself. [Page 84-87]
for and of the self. Note, also, how much

Fairness is only a means to an end. Advocacy offense trumps their impacts. Its
better to have a slightly worse debate about an important subject than a fair and
deep debate about one that doesnt matter.
Policy relevance destroys scholarship- and turns any of their standards.
Xenakis 2 - Christopher I. Xenakis Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tidewater
Community College What Happened to the Soviet Union? 2002
Why did so many American Soviet experts fail to anticipate the possibility of reform taking place
in the USSR? A number of prominent scholars, whose work we have examined at length in these pages, have argued pointedly that Cold War Sovietology
was perversely influenced, or co-opted, by totalitarianism model thinking and the Cold War
consensus. And it stands to reason that if Sovietologists themselves thought they were co-opted, some of them probably were. This explanation accords with Thomas S. Kuhn's account
of why scholarly communities are often reticent to accept new and anomalous data . As Alexander Dallin and
Gail W. Lapidus recalled, the Gorbachev reforms of the mid-1980s "challenged the prevailing academic paradigms and conventional wisdom regarding the Soviet system. The initial Western
reaction to the Gorbachev program was one of profound skepticism," the two scholars noted.86 "The widely held belief among U.S. Soviet experts was that "basic [Soviet) change was impossible
and could not be carried out by people who had themselves grown up in and benefited from the system." Eventually, with the delegitimation of Communism in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, a "scientific revolution" occurred in western Sovietology, as Soviet experts saw many of the familiar realities they had taken for grantednotably, the Cold War and the USSR

Sovietology was politicized from its inception as a result of its

dependence on government funding and the formation of an unhealthy "scholarly consensus" around the totalitarianism model. Wedded to this model,
many Sovietologists "eliminated everything diverse and problematic from [their] subject." and
Soviet studies became, in quick order, a kind of Kuhnian normal science that found it difficult to assimilate new information about the Soviet Union. " What belatedly
infused new ideas into Sovietology was less its own intellectual dynamic than political changes in
(Moscow] that the profession had not anticipated and could hardly explain" or ignore, Cohen said. The
changing or evaporating. Stephen F. Cohen adds that

discipline of Sovietology came into being "during the worst years" of the East-West conflict. Cohen added, at a time when U.S.-Soviet relations "intruded into academia both] politically and

The Cold War put a premium on "usable scholarship" that served Washington's
policy interests and diminished "more detached academic pursuits." If most early Sovietologists were honorable and
intellectually "

well-intentioned scholars, "many came to [their discipline through] wartime experience and [their] interest in 'national security,'" and not out "of an intellectual passion" for Soviet studies. These

the Pentagon, the State

Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency asked forand only funded"policyrelated research." Scholars "established many open and reasonable relationships with government" during this time, "but also some
that were covert and troublesome. As a result, academic Soviet studies became, a highly politicized
profession imbued with topical political concerns, a crusading spirit, and a know-theenemy raison d'etre." Cohen concluded. It taught "its basic 'lessons' in a single voice, which fostered
consensus and orthodoxy." This practice "narrowed the range of [acceptable]
interpretations," and "minimized intellectual space to be critical-minded and wrong"11 Similarly, Alexander
were joined by ex-Communists who had more political zeal than expertise. Foundations subsidized general Russian studies, but

Motyl revealed that during much of the Cold War, the influx of government money into academic political science departments and Russian studies institutes went hand in hand with the
government's attempt "to set Sovietology's research agenda" along policy-analysis lines.*8 But

this was a Faustian bargain for American

universities, because "notwithstanding its importance for democratic government, policy analysis inclines
Sovietologists to eschew the very stuff of theorybig questions with no simple answers. "
Analogously, Frederic J. Fleron and Eric P. Hoffmann argued that far too many U.S. scholars were focusing on short-term policyoriented research during the Cold War years. Such analyses were "neither historically grounded nor farsighted"; they "place[d] heavy emphasis on current political personalities, top-level power
relationships, and international and domestic crises" and skimped "on the thinking and
behavior of counter-elites and citizens; on underlying socioeconomic and scientifictechnological trends; and on policy options, policy implementation, and policy outcomes at
the national, regional, and local levels."*9 In addition, such research was "more focused on means
than ends, more speculative than analytical, more partial to simplistic than complex
explanations," more eager for quick fixes than durable solutions, more accepting of official
than independent views, and more cognizant of immediate than eventual political costs and
consequences." According to scholar Raymond C. Taras, Cold War scholarship simply followed geopolitics and
followed the money. Since the government was paying universities and think tanks for
research pertaining to the Soviet threat, little attention was focused on the Baltic states or
on the individual Soviet republics.90 Even as late as 1992, "western universities ha[d] trained few students in the languages spoken in the breakaway
republics, making prospects for incisive empirical research not promising." The existence of a pervasive co-optative relationship between academic Sovietology and the government is also
suggested by the career mobility many scholars enjoyed between these two environments. According to Jerry F. Hough, there existed, throughout the Cold War period, a virtual revolving door
between American universities, think tanks, and government foreign policy and national security-related agencies and departmentsand a number of Soviet experts moved repeatedly and often
from one of these professional environments to another.91 Not only did Sovietologists move freely from academia to government and back again; this study argues, more

perversely,

there was an insidious homogeneity of scholarly opinion within these settings

that
. While there were
significant distinctions between realist, political cultural-historicist, and pluralist points of view, the scholarly differences between professors, researchers, and policy makers of the same
Sovietologiest school were relatively slight. Thus, political cultural-historicists tended to think alike, whether they taught at a university or sat at a policy desk at the State Departmentand the

Sovietological co-optation by government was endemic

same was true of realists and pluralists. What this suggests is that
both in
the early Cold War years and in the 1970s and 1980sif for no other reason than that all Sovietologists, regardless of the professional setting in which they worked, needed good data, and the
government both supplied much of this data (for example, in unclassified CIA and Department of Defense studies) and controlled scholars' ability to acquire it on their own (through the tacit
threat of denying research grants and passport renewals to researchers who stirred up trouble). If it is true that many scholars became policy makers, and in turn, that a significant number of
government officials were also scholars, then we should expect that these professional communities courted and cooperated with one another as much they competed against each other. And it

this cozy relationship between

government and the academy was as deleterious to good scholarship as it was
commonplace. (p. 165-7)
should come as no great surprise that academic Sovietologists were co-opted by policy-making interests, or that, as Cohen argued,

A2: Permutation
Permutation is either severance or intrinsic both are voting issues. Makes it
impossible for us to be negative.
Perm is impossible The aff is a pragmatic deliberation, the alt is a Utopian rupture
to the architecture of securitization the two are necessary distinct.
All our links are DAs to the permutation:
National Security DA Any net benefit to the permutation presumes a top-down model
of deliberation and policy construction, the impact is the nation security apparatus, thats
above.
Apocalypse DA The emergency frame of the aff necessitates crowding out deliberation with a
politics of pre-emption, thats De-Good, Randall, Dillon and Reid. The impact is serial policy
failure.

Shift DISAD the emergency frame of the aff means withdrawal will lead to a
renewed call for military presence.
Kozue Akibayashi, 9 researcher at the Institute for Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University,
and Suzuyo Takazato, co-chair of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and one of the
foremost Japanese peace activists and feminists who critically examines U.S. bases on Okinawa,
Bases of Empire, p. 265-267
In the OWAAMV movement, it

is believed that closing the U.S. bases and troop withdrawal need to be
implemented in the larger context of demilitarization of the entire security system. As the discussions of
the movements international networking reveal, closing or decreasing the capacity of one Asian base has often led
to the reinforcement of other military bases in the region as a means of minimizing the negative
effects of the closure on the U.S. militarys global strategies. For instance, when the bases in the
Philippines were closed in 1992, those troops previously assigned there were transferred to bases in
Okinawa and Korea. More recently, lessening the burden of people in Okinawa, a phrase in the Security
Consultative Committee (2006) document, will be achieved by build-up on Guam
. From the perspectives of the international community and of the U.S. military, which

limits access to such highly classified information on security policies to a handful of people, thereby creating a new hierarchy, this may be an obvious tactic. It has been very difficult for grassroots peace activists to make such analyses and predictions due largely to the lack of resources
and information. In recent years, however, this type of observation of global strategies has been made possible through international solidarity and the exchange of information among areas. Through these networks, members of grassroots movements in Asia and in other parts of the world are
now connected and are better equipped to cope with the dwarfing information giant of the U.S. military. People have to unite with each other. There is an increasing understanding among people in the struggle against the U.S. military empire that security of people can never be achieved
without demilitarizing the security system. Feminist international scholars have already argued that a gender perspective effectively reveals an unequal dichotomy between the protector and the protected on which the present security system has been built (Peterson 1992). The OWAAMV
movement illustrates from a gender perspective that the protected, who are structurally deprived of political power, are in fact not protected by the militarized security policies; rather their livelihoods are made insecure by these very policies. The movement has also illuminated the fact that
gated bases do not confine military violence to within the bases. Those hundreds-of-miles-long fences around the bases are there only to assure the readiness of the military and military operations by excluding and even oppressing the people living outside the gated bases. The practical
aspect of analysis, connection, and solidarity among feminist activists worldwide has not been the only empowering experience for women in the struggle. As has happened so many times in the past, people in communities hosting U.S. bases have been divided over such issues as public
economic support for the financially distressed localities, and thus have felt isolated and disempowered, unable to mount or maintain protest actions. OWAAMV women have also, at times, been lone voices against a patriarchy that is, they argue, the source of the militarized security system.
Not only people in the local communities but also members of communities across borders share knowledge, analysis, and deep rage against injustice, as well as a vision of a demilitarized world with gender justice. Here, we see possibility and hope for transformation. Those who struggle for
the achievement of a demilitarized security system may have a long way to go, but they never lose hope.

Links

Link Assuming the Worst

Their jump from potentiality to actuality is a form of worst-case scenario
planning that causes serial policy failure and pre-emption.
Mueller & Stewart 11

[John, Woody Hayes National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science @ Ohio State University, Mark, Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the

Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at the University of Newcastle in Australia, Terror, Security, and Money, page numbers below, CMR]

Sunstein, who seems to have invented the phrase "probability neglect," assesses the version
peoples attention is focused on
the bad outcome itself and they are inattentive to the fact that it is unlikely to occur." Moreover, they
are inclined to "demand a substantial governmental response-even if the magnitude of the
risk does not warrant the response." It may be this phenomenon that Treverton experienced. Playing to this demand,
government officials are inclined to focus on worst-case scenarios , presumably in the
knowledge, following Sunstein's insight, that this can emotionally justify just about any expenditure , no [end page
14] matter how unlikely the prospect the dire event will actually take place. Accordingly; there is a
preoccupation with "low probability/ high consequence" events, such as the detonation of a sizable nuclear device in
Focusing on Worst-Case Scenarios Cass

of the phenomenon that comes into being when "emotions are intensely engaged." Under that circumstance, he argues, "

midtown Manhattan. The process could be seen in action in an article published in 2008 by Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff. He felt called upon to respond to

the number of people who die each year from international terrorism, While tragic, is
exceedingly small

the observation that

actually
. "This fails to consider," he pointed out, "the much greater loss of life that Weapons of mass destruction could wreak on the American
people." That is, he was justifying his entire budget-only a limited portion of which is concerned with Weapons of mass destruction by the WMD threat, even While avoiding assessing

conventional risk analysis breaks down under extreme conditions

because the risk is now a very large number (losses) multiplied by a very small number (attack
probability). But it is not the risk analysis method ology that is at fault here, but our ability to use
the information obtained from the analysis for decision making. A "high consequence" event has been defined to be a
its likelihood. It is sometimes argued that

"disaster" or "catastrophe" resulting in "great human costs in life, property environmental damage, and future economic activity" However, depending on how one Weighs the

the vast bulk of homeland security

expenditures is not focused on events that fit a definition like that, but rather on comparatively low-consequence ones,
like explosions set off by individual amateur jihadists. Analyst Bruce Schneier has written penetratingly of Worst-case thinking. He points out that it ,
involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty It
substitutes imagination for thinking , speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason . It
fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social [gridlock] . And it makes us more
vulnerable to the effects of terrorism. It leads to bad decision making because it's only half of
the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can
possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses
only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes. [end page 15]
It also assumes "that a proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is
impossible," and it " can be used to support any position or its opposite . If we build a nuclear power plant, it could
words in that definition, there may have been only one terrorist event in all of history that qualifies for inclusion. Moreover,

melt down. If we don't build it, We will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy" And worst, it "validates ignorance" because, "instead of focusing on what We

risk assessment is devalued " and "probabilistic

thinking is repudiated in favor of possibilistic thinking." As Schneier also notes, worst-case thinking is the driving force behind
know, it focuses on what we don't know-and what we can imagine." In the process, "

the precautionary principle, a decent working definition of which is "action should be taken to correct a problem as soon as there is evidence that harm may occur, not after the harm

action less than a week after 9/11, when President George W Bush outlined his new
national security strategy: "We cannot let our enemies strike first . . . [but must take]
anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place
of the enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United
States, will, if necessary act preemptively _ . . America will act against such emerging threats
before they are fully formed ." The 2003 invasion of Iraq, then, was justified by invoking the
has already occurred." It could be seen in

precautionary principle based on the worst-case scenario in which Saddam Hussein might
strike. If, on the other hand, any worst-case thinking focused on the potential for the destabilizing
effects a war would have on Iraq and the region, the precautionary principle would guide
one to be very cautious about embarking on war. As Sunstein notes, the precautionary principle "offers
no guidance-not that it is Wrong, but that it forbids all courses of action, including regulation." Thus, "taken seriously it is paralyzing ,
banning the very steps that it simultaneously requires."9 It can be invoked in equal measure to act or not to act. There are
considerable dangers in applying the precautionary principle to terrorism: on the one hand, any action taken to reduce a presumed risk
always poses the introduction of countervailing risks, while on the other, larger, expensive counterterrorism
efforts will come accompanied by high opportunity costs." Moreover "For public officials no less than the rest of us, the
probability of harm matters a great deal, and it is foolish to attend exclusively to the worst case scenario ." A more
rational approach to worst-case thinking is to establish the likelihood of gains and losses
from various courses of action, including staying the current course." This, of course, is the essence of risk assessment. What is
necessary is due consideration to the spectrum of threats, not simply the worst one
imaginable, in order to properly understand, and coherently deal with, the risks to people, institutions, and the economy The relevant decision makers are professionals,
and it is not unreasonable to suggest that they should do so seriously. Notwithstanding political pressures (to be discussed more in chapter 9), the fact that the public has difficulties
with probabilities when emotions are involved does not relieve those in charge of the requirement, even the duty to make decisions about the expenditures of vast quantities of public
monies in a responsible manner. [page 14-17]

Link Legitimacy
Their tactic of legitimacy is a guise to provide the United States with a velvet
coercive glove. Not only do nations see through the charade, but the politics
produce violent pre-emption.
Gulli 13. Bruno Gulli, professor of history, philosophy, and political science at Kingsborough
College in New York, For the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, pg. 5
I think that we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The sovereign
everywhere , be it the political or financial elite, fakes the legitimacy on which its power
and authority supposedly rest. In truth, they rest on violence and terror , or the threat
thereof. This is an obvious and essential aspect of the singularity of the present crisis. In
this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the struggle for dominance is at
one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the lack of hegemony. This is
true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with respect to the greatest power on
earth, the United States , whose hegemony has diminished or vanished . It is a fortiori true
of whatever is called the West, of which the US has for about a century represented the
vanguard. Lacking hegemony, the sheer drive for domination has to show its true face , its
raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological justifications for dominance (such as
bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have now become very weak because of
the contempt that the dominant nations (the US and its most powerful allies) regularly
show toward legality, morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states,
thriving on corruption, do not fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act
autonomously and against the dictates of the West, the specter of punishment, in the form
of retaliatory war or even indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a
clear limit, a possibility. Not so for the dominant nations: who will stop the United States
from striking anywhere at will, or Israel from regularly massacring people in the Gaza
Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa? Yet, though still
dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical,
weakness. All attempts at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable awareness of
it) only heighten the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance.
Although they rely on a highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is
a clear instance of this) and on an equally sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally
been and increasingly is an outpost for military operations and global policing (now
excellently incarnated by Africom ), they know that they have lost their hegemony .
Domination without hegemony is a phrase that Giovanni Arrighi uses in his study of the
long twentieth century and his lineages of the twenty-first century (1994/2010 and 2007).
Originating with Ranajit Guha (1992), the phrase captures the singularity of the global crisis,
the terminal stage of sovereignty, in Arrighis historical investigation of the present and of
the future (1994/2010: 221). It acquires particular meaning in the light of Arrighis notion

of the bifurcation of financial and military power. Without getting into the question, treated
by Arrighi, of the rise of China and East Asia, what I want to note is that for Arrighi, early in the
twenty-first century, and certainly with the ill-advised and catastrophic war against Iraq,
the US belle poque came to an end and US world hegemony entered what in all
likelihood is its terminal crisis. He continues: Although the United States remains by far
the worlds most powerful state, its relationship to the rest of the world is now best
described as one of domination without hegemony (1994/2010: 384). What can the US do
next? Not much, short of brutal dominance. In the last few years, we have seen president
Obama praising himself for the killing of Osama bin Laden. While that action was most
likely unlawful, too (Noam Chomsky has often noted that bin Laden was a suspect, not
someone charged with or found guilty of a crime), it is certain that you can kill all the bin
Ladens of the world without gaining back a bit of hegemony . In fact, this killing, just like
G. W. Bushs war against Iraq, makes one think of a Mafia-style regolamento di conti more
than any other thing. Barack Obama is less forthcoming about the killing of 16-year-old
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, whose fate many have correctly compared to that of 17-year-old
Trayvon Martin (killed in Florida by a self-appointed security watchman), but it is precisely in
cases like this one that the weakness at the heart of empire , the ill-concealed and
uncontrolled fury for the loss of hegemony , becomes visible. The frenzy denies the
possibility of power as care , which is what should replace hegemony , let alone domination.
Nor am I sure I share Arrighis optimistic view about the possible rise of a new hegemonic
center of power in East Asia and China: probably that would only be a shift in the axis of
uncaring power, unable to affect, let alone exit, the paradigm of sovereignty and violence.
What is needed is rather a radical alternative in which power as domination, with or
without hegemony, is replaced by power as care in other words, a poetic rather than
military and financial shift.

Alt

A2: Utopain Fiat

We impact turn Utopian politics are necessary to expand our Horizon and disrupt
systems of securitization.

A2: Conflict Inev (Biology/Thayer)

Their authors read into science.
BUSSER, 2006
(MARK, MASTERS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE @ YORK UNIVERSITY, YCISS WORKING PAPER NUMBER 40, AUGUST
2006, THE EVOLUTION OF SECURITY: REVISITING THE HUMAN NATURE DEBATE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,
HTTP://PI.LIBRARY.YORKU.CA/DSPACE/HANDLE/10315/1323)

Responding directly to Thayer, Duncan Bell and Paul MacDonald have expressed concern at the intellectual
functionalism inherent in sociobiological explanations, suggesting that too often analysts choose a
specific behaviour and read backwards into evolutionary epochs in an attempt to
rationalize explanations for that behaviour. These arguments, Bell and MacDonald write, often fall into what
Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould have called adaptionism, or the attempt to understand all physiological
and behavioural traits of an organism as evolutionary adaptations.42 Arguments such as
these are hand-crafted by their makers, and tend to carry forward their assumptions and
biases. In an insightful article, Jason Edwards suggests that sociobiology and its successor, evolutionary psychology,
are fundamentally political because they frame their major questions in terms of an
assumed individualism. Edwards suggests that the main question in both sub- fields is: given human nature, how is politics possible?43 The
problem is that the givens of human nature are drawn backward from common
knowledges and truths about humans in society, and the game-theory experiments which
seek to prove them are often created with such assumptions in mind. These arguments are seen by their critics
as politicized from the very start. Sociobiology in particular has been widely interpreted as a conservative
politico-scientific tool because of these basic assumptions, and because of the political
writings of many sociobiologists .44 Because sociobiology naturalizes certain behaviours like
conflict, inequality and prejudice, Lewontin et al. suggest that it sets the stage for legitimation of things
as they are. 45 The danger inherent in arguments that incorporate sociobiological arguments into
examinations of modern political life, the authors say, is that such arguments naturalize variable
behaviours and support discriminatory political structures. Even if certain behaviours are found
to have a biological drives behind them, dismissing those behaviours as natural precludes the
possibility that human actors can make choices and can avoid anti-social, violent, or undesirable
action.46 While the attempt to discover a genetically- determined human nature has usually been
justified under the argument that knowing humankinds basic genetic programming will help to
solve the resulting social problems, discourse about human nature seems to generate selffulfilling prophesies by putting limits on what is considered politically possible. While
sociobiologists tend to distance themselves from the naturalistic fallacy that what is is what
should be, there is still a problem with employing adaptionism to explain how existing political
structures because conclusions tend to be drawn in terms of conclusions that assert what must
be because of biologically- ingrained constraints.47 Too firm a focus on sociobiological
arguments about natural laws draws attention away from humanitys potential for social and
political solutions that can counteract and mediate any inherent biological impulses, whatever
they may be. A revived classical realism based on biological arguments casts biology as destiny
in a manner that parallels the neo-realist sentiment that the international sphere is doomed to
everlasting anarchy. Jim George quotes the English School scholar Martin Wight as writing that
hope is not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue.48 George questions the practical result

of traditional realsist claims, arguing that the suggestion that fallen mans sinful state can only be
redeemed by a higher power puts limitations on what is considered politically possible. Thayers
argument rejects the religious version of the fallen man for a scientific version, but similar
problems remain with his scientific conclusions. The political and philosophical debates that
surround sociobiology in general are the least of the problems with Bradley Thayers article. In
fact, Thayers argument is exactly the sort of reading of sociobiology about which its critics like
Lewontin and Gould have been uncomfortably anticipating. Worse, Thayers exercise
demonstrates a misreading of many evolutionary arguments drawing conclusions with
which the theorists he cites would likely distance themselves. His argument about an
egoistic human nature relies on a tiresomely common oversimplification of a classic
Darwinist argument, crudely linking natural selection to the assumption that selfishness
encourages evolutionary fitness ; Even Thayer feels the need to qualify this argument in a footnote.49 Thayers citation of
Richard Dawkins selfish gene theory to provide the second sufficient explanation for
egoism is also incredibly problematic.50 In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that at the
beginning of micro-organic life genes that promoted survival were key to making basic lifeforms into simple survival machines. Rather than viewing genes as an organisms tool for generating, Dawkins suggests
that it is wiser to look at the development of complex organisms as genes method of
replicating themselves. The word selfish is used as a shorthand to describe a more complex
phenomenon: genes that give their organic vessel advantages in survival and reproduction
are successfully transmitted into future generations.5 1 However, an important part of
Dawkins work is that the selfishness of genes translates into decidedly unselfish
behaviours. Dawkins himself has had to distance himself from groups who interpreted his
focus on kin selection as a reification of ethnocentrism : The National Front was saying something like this, kin selection
provides the basis for favoring your own race as distinct from other races, as a kind of generalization of favoring your own close family as opposed to other
individuals. Kin selection doesnt do that! Kin selection favors nepotism towards your own immediate close family. It does not favor a generalization of nepotism

In light of a careful consideration of the

intricacies of Dawkins thinking, Thayers treatment of his theories seems remarkably
crude and shallow. Broad conclusions seem to materialize as if from thin air: In general,
Thayer writes, the selfishness of the gene increases its fitness, and so the behaviour
spreads.53 This line, crucial to Thayers point, is such a brazen oversimplification and
misinterpretation of Dawkins work that Thayers arguments about a provable natural
human egoism are rendered essentially baseless in terms of scientific evidence. Thayers
argument about the ubiquity of hierarchical structures of power rely on a dichotomous
hypothetical choice between eternal conflict and structures of dominance. The suggestion that the
ubiquity of male- dominated hierarchies contributes to fitness in the present tense comes
dangerously close to naturalizing and reifying patriarchal structures of human social
organization.54 As presented, the argument reads very much like Hobbes Leviathan, in which
pre-social actors sought the refuge and protection of a larger social order. In many ways, Thayer
seems to be reconstructing the Leviathan using sociobiology rather clumsily to justify broad
generalizations. It is certain that some mix of biology and culture have led to male-dominated
cultures in the past, and there is a strong basis for the argument that humans have developed a
need to belong to social groups. It is also clear that humans have the mental capacity to
understand and technologies for operating within dominance hierarchies. Yet these possibilities
towards millions of other people who happen to be the same color as you.52

together do not suggest, contrary to Thayers argument, that humans readily give allegiance to
the state, or embrace religion or ideologies such as liberalism or communism, because evolution
has produced a need to belong to a dominance hierarchy.55 If humans do depend on social
connectedness, must this necessarily come in the form of hierarchical, patriarchal structures? The
case is not made convincingly. As I shall discuss below, alternate understandings of the
connection between basic human needs, human culture, and environmental stresses can provide
an understanding of dominance hierarchies that does not naturalize their ubiquity. Beyond the
problems with the scientific evidence behind Thayers ontological claims, there are also
problems with his proposed epistemological project of consilience. Using sociobiology to unite
the social and natural sciences (and to give bases to a revitalized classical realism) would depend
on achieving a near omnipotence, where known genetic programs could be weighed against
known environmental influence, using science to predict the results. At the outset of his essay,
Thayer implies that science is progressing at a rapid pace towards making this a reality. Yet
evolutionary explanations for specific behaviours become incredibly problematic given all of the
possible factors and externalities which might have affected evolutionary outcomes, all of which
are impossible to map into even the most complex mathematical theoretical games. Bell and
MacDonald point out that many biologists dispute whether sociobiology can offer useful
commentary on humans because of the central role of culture, language, and self-reflexivity in
determining human behaviour.56 Similarly, in response to Shaw and Wong, Joshua Goldstein
cites evidence that human beings do not demonstrate an inherent tendency towards aggression,
instead displaying cooperation more often. Goldstein offers the possibility that human
behavioural traits like aggression, altruism, and sacrifice are shaped more by cultural
transmission than by genes. This possibility enormously complicates the attempt at consilience
intended by Thayer and his contemporaries, by adding in incalculable variables that come with
social and cultural interactions.57 Because of these complications, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin
have asserted that sociobiologys grand argument is discredited since no aspect of human social
behaviour has ever been linked to a specific gene or set of genes.58 As Mary Clark observes, one
of the major results of the human genome project was the falsification of the supposition that
each protein produced in a human cell was coded by a separate gene. In fact, genes often work
interdependently, with the same gene recurring along the chromosome and causing different
outcomes depending on its position and neighbouring genes. Clark describes the complex signals
and activations which occur at the genetic level, concluding that rather than a linear
unidirectional blueprint, the human genome is more like an ecosystem, and can be responsive to
its microscopic and perhaps even the macroscopic environment.59 Just how important are the
influences culture, social behaviour, and environment to the human condition, as distinct from
biological programming? In many caveats and footnotes within Thayers own argument, he
includes statements that acknowledge the importance of cultural factors in the shaping of modern
human societies. If all behaviour cannot be explained by sociobiology and other evolutionary
arguments because behaviours are contingent on cultural and environmental factors, how strong
is the scientific support for Thayers revived realist project? As Bell and MacDonald have
suggested, many of the scientific foundations Thayer employs to support his epistemological
program are indeterminate because they cannot explain when cultural or environmental factors
will play a role.60 On the ontological side, Thayer certainly comes a long way from proving that

human nature is defined by and limited to egoism and dominance, as he had intended to do. If
knowledge borrowed from evolutionary biology and other natural sciences suggests that culture
and environment play a significant role in shaping human behaviours, then it may not be the
realist project that is best supported by a deep and sustained interdisciplinary exploration. Citing
evolutionary Science does not truly support realist narratives and explanations of egoistic
competition in human society, despite the fact that over the years it has often been cited by those
wishing to make such cases. There is plenty of evidence in evolutionary science for
explaining why biology is not destiny, and in fact, for unsettling any claim about an
evolutionarily-derived human nature that underlies political life . In her book In Search of Human Nature,
Mary E. Clark has suggested that instead of a human nature defined by genetically programmed instincts, predispositions and drives, it is more useful to discuss a
human nature in terms of universal needs. These needs, she argues, are as close to a human nature as we humans have, since their fulfilment is necessary as a result
of complex development. Clark suggests that human beings have basic biological and psychological needs for bonding, for autonomy, and for meaning.