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1NC Shell
The affs attempt to restrain a small element of the surveillance state
normalizes its existence as a whole and causes the corporate surveillance to fill
in --- that results in a depoliticized populace that embraces the panoptic gaze
of authoritarianism
Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies
Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian
Surveillance State, Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-postorwellian-surveillance-state]
In his videotaped Christmas message, Snowden references Orwell's warning of "the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us,"2 allowing the
state to regulate subjects within the most intimate spaces of private life. But these older modes of surveillance, Snowden elaborates, however, are nothing compared to
in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition.
Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically
in an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange and circulation. So, too, and in the current period of historical amnesia, privacy has been redefined through the
material and ideological registers of a neoliberal order in which the right to privacy has succumbed to the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism's
unending necessity to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5 In a world devoid
of care, compassion and protection, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of
the recognition of the frailty of human life. In a world in which the worst excesses of capitalism are unchecked,
amnesia, indifferent to its transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices."6 Consequently, culture loses its power as
the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven ethic "makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals" and furthers
the collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state.7 Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life. In fact, it is more appropriate to analyze the
based websites and gathered daily as people move from one targeted web site to the next across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out,
social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons, all the while endlessly shopping online and
texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets,
commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting
events and the like. Yet the most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of information but
also in a culture that normalizes
surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and enticements for consumers who
use the new digital technologies and social networks to simulate false notions of community and to socialize young people into a
culture of security and commodification in which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help and
commodification. Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion. Authoritarianism in its contemporary manifestations, as
evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead has become omniscient in a culture of control in which the most
cherished notions of agency collapse into unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for the spying state. The self has
become not simply the subject of surveillance but a willing participant and object. Operating off the assumption that some individuals will not willingly turn their
private lives over to the spying state and corporations, the
unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft,
Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist.
They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation,
especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential
eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated.
If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in
part by others. This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes.
Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.8 Social cynicism and
societal indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed hallucinatory hopes.9 Surveillance and its accompanying
culture of fear now produce subjects that revel in being watched, turning the practice if not the threat posed by surveillance into
just another condition for performing the self. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network.
Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman echoes this sentiment in arguing
that: These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the
opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to
stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of
privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to share.10
That biopolitical thought the aff uses leads to mass destruction and inevitable
extinction.
Kouros 97 (George, Yale Law Graduate, Holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory. Become What You Are/)
Although the
consequences are grave, the administrative practices of biopower go largely unchallenged precisely because they
system primarily concerned with technological exigencies of
ensuring survival paradoxically is no longer able to assign meaning to the value of life . Life is something to be
secured at all costs, and by any means, as the American military motto of "you have to kill to save" during the Vietnam War demonstrates. For Foucault,
this technological imperative to secure survival is what brings us closest to the possibility of our own extinction: [T]his formidable power
promise the opportunity of vastly improving the quality of life. But a
of death ... now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it
to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars ... are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
find ourselves
possessing the capabilities to wipe out all of humanity as we know it . Heidegger, much like Foucault, understands "the
atomic situation" as the product of a technological process that seeks to create "a happier human life."8 But he also emphasizes that "precisely if the hydrogen bombs
do not explode and human life on earth is preserved" that we face the greatest danger (DT 52). Responding to a chemist's proclamation that "The hour is near when
life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will," Heidegger writes: "We do not stop to consider
that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little" (DT
52). In other words, in the absence of a nuclear holocaust we assume that we have managed to keep technology in hand. Without the sound of an explosion to alert us,
we become complacent to the deadliness of our own technological achievements. For example, the chemist's ability to manipulate DNA and genetically screen out
undesirable traits, while promising the possibility of a "happier human being," maintains the conditions for a eugenic nightmare.
theorists have
sought alternatively to avoid, mitigate, or accept the problematisation of policy with power. The modernist tendency,
seen in the domain of transport, has been to sidestep the problem, maintaining a claim to value-free objectivity, and constantly refining scientific and economic
instruments to shape and deliver policy. The neo-liberal assertion of the critical role of market forces in shaping policy (Healey, 1997), and the resurgence of technical
and scientific analysis typified by the development of new approaches to environmental planning (Wong, 1998) represent the two prongs of this instrumental
rationality. An emerging body of theory which attempts to break free from instrumentalism instead posits policy making as argumentation, and focuses on
communicative rationality (Fischer and Forester, 1993; Innes, 1995; Healey, 1997). In the communicative approach knowledge is negotiated in policy making, and
ways of thinking, valuing and acting are 'actively constructed by participants' (Healey, 1997, 29). Power
focus shifts from what should be done to what is actually done. This analysis
It therefore
'becomes meaningless, or misleading - for politicians, administrators and researchers alike - to operate with a concept of
rationality in which power is absent' (Flyvbjerg, 1998, 164-65).
embraces the idea that 'rationality is penetrated by power', and the dynamic between the two is critical in understanding what policy is about.
Links
General
NSAs perpetuated domestic surveillance bolsters biopower
Beauchamp 13, Editor of TP Ideas and a reporter for ThinkProgress.org, Zack holds B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from
Brown University and an M.Sc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, Why The NSAs Secret Online Surveillance
Should Scare You, http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/07/2120141/why-the-nsas-secret-online-surveillance-should-scare-you/
The reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA)s secret online spying program, PRISM, has
been polarized between seething outrage and some variant on what did you expect? Some have gone
so far as to say this program helps open the door to fascism, while others have downplayed it as in line with the way that we
already let corporations get ahold of our personal data. That second reaction illustrates precisely why
this program is so troubling. The more we accept perpetual government and corporate surveillance
as the norm, the more we change our actions and behavior to fit that expectation subtly but inexorably
corrupting the liberal ideal that each person should be free to live life as they choose without fear of
anyone else interfering with it.Put differently, George Orwell isnt who you should be reading to understand the dangers inherent to
the NSAs dragnet. Youd be better off turning to famous French social theorist Michel Foucault. The basic concern with the
PRISM program is that it is undoubtedly collecting information on significant numbers of
Americans, in secret, who may not have any real connection to the case the Agency is pursuing. PRISM sifts through tech giants
databases to cull information about suspected national security threats. However, since it uses a 51 percent confidence threshold for
determining whether a target is foreign, and likely extends to individuals that are two degrees of separation
from the original target, the chances are extraordinarily high that this program is spying on a
significant number of Americans. A citizenry thats constantly on guard for secret, unaccountable
surveillance is one thats constantly being remade along the lines the state would prefer . Foucault
illustrated this point by reference to a hypothetical prison called the Panopticon. Designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the
Panopticon is a prison where all cells can be seen from a central tower shielded such that the guards can see out but the prisoners cant see in. The
prisoners in the Panopticon could thus never know whether they were being surveilled, meaning that they have to, if they want to avoid running
the risk of severe punishment, assume that they were being watched at all times. Thus, the Panopticon functioned as an effective tool of social
control even when it wasnt being staffed by a single guard. In his famous Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that we live in a world where
the state exercises power in the same fashion as the Panopticons guards. Foucault called it disciplinary power; the basic idea is that the
omnipresent fear of being watched by the state or judged according to prevailing social norms caused people to adjust the way they acted and
even thought without ever actually punished. People had become self-regulating agents, people who voluntarily changed who they were to fit
social and political expectations without any need for actual coercion. Online privacy advocates have long worried that government surveillance
programs could end up disciplining internet users in precisely this fashion. In 1997, the FBI began using something called Project Carnivore, an
online surveillance data tool designed to mimic traditional wiretaps, but for email. However, because online information is not like a phone
number in several basic senses, Carnivore ended up capturing far more information than it was intended to. It also had virtually no oversight
outside of the FBI. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Congress in 2000, Systems like Carnivore have the potential to turn into mass
surveillance systems that will harm our free and open societyOnce individuals realize that they have a lowered expectation of privacy on the
Net, they may not visit particular web sites that they may otherwise have visited. Writing in 2004, a group of scholars drew a straight line from
this analysis to Foucaults theory of disciplinary power. Resembling the ever-present powers of the central watchtower in a prison modeled after
the Panopticon, they wrote the very fact that the FBI has the potential to monitor communications on a website may lead Internet users to
believe that they are constantly being watched. We
warned, disciplinary
power was dangerous used in certain fashions, it could be subtly corrosive of exactly the sorts of
freedoms of expression and self-identity that liberal democracies purportedly protected absolutely.
The NSA program, especially as its breadth becomes clear, is exactly the sort of overreach his work should warn us against.
Prism
Corporate data surveillance and government collusion fills in for PRISM -that turns the aff and widens the panoptic gaze of the surveillance state
Sullivan 13 [John L., Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, Uncovering the data
panopticon: The urgent need for critical scholarship in an era of corporate and government surveillance, Political Economy of Communication
Vol 1, No 2 (2013), http://polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/23/192]
Big data and the panoptic sort In Philip K. Dicks 1956 science fiction short story, The Minority Report, crime in a futuristic United States has
been all but extinguished because the police have discovered the ability to predict future events. In this peaceful dystopia, suspects are arrested
and charged before their crimes are even committed. While real-world law enforcement agencies cannot (yet) predict future events, the recent
revelations about the scope and nature of the National Security Agencys (NSA) domestic digital spying program suggest they have developed
some formidable tools to locate would-be terrorists. Privacy
scale of the data collection and analysis performed by government and corporate institutions created
a panopticon wherein citizen actions would eventually become circumscribed within an everwidening net of personal data surveillance. The end result, he observed, is an antidemocratic system of control that
cannot be transformed because it can serve no purpose other than that for which it was designedthe rationalization and control of
human existence(Gandy, 1993: 227). Weve come a long way since 1993. Who could have imagined services like Facebook, Twitter, and
Tumblr that not only encourage, but actively incentivize the voluntary dissemination of personal information online? Over the past 20 years, the
centrality of the internet to the global communications infrastructure has made it a target for the type of panoptic sorting that Gandy described.
Now that the world knows about PRISM, it is tempting to imagine that enhanced public scrutiny
will effectively limit these programs . I dont think that is likely. In fact, there are four specific trends that foretell a
greater expansion of the data panopticon: convergence and the central place of software in social, commercial and political systems; the growing
importance of metadata for routing, storage and sorting of information; the global business of data storage and retrieval; the blurring of lines
between corporate and government data mining. The convergence of digital technologies and the importance of software In the previous era of
analog technologies, such as wired telephones and reel-to-reel tapes, each specific technology had a limited range of capabilities alongside a
specific set of legal standards to accompany their use. The Wiretap Act of 1968, for example, prohibits law enforcement from wiretapping
telephones without a court order because doing so would violate the 4th Amendment protections of both the suspect and anyone that
communicates with them. Today, there are few discrete technologies anymore. Thanks to technological convergence, almost
all forms
of communication today utilize some form of digital communication , and many do this via the Internet. Software
has now replaced specific forms of communication hardware as the nexus for new types of digital communication, from Skype and FaceTime to
emails and tweets. Creating legal precedents for protecting individual privacy throughout this myriad of new options has been difficult. Indeed,
new options are emerging all the time, and software is extremely fungible in functionality as it adapts quickly to new situations and uses. We
lack a coherent legal regime to counteract the interception of these communications. For example, Skype
phone calls can be protected under the existing federal wiretap laws, but emails and text messages cannot. The rise of metadata The expansion of
online communications has generated an explosion of metadata. Metadata are the transaction records that are generated whenever you send an
email or text message. It identifies the location from which the message was sent, when it was sent, the subject of the message, the recipient(s) of
the message, the web address of the recipient(s), and more. The Obama Administration has argued that its domestic intelligence program
complied with the law because it simply scanned the metadata of email transactions to search for anomalies rather than accessing the content of
those emails. As a recent article in The Economist (2013) pointed out, however, while the usefulness of metadata in an analog era was limited
(hence the lower evidentiary standards required in courts to obtain that information), today, thanks to the internet, metadata can now provide a
detailed portrait of who people know, where they go, and their daily routines. (para. 8) Therefore, the argument that random metadata searches
do not violate users privacy becomes difficult to sustain. The business of data storage and retrieval The
may have started down a path that will be difficult to alter . Once companies and governments
begin collecting and storing citizens private data, those institutions will continue to imagine new uses for such data , if only to justify the expense
of gathering and storing it. History and human nature tell us that the storage and sorting of online personal data will increasingly become the
solution to problems we havent even yet encountered, alongside existing problems (tracking terrorists, criminals, tax evaders, copyright
violators, etc.) The public and the role of critical scholarship Given that we still live in a liberal democracy, what is the publics role in this
process? Shouldnt citizens help to shape a proper balance between privacy and security? In The Panoptic Sort, Gandy traced the social origins of
privacy and considered the available cognitive strategies for a public trying to grapple with this amorphous concept within a changing technocultural environment. In focus group interviews, Gandy explored the types of information consumers had about the technologies that could be
used to observe and profile them. Respondents were asked whether they thought these practices were legitimate, and whether they had reflected
upon the sharing of private information among interested parties (including sharing between private corporations and government agencies).
These 1992 focus group participants were quite sophisticated in their responses, observing that the gathering of personal information may be
justified or even beneficial in some cases, but that no information should ever be used to restrict or limit ones pursuits, happiness, or joy of life
(Gandy, 1993: 135). Gandy also cited nationwide polling conducted in 1990 by Equifax, which found that 46 percent of respondents were very
concerned about threats to... their personal privacy (Gandy, 1993: 140). Today, in a post-September 11 society, the surreptitious gathering of
personal information has reached new heights, yet public opinion on the appropriate boundaries of private information retrieval has shifted
markedly. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 56 percent of Americans approve of the NSAs tracking
of phone records as an acceptable method of combatting terrorism (Pew Research Center, 2013). In that same poll, respondents were almost
equally divided about the NSAs policy of scanning all emails to prevent terrorism; 52 percent disapproved while 45 percent approved. We see a
somewhat disturbing trend here. While the tools available to gather, store and process personal information have dramatically expanded in the
past 20 years, the publics privacy concerns seem to have abated, albeit only slightly. Increased terrorism fears are no doubt one of the prime
catalysts for this, but we should not discount the prospect that popularization of email, search engines like Google and social media have lessened
our inhibitions regarding the sharing and monitoring of personal information. As Mark Andrejevic (2005, 2007, 2009) has noted in his impressive
corpus of research, citizens are not only being continually monitored by corporations and law enforcement, they are essentially monitoring each
other. This is what he calls lateral surveillance. At a time when we
wonder aloud with them about whether the tracks will carry a train this long, this
fast, that far. (Gandy, 1993: 230)
The aff is structurally incapable of solving trust its only result is to prop up
the surveillance state
Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State, Truthout, 10 February
2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]
The corporate-surveillance state collects troves of data, but the groups often targeted by traditional and new
forms of digital surveillance are more often than not those who fall within the parameters of either being a threat to authority,
reject the consumer culture or are simply considered disposable under the regime of neoliberal capitalism. The political, class and
racial nature of suppression has a long history in the United States and cannot be ignored by whitewashing the issue of surveillance as a form of
state violence by making an appeal to the necessity of safety and security. Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits
the highest levels of government.61 There
memory is a
crucial battleground for challenging a corporate-surveillance state that is motivated by the antidemocratic legal, economic and political interests. But if memory is to function as a witness to injustice and the practice of
criticism and renewal, it must embrace the pedagogical task of connecting the historical, personal and social .
It is worth repeating that C.W. Mills was right in arguing that those without power need to connect personal troubles
with public issues and that is as much an educational endeavour and responsibility as it is a political
and cultural task.63Obama's recent speech on reforms to the NSA serves as a text that demands not just close
reading but also becomes a model illustrating how history can be manipulated to legitimate the worst violations
of privacy and civil rights, if not state- and corporate-based forms of violence.64 For Obama, the image of Paul Revere or the
Sons of Liberty is referenced to highlight the noble ideals of surveillance in the interest of freedom and mostly provide a historical rationale for
the emergence of the massive spying behemoths such as the NSA that now threaten the fabric of US democracy and massive data on everyone,
not just terrorists. Of course, what Obama leaves out is that Paul Revere and his accomplices acted "to curtail government power as the main
threat to freedom."65 Obama provides a sanitized reference to history in order to bleach the surveillance state of its criminal past and convince
the American public that, as Michael Ratner states, "Orwellian surveillance is somehow patriotic."66 Obama's surveillance state does just the
opposite, and the politicians such as Rep. Mike Ford and Feinstein are more than willing to label legitimate whistle-blowers - including, most
famously, Snowden, Manning and Hammond - as traitors while keeping silent when high-ranking government officials, particularly James
Clapper Jr., the director of national security, lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee. Obama's
world, kills innocent people with drone attacks, promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily
authorizes targeted assassinations?68 Or, for that matter, a president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get
government employees to spy on each other and "turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches,"69 which includes "any
unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials."70
10
Catastrophe Images
The affs descriptions of catastrophe constitute a depolicitizing spectacle that
creates widespread political apathy and the conditions for self-enforced
surveillance
Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State, Truthout, 10 February
2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]
As Heidi Boghosian argues, the omniscient state "in George Orwell's 1984 is represented by a two-way television set installed in each home.
In our own modern adaptation, it is symbolized by the location-tracking cell phones we willingly carry in our pockets and the microchipembedded clothes we wear on our bodies."35 While such devices can be used for useful applications, they become dangerous in a society in
which corporations and government have increased power and access over every aspect of the lives of the American public. Put simply, "the
ubiquity of such devices threatens a robust democracy."36 What is particularly dangerous, as Boghosian documents in great detail, is that: as
government agencies shift from investigating criminal activity to preempting it, they have forged
close relationships with corporations honing surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques for
use against Americans. By claiming that anyone who questions authority or engages in undesired political
speech is a potential terrorist threat, this government-corporate partnership makes a mockery of civil
liberties. As the assault by an alignment of consumer marketing and militarized policing grows, each single act of individual expression or
resistance assumes greater importance.37 The dynamic of neoliberal modernity, the homogenizing force of the market, a growing culture of
repression and an emerging police state have produced more sophisticated methods for surveillance and the mass suppression of the most
essential tools for dissent and democracy: "the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on
corporate malfeasance and government abuse."38 The
vicariously participate in
the toxic pleasures of consumer culture, relentlessly entertained by the spectacle of violence in which, as
David Graeber, suggests, the police become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in
popular culture watching movies or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view."39 It is worth
repeating that Orwell's vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state looks tame next to the emergence of a corporate-private-state
surveillance system that wants to tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast
intelligence storage sites around the country and use those data to repress any vestige of dissent.40 Whistle-blowers are not only punished by the
government; their lives are turned upside down in the process by private surveillance agencies and major corporations who increasingly work in
tandem. These institutions share information with the government and do their own spying and damage control. For instance, Bank of America
assembled 15 to 20 bank officials and retained the law firm of Hunton & Williams to devise various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and Glenn
Greenwald, who they thought was about to release damaging information about the bank.41 Some
11
One of the most serious conditions that enable the expansion of the corporate-state surveillance
apparatus is the erasure of public memory. The renowned anthropologist David Price rightly argues that historical memory is
one of the primary weapons to be used against the abuse of power and that is why "those who have power create a 'desert of organized forgetting.'
"49 For Price, it
The
violence of organized forgetting has another component besides the prevalence of a culture of fear and hypernationalism that emerged after 9/11. Since the 1980s, the culture of neoliberalism with its emphasis on the self, privatization and consumerism
largely has functioned to disparage any notion of the public good, social responsibility and collective action, if not politics itself. Historical
memories of collective struggles against government and corporate abuses have been deposited down the memory
hole, leaving largely unquestioned the growing inequalities in wealth and income , along with the
increased militarization and financialization of American society. Even the history of authoritarian
movements appears to have been forgotten as right-wing extremists in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Maine, Florida and other
states attempt to suppress long-established voting rights, use big money to sway elections, destroy public and higher education as a public good,
and substitute emotion and hatred for reasoned arguments.53 Manufactured
the new apologists for the surveillance state refuse to recognize is a history of abuse and
criminal behavior by US intelligence apparatuses that were less concerned with implementing the
law, arresting criminals and preventing terrorist acts than they were in suppressing dissent and
punishing those groups marginalized by race and class.
12
Econ
Administration of biopolitical economic order requires threat inflation and
subversionresults in greater overall violence
Neocleous 8 [Mark, Professor of Government at the University of Brunel, Critique of Security, p, 95-8]
In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between economic and national security:
the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being
born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all its economic strength
in order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of economic security .99 Despite the fact that
econ omic security would never be formally dened beyond economic order or economic well-being,100 the signicant conceptual con
sistency between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By
intervention and policing all over the globe. Global order has come to be fabricated and
administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of capitalaccumulation
and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national
security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development
anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and Americas core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be
recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established
connections, but alsosecured everywhere.
Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global intervention, fusing global issues of economic
management with domestic
shows its face; the liberal moment becomes the moment of violence . This Janus-faced character has meant that
through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen t to either overtly or covertly re-order the
affairs of myriads of nations those rogue or outlaw states on the wrong side of history.104
Extrapolating the gures as best we can, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,there have been about 3,000 major covert
operations and over 10,000 minor operations all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the
activities of other countries, adding that every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national
security.105 These would include interventions in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China,
Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay,
Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South
Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once.
Next up are the 60 or more countries identied as the bases of terror cells by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used
have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security making the economy scream via controls,
interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing;
13
subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIAs Health Alteration Committee whose mandate was to incapacitate foreign
ofcials; drug-trafcking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some
plain old fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi
collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments,
such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism owed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108
Concomitantly, national security has
liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers . John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in
Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and
guring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difcult. But, adding them up as best
we can, we come up with a gure of six million people killed and this is a minimum gure. Included
are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia,
20,000 killed in Angola the operation I was part of and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum gure,
that he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This
is security as the
slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than conrmed by events in the twentyrst century: in a speech on 1 June
2002, which became the basis of the ofcial National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush
reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to
prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly new doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-rst century, the policy of
preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive
actions to counter a sufcient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and the more
compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the
United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the worlds only superpower in its current
war on terror is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of economic order. The National
Security Strategy concerns itself with a single sustainable model for national success based on political and economic liberty, with whole
sections devoted to the security benets of economic liberty, and the benets to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111
14
Drones
Regulating the use of drones normalizes their existence and locks in place
violent impulses inherent to the legal system
Trombly 12 [Dan, Associate Analyst @ Caerus Analytics, National Security/International Affairs Analyst, The Drone War Does Not
Take Place, NOVEMBER 16, 2012, http://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/the-drone-war-does-not-take-place]
there is no such
thing as drone war. There is no nuclear war, no air war, no naval war. There isnt really even irregular war. Theres just war.
Ill try to make this a bit shorter than my usual fare on the subject, but let me be clear about something. As much as I and many others inadvertently use the term,
There is, of course, drone warfare, just as there is nuclear warfare, aerial warfare, and naval warfare. This is verging on pedantry, but the
conduct and character of war should not be confused with its nature , as Colin Gray strives to remind us in so many of his writings. When
we believe
that some aspect of warfare changes the nature of war whether we do so to despair its ethical
descent or praise its technological marvels, or to try to objectively discern some new and irreversible reality we lose sight of a logic
that by and large endures in its political and conceptual character . Hence the title (with some, but not too much, apology to
Baudrillard). There is no drone war, there is only the employment of drones in the various wars we fight
under the misleading and conceptually noxious War on Terror. Why does this matter? To imbue a weapons system with the
political properties of the policy employing it is fallacious, and to assume its mere presence
institutes new political realities relies on a denial of facts and context. This remains the case with drones. The character of wars waged with
drones is different the warfare is different but the nature of these wars do not change, and very often this
argument obscures the wider military operations occurring. Long before the first drone strikes
occurred in Somalia, America was very much at war there. Before their availability in that theater,
the U.S. had deployed CIA and SOF assets to the region. It supported Ethiopias armies and it
helped bankroll and coordinate proxy groups, whether they were Somali TFG units, militias, or private contractors. It
bombarded select Somali targets with everything from naval guns to AC-130 gunships to conventional strike aircraft. It deployed JSOC teams to capture or kill Somalis. That at some
point the U.S. acquired a new platform to conduct these strikes is not particularly relevant to the
character of that war and even less to its nature. We sometimes assume drones inaugurate some new type of
invincibility or some transcendental transformation of war as an enterprise of risk and mutual violence. We are incorrect to do so. The war in Somalia is
certainly not risk free for the people who the U.S. employs or contracts to target these drones. It is not risk free for the militias, mercenaries, or military partners which follow up on the ground.
Nor is it risk free for those who support the drones. Just ask Abu Talha al-Sudani, one of the key figures behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, who sent operatives to
case Camp Lemonier and launch a commando raid one which looks, in retrospect, very much like the one that crippled Marine aviation at Camp Bastion recently that might have killed a great
is a product of relative military capabilities and wars multifarious external contexts. Looked at through this lens, its not drones that reduce U.S. political and material risk, its the basic facts of
the conflict. In the right context, most any kind of military technology can significantly mitigate risks. A 19th century ironclad fleet could shell the coast of a troublesome principality with basic
impunity. When Dewey said, You may fire when ready, Gridley, at Manila Bay, according to most history and much legend he lost only one man due to heatstroke! while inflicting grievous
casualties on his out-ranged and out-gunned Spanish foes. That some historians have suggested Dewey may have concealed a dozen casualties by fudging them in with desertions, which were in
any case were a far greater problem than casualties since the Navy was still in the habit of employing foreign sailors expendable by the political standards of the day is even more telling. Yes,
there are always risks and almost always casualties even in the most unfair fights, but just as U.S. policymakers wrote off Asian sailors, they write off the victims of death squads which hunt
down the chippers, spotters, and informants in Pakistan or the contractors training Puntlands anti-piracy forces. And no, not even the American spooks are untouchable, the fallen at Camp
There is a certain hubris in thinking we can limit war by limiting its most infamous weapons
systems. The taboo and treaties against chemical weapons perhaps saved men (but not the Chinese at Wuhan, nor the Allied and innocents downwind of the SS
John Harvey at Bari) from one of the Great Wars particular horrors, but they did nothing appreciable to check the kind of war the Great War was, or the hypersanguinary
but a generation later. The Predators and Reapers could have never existed, and very likely the U.S.
would still be seeking ways to carry out its war against al Qaeda and its affiliates under the auspices of the AUMF in all of todays same theaters.
More might die from rifles, Tomahawks, Bofors guns or Strike Eagles JDAMs than remotely-launched Griffins, and the tempo of strikes
would abate. But the same fundamental problems the opaque decisions to kill, the esoteric legal
justifications for doing so, the obtuse objectives these further would all remain . Were it not for the exaggerated and
almost myopic focus on killer robots, the U.S. public would likely pay far less attention to the victims, excesses, and contradictions. But blaming drones qua drones for these
consequences of its sequel
15
makes little more sense than blaming helicopters for Vietnam, or fearing airmobile
concern that proliferation of a weapons system equates to
proliferation of the outcomes associated with them, without regard to context, is equally misleading. Nobody in America
should fear the expansion of the Chinese UAV fleet because, like the U.S. UAV fleet, it is merely going to expand their ability to do what similar aircraft were already doing. Any
country with modern air defenses can make mincemeat of drone -only sorties, and for that reason China, which unlike Yemen and
problems, or fearing their proliferation at home,
Pakistan would not consent to wanton U.S. bombing of its countryside, need not fear drones. For an enormous number of geographical, political, and military reasons, the U.S. ought fear the
Drones do not grant a country the ability to conduct the kind of wars we
conduct against AQAM. The political leverage to build bases and clear airspaces, and the military and
intelligence capabilities to mitigate an asymmetric countermeasure operation do . If another country
gains that ability to conduct them against a smaller country, even, it is not because they lacked the ability to put weapons on planes, but because of
the full tapestry of national power and military capabilities gave them such an ability. It was not asymmetry in basic technical ability that
drone war coming home even less.
made the U.S. submarine blockade of Japan so much more effective than the Axiss attempts to do the same against Americas shores, but the total scope of the assets in the field and context of
their use.
, or lack thereof that the Axis could bomb Britain or lose the ability to do so, but
because of the cumulative effect of military capabilities and the judgments guiding them. What might expand the battlefield of a drone war is much the same. Americas enemies do not refrain
from attacking bases in CONUS or targeting dissidents in the U.S. (not that they have not before), they wait for an opportunity and practical reason to do so, and that has very little to do with
Fearing that the mere use of a weapons system determines the way
in which our enemies will use it without regard to this context is not prophetic wisdom. It is quasiSpenglerian hyperventilation that attributes the decision to use force to childlike mimesis rather
than its fundamentally political purposes. Iran and Russia do not wait on drones to conduct
extrajudicial targeted killings, and indeed drones would be of much less use to them in their own
political contexts. Focusing on drones and the nature of targeted killings as some sort of inherent link ignores those contexts and ultimately
does a disservice to understanding of wars past, present, and future, and by doing so, does little help and possibly a
great deal of harm to understanding how to move forward.
drones in particular and even less the nature of the war itself.
legal debate on targeted killing, particularly that referring to the US practice, has increased immensely during the last decade and
even more so very recently, obviously due to a compulsion of legality.87 Once this state practice of resorting to the use of lethal force has been recognized as
systematically taking place, it needs to be dealt with in legal terms. Whether this is done in supportive or critical terms, the assertion of targeted killing as a legal
The
practice commences at this point. This is due to the fact that the law, once invoked,
launches its own claims. To insist on disclosing the full legal basis
to render governmental action controllable; or on
legal principles to be applied in order to estimate the necessity and proportionality of a concrete intervention at stake,88 not only involves accepting
targeted killing as a legitimate subject of debate in the first place . It requires distinctions to be
made between, for example, a legitimate and an illegitimate target. It invokes the production of knowledge and the establishment of
for targeted killings; on criteria, legal procedures, and access to reliable information in order
pertinent rules. Indeterminate categories are to be determined and thus established as a new reading of positive law. The introduction of international human rights
standards into the debate, for example, clearly allows limits to be set in employing the pre-emptive tactic. As Wouter Werner has shown with regard to the Israeli High
Court of Justices decision on the legality of targeted killing operations,89 this may well lead, for example, to recognizing the enemy as being not outlaws but,
instead, combatants who are to be granted basic human rights. Subsequently, procedural rules
16
example, is intrinsically a relational one. The damage that targeting causes is to be related to the anticipated military advantage and to the expected
casualties of non-targeted operations. Even if there are substantial grounds to believe that such an operation will
encounter significant armed resistance,95 this is a presumption that, above all, entails a virtual
dimension: the alternate option will never be realized. According to a Foucauldian perspective, decisions always articulate within an epistemic
regime and thus eventualize on the political stage.96 There is, in this sense, no mere decision and no mere meaning ; and,
conversely, there is no content of a norm, and no norm, independent of its enforcement.97 To relate this observation to our
problem at hand means that, rather than the legal principles guiding a decision, it is the decision on how to proceed
that constitutes the meaning of the legal principle in question . The legal reasoning, in turn, produces a
normative reality of its own, as we are now able to imagine, comprehend, and assess a procedure and couch it in legal terms. This is also noticeable in the case of the
Osama bin Laden killing. As regards the initial strategy of justification, the question of resistance typically is difficult to establish ex post in legal terms. Such situations are fraught with so many
possible instances of ambiguous behaviour and risk, and the identification of actual behav- iour as probably dangerous and suspicious may change the whole outcome of the event.98 But, once
the public found itself with little alternative but to assume that the prospect of capturing the subject formed part of the initial order, it also had to assume that the intention was to use lethal force
once the public accepts the general presumption that the United States is at war with the
terrorist organization, legal reasoning about the operation itself follows and constitutes a rationale shaping the
perception of similar future actions and the exercise of governmental force in general.99 Part of this rationale is the assumption, as the president immediately
as a last resort. And,
pointed out in his speech, that the threat of al Qaeda has not been extinguished with bin Laden. The identification of a threat that emanates from a network may give rise to the question of
whether the killing of one particular target, forming part of a Hydra, makes any sense at all.100 Yet, it equally nourishes the idea that the fight against terrorism, precisely because of its
elusiveness, is an enduring one, which is exactly the position the United States takes while considering itself in an armed conflict with the terrorist organization. Targeting and destroying parts of
application.102 Just as between language and world . . . there is no internal nexus between them. The norm, in this sense, exists independent of reality. This, according to Agamben, allows for
the norm in the state of exception both to be applied with the effect of ceasing to apply103 the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception104 and to be suspended without being
abolished. Although forming part of and, in fact, being the effect of applying the law, the state of exception, in Agambens view, disconnects from the norm. Within a perspective on law as
practice, by contrast, there is no such difference between norm and reality. Even to ignore a pertinent norm constitutes an act that has a meaning, namely that the norm is not being enforced. It
Targeted killing
resists a binary deciphering of either legal or illegal and is not a matter of suspending a norm. As practices deploying particular forms of
targeted killing and its law mutually constitute each other, thus re-enforcing a new security
dispositive. The appropriate research question therefore is how positive law changes its framework
of reference. Targeted killing, once perceived as illegal, now appears to be a legal practice on the grounds of a
new understanding of international laws own elementary concepts. The crux of the compulsion of legality is that legality itself is a shifting reference . Seen this
that both
knowledge,
way, the United States does not establish targeted killing as a legal practice on the grounds of its internationally possessing exceptional power. Rather the reverse; it is able to employ targeted
killing as a military tactic, precisely because this is accepted by the legal discourse. As a practice, targeted killing, in turn, reshapes our understanding of basic concepts of international law.
Any dissenting voice will now be heard with more difficulty, since targeted killing is a no longer an
isolated practice but, within the now establishing security dispositif, appears to be appropriate and
rational. To counter the legal discourse, then, would require to interrupt it, rather than to respond
to it, and to move on to its political implications that are rather tacitly involved in the talk about threats and security,
and in the dispute about targeted killing operations legality.
17
Hegemony
Hegemony is based on a liberal fantasy of US exceptionalism which
necessitates permanent war-making a more peaceful world order fills in to
solve their theoretical impacts, while obscure the real consequences of untold
suffering
Jackson 11 [Richard, Director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of Otago. Former. Professor of International
Politics at Aberystwyth University, The Worlds Most Warring Nation, www.e-ir.info/2011/07/02/the-worlds-most-warring-nation]
The history of US foreign policy is a violent and bloody one, although this is not necessarily the dominant perception
of most Americans. From the frontier wars of subjugation against Native Peoples to colonial wars against
Mexico, Spain and the Philippines, the Cold War interventions in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Libya and elsewhere, the post-Cold
War interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, and the post-9/11
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya today , the US has an
unrivaled record of war and foreign military intervention. There are in fact, few periods in its history when the US has
not been engaged in war or military attacks on other countries. In addition, the US is the worlds largest manufacturer and
exporter of military weapons, and has a military budget several times greater than all its nearest
rivals combined. It is in fact, the most warring nation in modern history. It is in this historical
context that we have to try and understand its current military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Yemen, the Horn of Africa and Libya.
Although it
is sometimes argued by apologists that these military actions are always defensive in nature rather than proactive
result of real and serious threats to US security or the wider international system,
the virtually impregnable security position of the US, notwithstanding the 9/11 attacks a decade ago, makes this argument
unconvincing. The reality is that the size of the US landmass and population, the vast oceans to its
eastern and western borders and the friendly countries to its north and south, and the extent of its
economic and military power, means that there are no serious obstacles to the adoption of an
isolationist foreign policy or even the adoption of a pacifist role in international affairs . In other words,
there is nothing inevitable or predetermined about its long record of war and intervention. Explaining the
historical record of US foreign intervention requires a careful evaluation of both its strategic interests
and its ideological system, as it is the almost unique combination of these factors and the way in which
they underpin and interact with each other which helps to explain why the US continues to be the
most violent state in the international system today.
and expansionist, and are the
At the same time, the US has evolved since the founding of the republic a
18
complex capable of staying ahead of its rivals, for example, requires a supporting set of cultural values which
valorize military prowess, patriotism and sacrifice in war. These values are now part of the militaryindustrial-media complex in which video games and movies, among others, serve as recruitment tools for the military,
narrative frames for interpreting foreign threats and as propaganda for generating support for
foreign military intervention. Importantly, this military-industrial-media complex has come to generate
its own material and political interests, in part because it requires actual wars to reproduce and
sustain itself.
Other important ideological values include the strongly-held belief that the US has been called by history (or God) to protect the so-called free
world from major threats. Thus, it is believed that the US was first called to defeat the threat posed by the Axis powers, then the communist
threat, and today, the global threat of terrorism. This
It is the combination of the USs strategic interests and its ideological dispositions in the past two hundred
years or more which explains the frequency and geographical distribution of its military interventions. In some cases,
interventions have been launched primarily to protect perceived strategic interests, such as the case of the first Gulf War in which Iraq took
control of Kuwait oil reserves and appeared to seriously threaten Saudi oil reserves. In other cases, the USs strategic interests coincided with
strong ideological imperatives, such as the Libyan intervention today where the presence of significant oil reserves and the desire to create a proUS regime in a strategic region has combined with the US ideological value of spreading democracy and overthrowing a long-term dictator and
US opponent. The key point however, is that ideological values such as democracy promotion only rarely generate sufficient will by themselves
for military intervention, although Somalia and Kosovo may be considered exceptions (although there were strategic interests involved in both
cases). In many other cases, such as Rwanda in the 1990s and Syria today, such ideological imperatives are insufficient on their own to generate
US-led military intervention. At the same time, no wars can be justified or defended to the American public, except by claiming that they fit US
ideological values; US politicians cannot admit that they are ever at war solely to secure strategic advantage.
Of course, during some periods such as the cold war and to a lesser degree the
appeals by leaders which mask the deeper strategic reasons for violent
intervention. While it is unlikely that its strategic interests will change any time soon or that the military-industrial
complex can be significantly reduced in size, there is always the hope that new leaders might arise and peace
19
movements might emerge which are able to challenge, and perhaps even change, the militarized patriotism and deeplyembedded culture of violence which makes the US the most violent state in the world.
20
Legitimacy
The discourse of legitimacy masks the violence of hegemony---the
affirmatives commitment to US leadership recreates masculinist national
identity that codes the US as a the shepherd of liberal architecture
Landreau 11 [John, associate professor of womens and gender studies at The College of New Jersey., Obamas My Dad: Mixed Race Suspects,
Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism, www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/landfreau/408]
Both during his campaign, and in his presidential inauguration speech, Barack Obama
seems
to articulate a gentler, more reasoned approach to national security and terrorism that includes the use of 'hard'
military power but also depends importantly on 'soft' power in the form of diplomacy, international
cooperation, and an emphasis on human rights, economic stability and political freedom. Ivie and Giner argue that the success
of Obama's rhetorical appeal to 'soft' power during the 2008 presidential campaign was due to his ability to harness and
resignify the deeply-resonant myth of American exceptionalism for a more democratic and
community-minded projection of America's role in world affairs . In Obama's version of national security, they write: A less
tragic sense of order mandated a reduced sense of guilt and thereby decreased the need for redemption via the cult of killing. This expression of national mission in
more democratic and practical terms indicated, at least "logologically," the possibility of aligning public culture with a more global and constructive perspective on
matters of national security. It revealed the possibility of a founding myth reformed to relax the lethal grip of the Evil One on the conscience of a nation that might do
more good in the world if it were burdened less by tragic guilt.[4] (296) This conclusion requires a retrospective reassessment in the light of Obama's decision to
escalate the war in Afghanistan. How
candidate who was proud to have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, and who abolished the use of torture and illegal detention in his first day in
office, to
the president who in December 2009 made the decision to pursue and significantly escalate military violence in
Afghanistan? How do we reconcile Obama's seemingly contradictory use of both the soft rhetoric of hope and diplomacy and the hard rhetoric of fear and
military violence in his national security statements and speeches? In the analysis that follows I argue that while Obama at times articulates a
softer version of foreign policy, and seems to perform a softer, more inclusive presidential
masculinity in the area of global politics and terrorism, this does not fundamentally signify a different
orientation to national security as some have argued. I emphasize how Obama's rhetoric and policies fall
within the standard rhetorical oscillations that constitute the myth of American exceptionalism and
presidential masculinity, and that those oscillations are principally and most significantly oriented by the
more militarist and conventionally masculinist versions of the myth . Presidential Masculinity in the Democratic
Nomination Speech Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008 marks the formal shift of his campaign focus from Democratic Party
voters towards a national audience, and from his rivalry with Hillary Clinton to a campaign against John McCain. In terms of Obama's national security rhetoric, this
is a fascinating moment because, in this new broader context, he makes an attitudinal shift to a more militarized and masculinized mode of speech. In fact, Obama's
performance of soft masculinity on issues of national security during the primary campaign was an opportune product of the moment that did not reflect the principal
orientation of his thinking.[5] This is quite clear in the nomination speech as he shifts his campaign towards a more conservative national audience, and directs his
21
attention from a female rival to a male rival with military credentials. Obama's first sentence about foreign policy in the nomination speech concerns his own stature
and ability to lead American troops into battle, and to battle John McCain for the position of commander in chief. "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who
has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander-in-chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have." (para. 79) What is most interesting about this lead-in to
the topic of national security, terrorism, and foreign policy is that its main rhetorical function is to emphasize Obama's masculine capability. It does this by declaring
his presidential mettle, but also through the performance of an 'I dare you' challenge to his political adversary. It seems to say, 'if you want to fight, then let's fight.
Bring it on!' Why does Obama begin this section of the speech with a flexing of muscle? In part, it has to do with the histrionics of presidential campaigns, and in this
particular campaign with the anticipated challenge to Obama's military masculinity from John McCain, a candidate with a powerful story of military bravery and
heroism to his credit. At the same time, the foregrounding of presidential masculinity in terms of the resolve and capacity to lead the armed forces into battle is
nothing unusual. The most significant human protagonist in the narrative of American exceptionalism is almost always the figure of the president. This is
especially true in times of danger, crisis or war. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. To him goes the job of protecting the national family from outside
threats and danger. To do this effectively, he must
be brave, decisive and rational. He cannot afford to be feminized by being overly emotional
or sympathetic to others; he cannot succumb to doubts, or become scared to act (Cohn, Cuordileone, Hopper, Lakoff, Sylvester, Tickner, Young).
It is to this mythos that Obama's beginning performance of masculinity in the speech belongs. In the new context of a national audience, it stands out as a deeply-felt
and vigorously articulated orientation towards national security. After this initial show of male plumage, Obama continues the foreign policy section of the nomination
speech by contrasting his youthful masculinity to McCain's elderly, bumbling masculinity. For -- for while -- while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just
days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats that we face. When John McCain said we could just muddle
through in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we
must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. (para. 80-81) While McCain turns his sights away from the target, Obama stands up.
While McCain muddles, Obama works to finish the fight and "take out" bin Laden if he's "in our sights." In the subtly crafted metaphor of aiming a gun at an enemy
that organizes the passage, McCain appears as a distracted old soldier who aims at the wrong target and is generally confused. In contrast, vigorous and youthful,
Obama stands up purposely, aims at the target, and fires. These metaphors all work to highlight the differences between McCain and Obama in terms of their
embodiment of a properly militarized masculinity: which candidate can stand up, correctly identify the enemy, and fire the necessary shots to kill him. Obama
criticizes McCain for standing alone in "stubborn refusal" to recognize the realities of the conflict (that it is with al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, not in Iraq),
and therefore for lacking judgment. This lack of judgment is also narrated in terms of a contrast between a youthful and an aging masculinity: " We
need a
president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past." (para. 84)
Obama declares. The contrast between a man who grasps at the past and one who "faces" the future is coded with messages about age and masculinity: youthful,
confident stepping forward into the future versus old, unsteady back-stepping towards the past. At stake in this contrast is which strategy will "defeat" the enemy. "You
don't defeat -- you don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq", (para. 85) Obama argues. These are enemies who must be killed in
order to protect the nation. To
As
a justification for war, it seems, rather, to be structured like a myth in the sense that Roland Barthes gave the word.
Myth, according to Barthes, is paradoxically effective because, formally, it works like an alibi. It is an explanation based on an
absence of evidence and meaning rather than its presence. In an alibi (the accused was absent not present at the scene) the
meaning and the evidence are always elsewhere (121-127). Obama's narrative amounts to a mythological explanation for
war in the sense that its significance lies not in the history itself but in the formal seriousness of a president telling a story to justify war. That is, its significance lies
in the rhetorical gesture that serves to remind the audience of the president's authority as commander in chief and of his role to defend the nation from harm. By telling
this story the president in effect quotes an array of motives, intentions, plot sequences and characters that are formally full even if their content in this instance is
misleading or empty. To paraphrase Hayden White, in this case the content is the form. Here, the details of the story of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan are
significant to the extent that they play a role in a larger narrative already familiar to the American audience: the Unites States stands for peace and prosperity, freedom
and democracy but sometimes it is attacked by evil enemies whose irrational desire is to destroy all that is good. In that circumstance, the president must protect the
national family through the use of military violence. War is the best and, in fact, the only way to make ourselves secure. Following this schematic historical narrative
with which he begins the West Point speech, Obama reassures the audience that his final decision to escalate the war was taken only after a serious and difficult
deliberative process. This process, he says, "has allowed me to ask the hard questions, and to explore all the different options, along with my national security team,
our military and civilian leadership in Afghanistan, and our key partners. And given the stakes involved, I owed the American people -- and our troops -- no less."
(para. 13) The
image of the president very seriously asking questions, exploring options, and consulting
experts is one intended to produce a sense of citizen confidence both in the decision and in the
decider (as George W. Bush famously called himself) again without revealing any of the details or particulars that constitute the decision. The rhetorical appeal
here is essentially charismatic and depends on thick cultural associations with the president as benevolent paternal authority, and as rational but determined protector
22
of the nation. The tone of the passage is that of a father reassuring his family that the big decision he has made today was made with great care, and with their
communal welfare in mind. Obama's stress
other world powers, we are benevolent, seeking only that which will
make the world a better place. We are, that is to say, a world power but not a world empire. Our history shows this: our military
violence and our leadership have underwritten global security for over sixty years. Strangely, though,
our fatherly sacrifice to protect the world from harm is sometimes misunderstood, and "we have
not always been thanked for our efforts." Who are the unthankful and what is their story? In the standard-issue
exceptionalist narrative, they are the enemies of freedom, the sowers of chaos, and the ideologically possessed.
Obama certainly believes this. At the same time, the statement that "we have not always been thanked for our efforts" also expresses a deep anxiety about the details
and the stories that are erased by the great father's version of history. Making War, Talking Peace: The Nobel Peace Prize Speech The Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
given just nine days after Obama's announcement of the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, provides a fascinating expansion of the plot of "American as good vs.
foreign as evil" that informs the narrative justification for war in the West Point speech. In this speech, Obama contextualizes both American exceptionalism in
general, and his specific decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, in a sweeping historical narrative of global progress. "At the dawn of history," Obama declares,
"war was routinely pursued between tribes and peoples quite simply as a way of 'seeking power and settling disputes." (para. 6) Later, as "man" progressed, legal and
diplomatic efforts were made in an attempt to regulate war and the way it was pursued. Obama invokes just war theory citing it as one of the principle ways in which
humans have tried to regulate and civilize war. In
Obama's narrative, the United States is located at the upper end of this
historical progression because it is the United States that has provided the leadership to produce the
global "architecture" of peace in the form of the United Nations, support for human rights, nuclear arms reductions, and so on. Elaborating on the
schematic history of the United States that appeared in the West Point speech, Obama says The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for
more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and
prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our
will.We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better
if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity (para. 18). J. Ann Tickner argues that the
choices in a dangerous world in order to protect our interests. By virtue of the incantatory power of the exceptionalist narrative, our interests are identical with
democratic values and the cause of economic justice. The awkward context of the Nobel Prize speech both clarifies and complicates Obama's justification of war.
While acknowledging the "moral force" of the theory of non-violence, he also argues that "evil
This is precisely what is wrong with the narrative of American exceptionalism, and with Obama's
obligation to it. A story whose plot is organized entirely around the character of its hero does not
seek to know. It is narcissistic. It shores up what it knows in fear of the Other, and in this gesture
reconfirms that its view of the world is the truth. Obama seems oblivious to the contradictions in his
assertion of American power as he struggles here to articulate the oxymoron of peace through war.
In the end, what "makes sense" in his justification for war is the cultural and political sense that
adheres to the image of embodied presidential masculinity, and to his military leadership
performed in patriotic service to America's heroic global mission. Conclusion Obama's national security policies and
rhetoric are, to be fair, significantly different in many ways than Bush's. Nonetheless, he steeps his rhetoric of hope for a new foreign policy in the old, familiar
language of American exceptionalism. This illustrates how the
it is
impossible to know all the ins and outs of how Obama and his advisors reached the decision to escalate the
war in Afghanistan. For those who voted for Obama over Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign because of his clear-spoken commitment to a
different kind of foreign policy, the decision is disappointing to say the least. In that the Obama administration felt at home in and
oriented by - the old language of American exceptionalism the final analysis, when the decision was
made, and its justification needed to be formulated into public rhetoric, what is clear is . Familiar
citizenship best characterized in terms of a militarized and masculinized patriotism? Can terrorism be fought with large-scale military tactics? Of course,
orientations, as Sara Ahmed argues, are an "effect of inhabitance." That is, their sense, their familiarity and their surety are products of their alignment with an already
aligned world (7). My argument here is that the sense Obama makes of war is indebted to and made possible by - the familiarity and common-sense orientation of
American exceptionalism. If
the militarism and masculinism of his national security logic seem sensible or
reassuring, it is because they are oriented in deeply familiar ways. The rhetoric of war and national
security also works, of course, to recreate the familiar orientation from which it emerges. As Susan Jeffords
argues, in the post-Vietnam context, heroic narratives about the war had the decisive (but indirectly manifested) effect of "remasculinizing American culture." This is
why the work of disorientation that is proposed by feminist International Relations scholars and activists with its specific focus on the hidden injuries of gender in the
familiar discourses of war and security is so important. It is also why it is so difficult. I have argued that Obama's
24
and masculinity. The difficulty of challenging and disorienting that prevailing narrative is eloquently described by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "The
South." The story serves as an apt allegory of the mythology of American exceptionalism with its multiple commitments to masculinity and violence, and for the ways
this mythology works to make military violence the seemingly inevitable and sensible locus where the national story is both
resolved and reinvigorated. The main character in "The South" is named Juan Dahlmann. Dahlmann feels "deeply Argentine" despite the fact that his paternal
grandfather was a northern European immigrant. Dahlmann's patriotic sense of identity involves, among other things, having purchased a little ranch in the south that
had once been in his mother's family. Dahlmann lives in Buenos Aires, and for him the south has tremendous symbolic resonance as that place that retains the
masculinist features of national mythology: the pampa, the gaucho, the singing bard, the tavern, the duel. Dahlmann dreams about the ranch and its old house, and
takes comfort in imagining it waiting for him on the pampa, even though he never really gets a chance to actually go there. One day, Dahlmann is struck gravely ill
with a terrible infection and is hospitalized with high fever. As is typical of so many of Borges' stories, it is impossible to tell if the subsequent narrated events are
products of his hallucinatory state or are really happening to him. In any event, after some days of medical intervention, he is released and boards a train towards the
south to convalesce at his ranch. He arrives, enters a tavern where he eats barbeque and drinks wine, and then is taunted by some young men who have been drinking
too much. Although the bar owner tells him to pay them no mind, Dahlmann confronts them as any traditional male character in a gaucho story would be required to
do. In seeming recognition of his decisive entrance into one of the enduring storylines of nationalist mythology (the knife fight between men at a watering hole on the
pampa), the ancient gaucho in the corner of the bar who until now has remained motionless as if frozen in time, becomes "ecstatic" and throws him a dagger. The rest
is preordained: Dahlmann will walk out of the tavern with a knife in his hand, he will fight bravely, and then die with the stranger's blade in his gut. It is, the narrator
says, "as if the South had decided that Dahlmann should agree to the duel." (203) When he picks up the dagger, he feels two things: first, "that this almost instinctive
act committed him to fighting" and, second, "that, in his clumsy hand, the weapon would not serve to defend him, but rather to justify their killing of him" (Borges,
203 translations mine). For me, "The South" is a story about the masculinist mythology of national identity and violence. Intricate and contradictory is it dream or
reality? the myth exercises its force both from within on Dahlmann's imagination and from without on his body. The
long as the
militarized and masculinized ideology of American exceptionalism remains the almost unitary
language with which we speak of national security and foreign policy, there should be no surprise
when ostensible doves from the Democratic Party such as Barack Obama pursue large-scale military campaigns in places like
Afghanistan, and seem to do so as readily as their reputedly hawkish counterparts in the Republican
Party. Alternate strategies to large-scale military violence require new story-lines of national
identity and national security. We need to give ourselves a choice about whether taking up the knife is what
the situation calls for. We need to ask questions about how we got into such a situation in the first
place. We need to create alternatives to the logic that defines security as killing or being killed . Clearly,
rhetoric plays a significant role in preparing these choices. But, as Obama's performance indicates, it is unlikely that
our presidents and our politicians will do the rhetorical work necessary to disorient the prevailing
exceptionalist narrative and reorient the debate towards the ethos of human security. It falls to us citizens, activists and intellectuals - to turn our political rhetoric away from antagonisms that
require violence towards the democratic task of contending with opponents with whom we share
the world.
25
Racial profiling
The plan is a violent endorsement of broader surveillance networks the
problem isnt merely that a totalitarian state surveils identities differently, but
a violent surveillance state exists minor reforms legitimize this enterprise
and cultivate widespread political apathy
Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State, Truthout, 10 February
2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]
media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons, all
the while endlessly shopping online and texting.7A This collecting of information might be most
evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets, commercial
establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at
the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like.
Yet the
most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of
information but also in a culture that normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and
26
enticements for consumers who use the new digital technologies and social networks to simulate
false notions of community and to socialize young people into a culture of security and commodification in which their identities,
values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help and commodification.
Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion. Authoritarianism in its contemporary manifestations, as
evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead has become omniscient in a culture of
control in which the most cherished notions
and computer
companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these
data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new
technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already
powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are
saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and
illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If
Now consider the work camera surveillance can do to address these issues. First, take the racial profiling of minority drivers. Cameras
already monitor automated bridge and tunnel tolling systems, (145) and photo-radars already catch red-light violations. (146) But this is
only the start. As Elizabeth Joh has explored, technology
27
free police to focus on actual policing. But more importantly, it has the advantage of being racially neutral. (150) Rather than using pretext stops
to single out minority motorists, surveillance
In the literature on racism, the broad change, since the Second World War, towards the erasure of
explicit discourses about racial difference has been widely noted. The story is that with the crumbling of a scientific
consensus about the biological basis of racial difference and inequality, and with a global reaction against the Nazi racism that changed the image
of eugenics from that of a progressive and rational movement for social change to that of an odious instrument of biopolitical aggression, it
became increasingly difficult to explicitly use a discourse about race in the public sphere. In fact, some
countries continue to use an explicit discourse of race for example, Britain's Race Relations Act, or the census and other
official enumeration categories of race in the USA and Brazil but these are deployed in the interests of the post-war hegemonic
ideology, that is, anti-racism. The rationale is that, in order to combat racial inequality, it is necessary to measure it and thus to count by
racial category. Sometimes in this process, the word ethnicity is used instead of race, thus blurring the explicit presence of a racial
discourse, while clearly referring to categories previously named as racial . Meanwhile, it is widely argued that racial
thinking and
racist ideologies and practices continue, despite the widespread public denial of race as an
acceptable mode of discourse (Goldberg 2008; Lentin and Titley 2011). This argument often refers to cultural racism in which
reference to biological differences are submerged or replaced by reference to cultural attributes, which serve to differentiate categories of people
that look very similar to the categories of older, more explicitly racial discourses; culture
adducing
the persistence of racism locate it at different levels . It may be identified in the practices of the state,
for example in racial profiling practices secret and explicitly racial, or open and euphemized as
cultural aimed at monitoring security; or in the idea that British immigration policy after 1950 actively sought to restrict
the entry of New Commonwealth (i.e. non-white) immigrants, without mentioning race. Racism may also be identified in the everyday practices
of ordinary citizens, most obviously those of a far-right persuasion, but also many who are just doing the best for their families, when they
avoid certain schools and areas, or when they just prefer to stick to their own. These two levels can come together in the identification of
institutional racism, when the everyday prejudices of state agents (e.g. police canteen culture) drive practices such as racial profiling,
independently of official policy. What we are faced with here is a sea change towards anti-racism and the silencing of race, alongside the
persistence of differentiations and discriminations of a racial character (Winant 2004). This deep-seated tension is not unusual. It is a
reflection of the tension in liberalism between ideals of equality and, not just the simple existence of inequality, but the way people
also actively maintain that inequality, defending what they have or want to have against others seen as competitors, as less deserving, or
as a threat. Practices of inclusion always coexist with practices of exclusion in changing ways and with a shifting balance between them: the task
of the historian and the social scientist is to identify how these practices operate and interweave.
28
Surveillance Reform
Focusing on government surveillance without tackling corporate data
collection locks in place corporate domination and authoritarianism
Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State, Truthout, 10 February
2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]
The surveillance state with its immense data mining capabilities represents a historical rupture from traditional
notions of modernity with its emphasis on enlightenment, reason, and the social contract. The older modernity held up
the ideals of justice, equality, freedom, and democracy, however flawed. The investment in public goods was seen as
central to a social contract that implied that all citizens should have access to those provisions,
resources, institutions, and benefits that expanded their sense of agency and social responsibility. The new
modernity and its expanding surveillance net subordinates human needs, public goods, and justice to
the demands of commerce and the accumulation of capital, at all costs. The contemporary citizen is primarily a
consumer and entrepreneur wedded to the belief that the most desirable features of human behavior are rooted in a "basic tendency towards
competitive, acquisitive and uniquely self-interested behavior which is the central fact of human social life."23 Modernity
is now
driven by the imperatives of a savage neoliberal political and economic system that embrace what
Charles Derber and June Sekera call a "public goods deficit" in which "budgetary priorities" are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow
out the welfare state and drastically reduce social provisions as part of a larger neoliberal counter revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and
mega-corporations while selling off public good to private interests.24 Debates
is now
personalized, reduced to an atomized fear that revolves around crime, safety, apocalypse, and
survival. In this instance, as the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once warned, modernity now privileges "a disgraceful
combination of 'private opulence and public squalor.' "26 This is not surprising given the basic elements of neoliberal policy, which as Jeremy
Gilbert indicates, include the: privatization of public assets, contraction and centralization of democratic institutions, deregulation of labor
markets, reductions in progressive taxation, restrictions on labor organization, labor market deregulation, active encouragement of competitive
and entrepreneurial modes of relation across the public and commercial sectors.27
Under the regime of neoliberal capitalism, the
collected and stored by corporate and government organizations such as the NSA and numerous other intelligence agencies. Snowden's exposure
29
of the massive reach of the surveillance state with its biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies, miniature drones, high speed
computers, massive data mining capabilities and other stealth technologies made visible "the stark realities of disappearing privacy and
diminishing liberties."33 But the
NSA and the other 16 intelligence agencies are not the only threat to privacy,
freedom and democracy. Corporations now have their own intelligence agencies and data mining
offices and use these agencies and new surveillance technologies largely to spy on those who
question the abuses of corporate power. The emergence of fusion centers exemplifies how power is
now a mix of corporate, local, federal and global intelligence agencies , all sharing information that can be used by
various agencies to stifle dissent and punish pro-democracy activists. What is clear is that this combination of gathering and
sharing information often results in a lethal mix of anti-democratic practices in which surveillance
now extends not only to potential terrorists but to all law-abiding citizens. Within this sinister web of secrecy,
suspicion, state-sanctioned violence and illegality, the culture of authoritarianism thrives and poses a dangerous
threat to democratic freedoms and rights. It also poses a threat to those outside the United States
who, in the name of national security, are subject to "a grand international campaign with drones and special
operations forces that is generating potential terrorists at every step ."34 Behind this veil of concentrated power
and secrecy lies not only a threat to privacy rights but the very real threat of violence on both a domestic and global level.
Everything that moves is monitored, along with information that is endlessly amassed and stored by private and government agencies. No
one,
it seems, can escape the tentacles of the NSA or the spy agencies that are scouring mobile phone apps
for personal data and intercepting computer and cellphone shipments to plant tracking devices and malware in them.11 Surveillance
is now global, reaching beyond borders that no longer provide an obstacle to collecting information and
spying on governments, individuals, prominent politicians, corporations and pro-democracy protest groups. The details of our daily
lives are not only on full display but are being monitored, collected and stored in databanks waiting
to be used for commercial, security or political purposes . At the same time, the right to privacy is eagerly
given up by millions of people for the wonders of social networking or the varied seductions inspired
by consumer fantasies. The loss of privacy, anonymity and confidentiality also has had the adverse effect of
providing the basis for what Bauman and David Lyons call the undemocratic process of "social sorting," in which
different populations are subject to differential treatment extending from being protected by the
state to being killed by drone attacks launched under the auspices of global surveillance and state
power.12Privacy is no longer a principled and cherished civil right. On the contrary, it has been absorbed and transformed
within the purview of a celebrity and market-driven culture in which people publicize themselves
and their innermost secrets to promote and advance their personal brand. Or it is often a principle invoked by
conservatives who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled when confronted with ideas or arguments that unsettle their notions of
common sense or their worldviews. It is worth repeating that privacy
30
We seem to experience no joy in having secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of
researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines.Everything private is now done, potentially,
in public - and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet 'can't be
made to forget' anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This
the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the fact that the public is
subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems interested in contesting. And it is
precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that puts
at risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner,
who is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in
terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my
knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the
fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the
mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for
the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.14
31
Terrorism
Their advantage is a sham rooted in vested interests and violent national
identity formationthe impact is expansive structural violence and racist
political subjectivity
Bryan 12 [Research Assistant at Middle East Institute. MScECON Candidate: Security Studies at Aberystwyth University, The
Popularity of the New Terrorism Discourse, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/06/22/the-popularity-of-the-new-terrorism-discourse/]
been characterized by the same fundamental qualities throughout history. Some of the superficial characteristics, the means of
implementation (e.g. the invention of the Internet or dynamite) or the discourse (communism vs. Islam) may have evolved, but the central components remain the
same. The second major problem is
talk about the difficultly of acquiring and deploying WMDs (by non-state agents), is not to diminish the question of what terrorists have to gain by utilizing these
weapons. It
is important to question whether it would even further the aims of terrorists to use WMDs.
suggests otherwise. In the Politics of Fear Jackson states, Mass casualties are most often
The evidence
32
counterproductive to terrorist aims they alienate their supporters and can provoke harsh reprisals
from the authorities [] in addition, [] they would undermine community support, distort the terrorists political
message, and invite over-whelming retaliation (2007, 196-197). Despite popular rhetoric to the contrary,
terrorists are rational political actors and are acutely aware of these dangers (Jackson, 2007, 197). Government
appointed studies on this issue have supported these views . This leads us to the third problem with new terrorism, which is the idea
that we are facing a new era of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology. As stated previously, earlier, so-called traditional forms of
terrorism are associated with left wing, political ideology, whereas contemporary terrorists are described as having anti-modern goals of returning society to an
idealized version of the past and are therefore necessarily anti-democratic, anti-progressive and, by implication, irrational (Gunning and Jackson, 3). Rapoport argues
the idea that religious terrorists are irrational, saying, what seems to be distinctive about modern [religious] terrorists, their belief that terror can be organized
rationally, represents or distorts a major theme peculiar to our own culture [] (1984, 660). Conveniently for the interests of the political elites, as we shall see later,
the idea of irrational fanaticism makes the notion of negotiation and listening to the demands of the other impossible. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the
U.S. has, for decades, given billions of dollars in aid to the State of Israel, which could be argued to be a fundamentalist, religious organization that engages in the
terrorization of a group of people. Further, it is difficult to speak of The Troubles in Northern Ireland without speaking of the religious conflict, yet it was never
assumed that the IRA was absolutist, inflexible, unrealistic, lacking in political pragmatism, and not amenable to negotiation (Gunning and Jackson, 4). Rapaport
further reinforces the idea that religious terrorism goes back centuries by saying, Before the nineteenth century, religion provided the only acceptable justifications
for terror (1984, 659). As we have seen here, problems with the discourse of new terrorism include the fact that these
elements of terrorism
are neither new nor are the popular beliefs of the discourse supported by empirical evidence . The
question remains, then, why is the idea of new terrorism so popular? This question will be addressed next. Political Investment in New Terrorism There are two main
categories that explain the popularity of new terrorism. The first category is government and political
terrorism discourse. The first is as a distraction from other, more immediate and domestic social problems
such as poverty, employment, racial inequality, health and the environment . The second, more
sinister function is to control dissent. In looking at both of these issues Jackson states: There are a number of clear political
advantages to be gained from the creation of social anxiety and moral panics. In the first place, fear is a disciplining agent
and can be effectively deployed to de-legitimise dissent , mute criticism, and constrain internal opponents. [] Either way, its
primary function is to ease the pressures of accountability for political elites . As instrument of elite
rule, political fear is in effect a political project aimed at reifying existing structures of power . (Politics of
Fear, 2007, 185). Giroux further reinforces the idea that a culture of fear creates conformity and deflects attention from government
accountability by saying, the ongoing appeal to jingoistic forms of patriotism divert the public from addressing a number of pressing domestic and foreign
issues; it also contributes to the increasing suppression of dissent (2003, 5). Having a problem that is ubiquitous, catastrophic,
and fairly opaque (Jackson, Politics of Fear, 2007, 185) is useful to political elites, because it is nearly impossible
to address the efficacy of combating the problem. At least, empirical evaluation can be, and is, easily discouraged in academic circles
through research funding directives. Domestic problems such as the unemployment rate or health care reform, on the other hand, are directly measurable and heavily
monitored by domestic sources. It is possible to account for the success or failure of policies designed to address these types of problems and the (re)election of
politicians often depends heavily on success in these areas. However, the public is neither involved on a participative level nor, often, socially aware of what is
happening in murkier and unreachable areas like foreign policy. The third political investment in maintaining the terrorism discourse has to do with economics. At a
material level, there
are a great many vested interests in maintaining the widespread condition of fear, not least for the
military-industrial complex which benefits directly from increased spending on national security (Jackson,
Politics of Fear, 2007, 186). This is true with all forms of crime and insecurity as all of them factor into the greater security-industrial complex. Not only do these
industries employ millions of people and support their families, they boost the economy. Barry Buzan talks of these the importance of these issues to both the
government and the public in
terms of a threat-deficit meaning that U.S. policy and society is dependent on having
an external threat (Buzan, 2007, 1101). The fourth key political interest in terrorism discourse is
constructing a national identity. This will be discussed more thoroughly in the following section, however, it is important to acknowledge the role
the WoT (and previous threats) has had on constructing and reinforcing a collective identity. Examples of this can be seen in the discourse and the subsequent reaction
to anyone daring to step outside the parameters of the Bush Administration-established narrative in the days immediately following the September 11th attacks. A
number of journalists, teachers and university professors lost their jobs for daring to speak out in criticism of U.S. policy and actions following the attacks. In 2001,
Lynne Cheney attacked the then deputy chancellor of the New York City Schools, Judith Rizzo, for saying terrorist attacks demonstrated the importance of teaching
about Muslim cultures (Giroux, 2003, 22). According to Giroux, this form of jingoistic
dangerous departure from what it means to uphold a viable democracy (2003, 24). The message is, we
are not the other (Muslims), patriotism equals agreement and compliance and our identity is based on the shared
values of liberty and justice. According to Carol Winkler, Negative ideographs contribute to our collective identity by branding behavior that is
unacceptable American society defines itself as much by its opposition to tyranny and slavery as it does by a commitment to liberty (Winkler, 2006, 12).
Terrorism, and by association in this case, Islam, functions as a negative ideograph of American values. It thereby tells us what our values and our identity are by
telling us who the enemy is and who we are not. According to Jackson, [] some have argued that Western
only is it key for political elites to support this system, it is also crucial that there be
an ever renewing threat that is uniquely different from past threats. These new threats allow for the
investment of significantly more resources, the continuation of the economy, the renewal of a strong sense of cultural identity and the
indoctrination and obedience of new generations of society. This essay will now look at how individual and collective psychology supports the popularity of the new
terrorism discourse. Psychology of the Masses The second category of reasons why new terrorism discourse is popular can be called the psychology of the masses.
There are a number of factors that fall under this category such as: the hyper-reality of the modern era; the culture of fear; the carryover of historical archetypes and
the infiltration of neoliberal values into cultural norms. The topic of social and individual psychology and how it relates to the propagation and acceptance of
hegemonic discourse is broad. It is also an important aspect of critical terrorism studies and merits further exploration. However, in this section will outline the basis
for the popularity of new terrorism discourse and discuss several ways in which this popularity is manifested and reinforced in contemporary society.
network of knowledge-based experts who have recognised expertise and competence in a particular
domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain. This community, or network of productive authors, has operated by
establishing research agendas, recruiting new members, securing funding opportunities, sponsoring conferences, maintaining informal contacts,
and linking separate research groups (Reid, 1993, 1997). Regardless of the largely academic debate over whether the study of terrorism should constitute an
independent field, the existence of a clearly-identifiable research community (with particular individuals at its core) is a social fact.2 Further, this
community has traditionally had significant influence when it comes to the formulation of government
policy, particularly in the United States. It is not the case that the academic field of terrorism studies operates solely in the ivory towers of higher
education; as noted in previous studies (Schmid and Jongman, 1988: 180; Burnett and Whyte, 2005), it is a community which has intricate and
multifaceted links with the structures and agents of state power , most obviously in Washington. Thus, many recognised
terrorism experts have either had prior employment with, or major research contracts from, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and
other key US Government agencies (Herman and OSullivan, 1989: 142190; RAND, 2004). Likewise, a high proportion of core experts in the field (see below)
have been called over the past thirty years to testify in front of Congress on the subject of terrorism (Raphael, forthcoming). Either way, these
scholars
have fed their knowledge straight into the policymaking process in the US.3 The close relationship
between the academic field of terrorism studies and the US state means that it is critically important to
analyse the research output from key experts within the community. This is particularly the case because of the aura of
objectivity surrounding the terrorism knowledge generated by academic experts . Running throughout
the core literature is a positivist assumption, explicitly stated or otherwise, that the research conducted is apolitical and
objective (see for example, Hoffman, 1992: 27; Wilkinson, 2003). There is little to no reflexivity on behalf of the scholars, who
see themselves as wholly dissociated from the politics surrounding the subject of terrorism. This reification of academic knowledge
about terrorism is reinforced by those in positions of power in the US who tend to distinguish the experts from other
kinds of overtly political actors. For example, academics are introduced to Congressional hearings in a manner which privileges their nonpartisan input: Good
morning. The Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism meets in open session to receive testimony and discuss the present and future course of terrorism in the Middle
East. . . . It has been the Terrorism Panels practice, in the interests of objectivity and gathering all the facts, to pair classified briefings and open briefings. . . . This
way we garner the best that the classified world of intelligence has to offer and the best from independent scholars working in universities, think tanks, and other
institutions . . . (Saxton, 2000, emphasis added) The
experts tend to insulate the broad direction of US policy from critique. Indeed,
as Alexander George noted, it is precisely because they are trained to clothe their work in the trappings of objectivity, independence and scholarship that expert
research is particularly effective in securing influence and respect for the claims made by US
policymakers (George, 1991b: 77). Given this, it becomes vital to subject the content of terrorism studies to close
scrutiny. Based upon a wider, systematic study of the research output of key figures within the field (Raphael, forthcoming), and building upon previous
critiques of terrorism expertise (see Chomsky and Herman, 1979; Herman, 1982; Herman and OSullivan, 1989; Chomsky, 1991; George, 1991b; Jackson, 2007g),
this chapter aims to provide a critical analysis of some of the major claims made by these experts and to reveal the ideological functions served by much of the
research. Rather than doing so across the board, this chapter focuses on research on the subject of terrorism from the global South which is seen to challenge US
interests. Examining
this aspect of research is important, given that the threat from this form of terrorism has led the
US and its allies to intervene throughout the South on behalf of their national security, with profound
consequences for the human security of people in the region. Specifically, this chapter examines two major problematic features
which characterise much of the fields research. First, in the context of anti-US terrorism in the South, many important claims made by key terrorism
experts simply replicate official US government analyses. This replication is facilitated primarily through a sustained and
uncritical reliance on selective US government sources , combined with the frequent use of
unsubstantiated assertion. This is significant, not least because official analyses have often been revealed as presenting a politically-motivated
account of the subject. Second, and partially as a result of this mirroring of government claims, the field tends to insulate from critique
those counterterrorism policies justified as a response to the terrorist threat . In particular, the experts
overwhelmingly silence the way terrorism is itself often used as a central strategy within US-led
counterterrorist interventions in the South. That is, counterterrorism campaigns executed or supported by Washington
often deploy terrorism as a mode of controlling violence (Crelinsten, 2002: 83; Stohl, 2006: 1819). These two features of the
literature are hugely significant. Overall, the core figures in terrorism studies have, wittingly or otherwise, produced a body of work
plagued by substantive problems which together shatter the illusion of objectivity. Moreover, the research output can be seen
to serve a very particular ideological function for US foreign policy . Across the past thirty years, it has largely served
the interests of US state power, primarily through legitimising an extensive set of coercive interventions
in the global South undertaken under the rubric of various war(s) on terror. After setting out the method by which key experts within the field have been
identified, this chapter will outline the two main problematic features which characterise much of the research output by these scholars. It will then discuss the
function that this research serves for the US state.
35
Democracy
The structure of Democracy legitimized surveillance- worsening biopower
Savell 01 (Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. "Human Rights in the Age of Technology:
Can Law Rein in the Medical Juggernaut" [2001] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SydLRev/2001/19.html)
Hunt and Wickham interpret Foucault as distinguishing law and discipline as 'dual but opposing They argue that whilst Foucault frequently
'counterposes law and discipline in order to highlight the distinctiveness of the modem disciplines"87 he is best understood as 'drawing
attention to the interaction and interdependence of disciplinary practices and their legal framework."~~ They offer two interpretations
of the relationship between law and discipline in Foucault's thought. The first is the 'broadly historical thesis'ls9 that the 'advent of
representational democracy existed side by side with the rise of an expanding disciplinary with the result that law legitimated
disciplinary power and merely masked the domination of normalising discourses. The second 'and more interesting'191 interpretation is
that law exists in competition with disciplinary power, without resolution. Expanding on this argument they write: I do not think it is possible
or desirable for a court to so exercise its jurisdiction. In all proceedings \\here expert opinions are expressed. those opinions are listened to with
great respect: but in the end. the validity of the opinion has to be weighed and judged by the court . . . For a court to automatically accept an
expert opinion. simpl) because it was concurred in by another appropriate expert. ~vould be a denial of the function of the court.198
36
Governmentality
Focusing on governmentality in the plan helps exert a form of social control,
and therefore biopower
Wong 13 [Jessica Chantelle, is a Junior Consultant with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) in Bangkok,
Thailand. She works with the Inclusive Finance team on a range of ongoing global financial inclusion programmes in the Asia and Pacific
region. Jessica holds a Master Degree with a Political Science major from Lund University in Sweden. , Risk-Management Approaches
in the Post 9/11 Era]
In examining Foucaults (2007) notion of biopower, it is also important to address the concept of governmentality, or the rationalities of
the government, which is an analytical approach for regulating people. Foucault states the concept of governmentality embraces the
following three ideas: (1) it is formed through institutions and procedures allowing the exercise of power over the population, (2) it holds greater
position over other types of power including sovereignty and discipline and (3) it includes the process of the governmentalization of an
administrative state (Foucault 2007, p. 144). Foucault's idea of governmentality can be observed as a method of, thinking about the nature
of the practice of government (who can govern; what governing is; what or who is governed) (Gordon 1991, cited in Henman, 2011, p.
289). Therefore, the idea of governmentality helps understand the notion of power in which it can be conceived as a form of social control that is
embedded within norms and institutions. Governmentality is described as the control of a population exercised over subjects that are free;
however, free in the sense that government entails a subject who is not simply the object of power, but who can both resist it, and reshape its
modalities (Milchman & Rosenberg 2005, p. 339). Foucault (2003, p. 40) argues, resistance towards this form of domination allows for a,
new right that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty. Foucaults idea of regimes of biopower and
their disciplinary networks suggests that, biopower replaces sovereignty. This appears when technology allows, man not only to manage life
but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are
universally destructive (Foucault 2003, p. 254).
37
Domestic Citizenship
Domestic deems a person as a citizen of the United States
Tillinghast 84 [David R, International and corporate tax lawyer. J.D. from Yale, A Matter of
Definition: Foreign and Domestic Taxpayers, Fall 1984]
From the beginning of the federal income tax system, an
in which the formal dimension of citizenship was used to include people and as a consequence of the crisis of the welfare state and immigration
as a social problem, formal
citizenship is used to exclude people. Consequently a differentiation of persons has taken place.
Based on citizenship it has become possible to differentiate between: citizens (full formal
citizenship); denizens (bounded citizenship); aliens (full citizenship in other nation-states) (Hammar,
1990) and; illegals (Entzinger & Engbersen, 2004). In a glocalizing world the nation-state tries to operate and make itself useful by
transforming the functioning of citizenship and regulating the population on its soil. Bio-power of society in relation to
citizenship was illustrated by the use of moral citizenship. In a period society has trouble defining
itself it uses citizenship to create a moral space and to differentiate between real citizens and unreal
citizens. Moral citizenship of society means active participation in society, to contribute to the health of society (social cohesion). Next to
(moral) citizenship as political participation in the nation-state stands bio-political participation in society
38
Protection of Rights
Declarations of rights and the protection of rights establish the sovereignty of
a citizen over others, reinforcing juridical, sovereign and biopolitical power
Agamben 95 [Giorgio, an Italian continental philosopher best known for his work investigating
the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics
informs many of his writings, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg 76-78]
Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which the passage from divinely authorized
royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished. This passage assures the exception of life in the new state order that
will succeed the collapse of the ancient rgime. The fact that in this process the subject is, as has been noted,
transformed into a citizen means that birth which is to say, bare natural life as such here for
the first time becomes (thanks to a transformation whose biopolitical consequences we are only
beginning to discern today) the immediate bearer of sovereignty . The principle of nativity and the principle of
sovereignty, which were separated in the ancient rgime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably united
in the body of the sovereign subject so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted. It
is not possible to
understand the national and biopolitical development and vocation of the modern state in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and
conscious political subject but, above all, mans bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in the
passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle of sovereignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth
immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two terms. Rights are attributed to
man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who
must never come to light as such) of the citizen. Only if we understand this essential historical
function of the doctrine of rights can we grasp the development and Metamorphosis of declarations
of rights in our century. When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the
devastation of Europes geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism,
that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of the
sovereign decision. We are used to condensing the essence of National Socialist ideology into the syntagm blood and soil (Blut und
Boden). When Alfred Rosenberg wanted to express his partys vision of the world , it is precisely to this hendiadys
that he turned. The National Socialist vision of the world, he writes, springs from the conviction that
soil and blood constitute what is essential about Germanness, and that it is therefore in reference to
these two givens that a cultural and state politics must be directed (Blut und Ehre, p. 242). Yet it has too often
been forgotten that this formula, which is so highly determined politically, has, in truth, an innocuous juridical origin.
The formula is nothing other than the concise expression of the two criteria that, already in Roman law, served to
identify citizenship (that is, the primary inscription of life in the state order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth
from citizen parents). In the ancien rgime, these two traditional juridical criteria had no essential meaning, since they expressed only a relation
of subjugation. Yet with the French Revolution they acquire a new and decisive importance. Citizenship
39
Biopolitics and the rights of man redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become
fully intelligible only when situated no matter how paradoxical it may seem in the biopolitical
context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights. Only this tie between the
rights of man and the new biopolitical determination of sovereignty makes it possible to understand
the striking fact, which has often been noted by historians of the French Revolution, that at the very moment in which
native rights were declared to be inalienable and indefeasible, the rights of man in general were
divided into active rights and passive rights. In his Prliminaires de la constitution, Sieys already clearly stated:
Natural and civil rights are those rights for whose preservation society is formed, and political rights are those rights by which society is formed.
For the sake of clarity, it would be best to call the first ones passive rights, and the second ones active rights.... All inhabitants of a country must
enjoy the rights of passive citizens ... all are not active citizens. Women,
40
Impact
41
General Bad
Biopower bad
Berger 4/15, Author at the Foreign Policy Journal, Empire, Biopower, Spectacle: Notes on Tiqqun,
https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/empire-biopower-spectacle-notes-on-tiqqun/
Todays territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. People
42
Liberalism bad
The impact is a biopolitical protection of life itself, the violent imposition of
liberalism that perpetuates structural violence, racism, and global civil war
Evans 10 [Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds and Programme Director for
International Relations, Foucaults Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century, Security Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August 2010, pg.
422-424, sage]
Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous recourse to
war. While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault
was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has been declared.4 Denouncing the illusion that
we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to disrupt the neat
distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of peace/civic normality. War
accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map- ping out this warpeace continuum
than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009). Their liberal war thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of making live.
Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission. Hence, while
there may still be populations that exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be
included. With liberal peace therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination of all forms of political
difference in order that liberalism might meet its own moral and political objectives, the more peace is
commanded, the more war is declared in order to achieve it: In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are
nonetheless committed also to making war. This is the martial face of liberal power that, contrary to the
familiar narrative, is directly fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be
admired (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing war in its pursuit of
peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as
instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in the
pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly
shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and
freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon & Reids thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto- theological dimension,
they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with
only two possible outcomes: endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul- tures (Dillon & Reid,
2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems. Unlike
gains its mastery by posing fundamental questions of life and death that is,
the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be the point of
theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a globally ambitious biopolitical imperative
(see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify their use of military force (Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there
is to be one, must be for the unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently it
who is to live and who can be killed disrupting
underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (hearts and minds) in everything but
name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal
43
idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics deployed in the will to govern illiberal
populations. Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood
are not fit for 21st century counterinsurgency. That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics.
People like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of
warfare by other means. Milibands Foucauldian moment should not escape us. Inverting
in other
words a planetary outlook, it collapses the local into the global so that lifes radical interconnectivity
implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane
recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any way been removed from
the species. Instead, humanized in the name of local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global
species necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means. Our understanding of civil war is
invariably recast. Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric
narrative, colonized peoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power
increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialisms own brand of warfare by other
means. Foucault was well aware of this his- tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternative
histories of the
subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms not least civil war for
Foucault in particular there was something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation
whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may insist, politically
speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make
sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should
be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily
dangerous simply because location dictates. With
universal against the particular, willingly commits violence against any ontological commitment to
political difference, even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying
political adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters. Necessary Violence Having established
that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct biopolitical
aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design inevitably
writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman,
1991). Racism
thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002). This takes
life itself becomes the principal referent for
political struggles, power necessarily concerns itself with those biological threats to human existence
(Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making, the biopolitical assay of life
necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: a race that is portrayed
as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those
who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage (Foucault, 2003: 61).
Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a
permanent presence within the political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely
through the internalization of threat the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous
Others that exist within that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to
secure the subject, since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for
political modernity to function one always has to be capable of killing in order to go on living: Wars are
no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the
existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the
name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to
us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When
become capable of killing in order to go on living has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When
Foucault refers to killing, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: When
arguably
represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing the
violence that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one
of the most essential characteristics of modern biopolitics is to constantly redefine the threshold in
life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside, it is within those sites that
eliminate radically the people that are excluded that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in
its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is
a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media- tion (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking
Agambens intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of
juridical exception has certainly gained wide- spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has
45
been awash with works that have tried to theorize the exceptional times in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007).
While some of the tactics deployed in the Global War on Terror have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of understanding
violence they are limited. Violence
46
Necropolitics
The affs regulation of the surveillance state is the commission of lawfare --that animates the necropolitical slaughter of the global periphery
Comaroff and Comaroff 7 [John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology,
Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at at Harvard, and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of
Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, Law and disorder in the postcolony, Social
Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144]
Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier, the past, too, is being fought out in the courts.
Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for having killed local
leaders, unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on.33 By
growing
heterodoxy, legal instruments appear to offer a means of commensuration (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000): a
repertoire of standardised terms and practices that permit the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and
interests across otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage . Hence the flight into a constitutionalism that
explicitly embraces heterogeneity in highly individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even where
states are paying less and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make human rights into an ever more
global, ever more authoritative discourse. But there is something else at work too. A well-recognised corollary of the neoliberal
turn, recall, has been the outsourcing by states of many of the conventional operations of governance, including those, like health services,
policing and the conduct of war, integral to the management of life itself. Bureaucracies
law presents itself as a more or less effective weapon of the weak, the strong and everyone in between .
Which, in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare. The court has become a utopic site to which human
agency may turn for a medium in which to pursue its ends. This, once again, is particularly so in postcolonies, where
bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to begin with; and in which heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the start. Put all this
together and the
fetishism of the law seems over-determined. Not only is public life becoming more
legalistic, but so, in regulating their own affairs and in dealing with others, are communities within the
nation-state: cultural communities, religious communities, corporate communities, residential
communities, communities of interest, even outlaw communities . Everything, it seems, exists here in the
shadow of the law. Which also makes it unsurprising that a culture of legality should saturate not just civil order but also its criminal
undersides. Take another example from South Africa, where organised crime appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits the means and ends
of both the state and the market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen stand-in for
those excluded from the national economy (Standing 2003). For their tax-paying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions of
government, not least security provision. Illicit corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world often have shadow judicial personnel and
convene courts to try offenders against the persons, property and social order over which they exert sovereignty. They also provide the policing
that the state either has stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have constitutions. A few are even structured as
franchises and, significantly, are said to offer alternative citizenship to their members.35 Charles Tilly (1985) once suggested, famously, that
modern states operate much like organised crime. These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states. Self-evidently, the
counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the criminal underworld feeds the dialectic of law and disorder .
After all, once government outsources its policing services and franchises force, and once outlaw
organisations shadow the state by providing protection and dispensing justice, social order itself
becomes like a hall of mirrors. What is more, this dialectic has its own geography. A geography of
discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties. We said a moment ago that communities of all kinds have become ever
more legalistic in regulating their affairs; it is often in the process of so doing , in fact, that they become
communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of objectification. Herein lies their will to sovereignty, which
we take to connote the exercise of autonomous control over the lives, deaths and conditions of existence
of those who fall within its purview and the extension over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of
law. Lawmaking, to cite Benjamin (1978: 295) yet again, is power making. But power is the principal of all
lawmaking. In sum, to transform itself into sovereign authority, power demands an architecture of
legalities. Or their simulacra.
48
Threat inflation
The 1acs maintenance of the illusion of legitimacy results in destabilizing
arms races, public backlash, and crackdowns
Glennon 14 [Michael, Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Harvard National Security
Journal, Vol. 5, National Security and Double Government, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf]
If Bagehots theory is correct, the
United States now confronts a precarious situation. Maintaining the appearance that
control the course of national security policy requires that those institutions play a
large enough role in the decision-making process to maintain the illusion . But the Madisonians role is too
visibly shrinking, and the Trumanites too visibly expanding, to maintain the plausible impression of
Madisonian governance.504 For this reason and others, public confidence in the Madisonians has sunk to new lows.505 The
Trumanites have resisted transparency far more successfully than have the Madisonians, with unsurprising results. The
success of the whole dual institutional model depends upon the maintenance of public enchantment with the
dignified/ Madisonian institutions. This requires allowing no daylight to spoil their magic ,506 as Bagehot put it. An
element of mystery must be preserved to excite public imagination. But transparency driven hugely by modern
internet technology, multiple informational sources, and social media leaves little to the imagination. The cure for admiring the House of Lords,
Bagehot observed, was to go and look at it.507 The public has gone and looked at Congress, the Supreme Court, and the
President, and their standing in public opinion surveys is the result . Justices, senators, and presidents are
not masters of the universe after all, the public has discovered. They are just like us . Enquiring minds may not have
Madisonian institutions
read enough of Foreign Affairs508 to assess the Trumanites national security polices, but they have read enough of People Magazine509 to know that the
too many
people will soon be too savvy to be misled by the Madisonian veneer,510 and those people often are opinion
leaders whose influence on public opinion is disproportionate to their numbers . There is no point in telling
ghost stories, Holmes said, if people do not believe in ghosts.511 It might be supposed at this point that the phenomenon of
double government is nothing new. Anyone familiar with the management of the Vietnam War 512 or the unkillable ABM program 513 knows that double government has been around for a while. Other realms of
law, policy, and business also have come to be dominated by specialists, made necessary and empowered
by ever-increasing divisions of labor; is not national security duality merely a contemporary manifestation
of the challenge long posed to democracy by the administrative state-cum-technocracy?515 Why is
national security different? There is validity to this intuition and no dearth of examples of the frustration confronted by
Madisonians who are left to shrug their shoulders when presented with complex policy options, the
desirability of which cannot be assessed without high levels of technical expertise . International trade issues, for
Madisonians are not who they pretend to be. While the publics unfamiliarity with national security matters has no doubt hastened the Trumanites rise,
example, turn frequently upon esoteric econometric analysis beyond the grasp of all but a few Madisonians. Climate change and global warming present questions that
depend ultimately upon the validity of one intricate computer model versus another. The
49
the extent that the marketplace of ideas analogy ever was apt, that
marketplace, like other marketplaces, is given to distortion. Public outrage is notoriously fickle, manipulable, and
selective, particularly when driven by anger, fear, and indolence. Sizeable segments of the publicoften egged on by public officialslash out
unpredictably at imaginary transgressors, failing even in the ability to identify sympathetic allies.518 [P]ublic opinion, Sorensen wryly observed, is not always
identical with the public interest.519 The influence of the media, whether to rouse or dampen, is thus limited. The handful of investigative journalists active in the
United States today are the truest contemporary example of Churchills tribute to the Royal Air Force.520 In the end, though, access remains everything to the press.
network resistant to efforts to pinpoint decision-makers521 can take years. Few publishers can afford the necessary financial investment; newspapers are, after all,
businesses, and the bottom line of their financial statements ultimately governs investigatory expenditures. Often, a second corroborating source is required. Even after
scaling the Trumanite wall of secrecy, reporters and their editors often become victims of the deal-making tactics they must adopt to live comfortably with the
Trumanites. Finally, members of the mass media are subject to the same organizational pressures that shape the behavior of other groups. They eat together, travel
together, and think together. A case in point was the Iraq War. The Washington Post ran twentyseven editorials in favor of the war along with dozens of op-ed pieces,
with only a few from skeptics.522 The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal all marched along in lockstep. 523 As
Senator Eugene McCarthy aptly put it, reporters are like blackbirds; when one flies off the telephone wire, they all fly off.524 More importantly, the
premise
that a vigilant electorate fueled by a skeptical press together will successfully fill the void created by the hollowed-out
Madisonian institutionsis wrong.525 This premise supposes that those outside constraints operate independently, that their efficacy is not a function of the
efficacy of internal, Madisonian checks.526 But the internal and external checks are woven together and depend upon one another.
527 Non-disclosure agreements (judicially-enforced gag orders, in truth) are prevalent among those best positioned to criticize.528 Heightened efforts have been
undertaken to crush vigorous investigative journalism and to prosecute and humiliate whistleblowers and to equate them with spies under the espionage laws. National
security documents have been breathtakingly over-classified. The evasion of Madisonian constraints by these sorts of policies has the net effect of narrowing the
marketplace of ideas, curtaining public debate, and gutting both the media and public opinion as effective restraints.529 The vitality of external checks depends upon
the vitality of internal Madisonian checks, and the internal Madisonian checks only minimally constrain the Trumanites. Some
could entail consequences that are profoundly disruptive, both for the government and the people. This scenario would be more likely in the
aftermath of a catastrophic terrorist attack that takes place in an environment lacking the safety-valve checks that the Madisonian institutions once provided. In this
future, an initial rally
round the flag fervor and associated crack-down are followed, later, by an increasing spiral
of recriminatory reactions and counter-reactions. The government is seen increasingly by elements of the public as hiding what they ought to know,
criminalizing what they ought to be able to do, and spying upon what ought to be private. The people are seen increasingly by the government as unable to
comprehend the gravity of security threats, unappreciative of its security-protection efforts, and unworthy of its own trust. Recent public opinion surveys are
portentous. A September 2013 Gallup Poll revealed that Americans trust and confidence in the federal governments ability to handle international problems had
reached an all-time low;533 a June 2013 Time magazine poll disclosed that 70% of those age eighteen to thirty-four believed that Edward Snowden did a good thing
in leaking the news of the NSAs surveillance program.534 This yawning attitudinal gap between the people and the government could reflect itself in multiple ways.
Most obviously, the Trumanite network must draw upon the U.S. population to fill the five million positions needed to staff its projects that require security
clearances.535 That would be increasingly difficult, however, if the pool of available recruits comprises a growing and indeterminate number of Edward Snowdens
individuals with nothing in their records that indicates disqualifying unreliability but who, once hired, are willing nonetheless to act against perceived authoritarian
tendencies by leaving open the vault of secrecy. A smaller, less reliable pool of potential recruits would hardly be the worst of it, however. Lacking
50
perceived legitimacy, the government could expect a lesser level of cooperation, if not outright obstruction, from the general
public. Many national security programs presuppose public support for their efficient operation. This ranges from compliance with national
security letters and library records disclosure under the PATRIOT Act to the design, manufacture, and sale of drones, and cooperation with
counterintelligence activities and criminal investigations involving national security prosecutions. Moreover, distrust of government tends to
become generalized; people who doubt governmental officials assertions on national security threats are inclined to extend their skepticism. Governmental
assurances concerning everything from vaccine and food safety to the fairness of stock-market regulation and IRS investigations (not without
evidence536) become widely suspect. Inevitably, therefore, daily life would become more difficult. Government, after all, exists for a reason. It carries out many helpful and
indeed essential functions in a highly specialized society. When those functions cannot be fulfilled, work-arounds emerge, and social dislocation results. Most seriously, the
protection of legitimate national security interests would itself suffer if the public were unable to distinguish between measures vital to its
protection and those assumed to be undertaken merely through bureaucratic inertia or lack of imagination. The government itself, meanwhile, could not be counted upon to remain
passive in the face of growing public obduracy in response to its efforts to do what it thinks essential to safeguard national security. Here we do have historical
precedents, and none is comfortably revisited. The
Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s;537 the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920;538 the
round-up of Japanese-American citizens in the 1940s;539 governmental spying on and disruption of civil rights, draft protesters, and anti-war
activists in the 1960s and 1970s;540 and the incommunicado incarceration without charges, counsel, or trial of unlawful combatants only a few short years ago541
all
are examples of what can happen when government sees limited options in confronting nerve-center
security threats. No one can be certain, but the ultimate danger posed if the system were to fall to earth in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack could
be intensely divisive and potentially destabilizingnot unlike what was envisioned by conservative Republicans in Congress who opposed Trumans national security
programs when the managerial network was established.542 It is therefore appropriate to move beyond explanation and to turn to possibilities for reformto consider
steps that might be taken to prevent the entire structure from falling to earth.
Even if 1ac threats are real, unintended consequences and corrupt scholarship
are reasons to vote neg on presumption
Pieterse 7 [Jan Nederveen, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 3,
Aug., Political and Economic Brinkmanship, p. 473-4]
Brinkmanship and producing instability carry several meanings. The American military spends 48% of world military spending (2005) and rep resents a vast, virtually
redistribution of power within the US government played a key part leading up to the war and in the massive failure in Iraq. Diplomacy was under resourced,
intelligence was manipulated and the Pentagon and the Office of Strategic Planning ignored experts' advice and State Department warnings on the need for postwar
planning (Packer, 2005; Lang, 2004).
51
governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal forms o f power, of what Michel Foucault called the
great economy o f power whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once the problem of
the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged.3 Foucault called this kind of powerthe kind of
power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of po wer that threatens death
biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal
governance as a form of global biopolitics.4 We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in which
biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent face and, gives to the power to inflict legal punishment
a context in which it appears to be free of all excess and violence.5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the
ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the
socio -economic and cultural net works of bio political relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the
relation between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war b y other means. We are also concerned, however, to note how the
conceptualisation and practice of war itself changes via the very process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of
biopolitical order; and we concentrate on that point in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek to extend
Foucaults project.
52
Root Of Racism
Biopower is the root cause of racism
Mbembe Research Professor Institute of Social and Economic Research University of Witwatersrand 2008 Achille Foucault in an Age of
Terror ed Morton & Bygrave page 156-157
In Foucault's formulation, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on
the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field - which it takes control of and vests
itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups d the
establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism.
17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class
thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever-present shadow in Western political thought
and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever presence and the
phantom-like world of race in general, Hannah Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of
race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. 18 Indeed, in Foucault's terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise
of biopower, 'that old sovereign right of death'. 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and
make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, 'the condition for the acceptability of putting to death'.20
53
Extinction
Bio-powers obsession with survival guarantees extinction
Kouros 1997 (George, Yale Law Graduate, And Holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory. Become What You Are)
Although the consequences are grave, the administrative practices of biopower go largely unchallenged precisely because they promise the
opportunity of vastly improving the quality of life. But a system primarily concerned with technological exigencies of ensuring survival
paradoxically is no longer able to assign meaning to the value of life. Life is something to be secured at all costs, and by any means, as the
American military motto of "you have to kill to save" during the Vietnam War demonstrates. For Foucault, this technological imperative to secure
survival is what brings us closest to the possibility of our own extinction: [T]his formidable power of death ... now presents itself as the
counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise
controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars ... are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the
purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the
race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as
the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates
them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to
expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's existence . . . If genocide is indeed the dream of
modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life,
the species, the race. (HS 137) In the interest of optimizing life we find ourselves possessing the capabilities to wipe out all of humanity as we
know it. Heidegger, much like Foucault, understands "the atomic situation" as the product of a technological process that seeks to create "a
happier human life."8 But he also emphasizes that "precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved" that we
face the greatest danger (DT 52). Responding to a chemist's proclamation that "The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the
chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will," Heidegger writes: "We do not stop to consider that an attack
with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means
little" (DT 52). In other words, in the absence of a nuclear holocaust we assume that we have managed to keep technology in hand. Without the
sound of an explosion to alert us, we become complacent to the deadliness of our own technological achievements. For example, the chemist's
ability to manipulate DNA and genetically screen out undesirable traits, while promising the possibility of a "happier human being," maintains the
conditions for a eugenic nightmare.
54
Death of POC
The Murderous Patriot Subject is at the back drop of the social projects of
terror and which leads to the death of millions of people of color
Itwaru 09 ( Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on the project
named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica
Master Race, Murder and Gory Globalization in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism,
Imperialism, Colonialism, Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79)
The murderous patriot-subject force is celebrated for eliminating those who would prevent, or
who just happen to be in the way of capitalist accumulation. The truth of this tyranny is all
obfuscated in the claim that those killed somehow deserve" to die, and they are demeaned as
"insurgents" or "illegal combatants" or "collateral damage" or demonized as "terrorists." They
are dehumanized and their humanity is completely destroyed. They become unspecified
"casualties" of the superior forces of oppression. These are the continuing formulations of
racial hatred which tend to be named away in this war on terrorism but which are fundamentally
there nonetheless. Othered peoples are those whose dispossession and murder assure the
victorious order of the rule of the accumulative. White supremacist globalizational capitalist
project. The desired Western citizen, the national character, is the loyal subject the state-order
requires to perpetuate itself in power. This is the imperialist superiority complex normalized
and ecstatically , romanticized as national heroism. It is where the murderous patriot-subject is
catapulted as the heroic maker of this supremacist civilization, always on guard against the
inferior yet threatening other. This imperialist superiority complex, Balibar tells us, originated among the
colonial castes of various nationalities in the West: the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, and others, working collectively to forge the
idea of "White Supremacy," of European civilization as an interest which has to be defended against the "savages" they were out to violate
and conquer, with the "White Man's Burden" working in a decisive way to mould the modern notion of a supra-national' European or Western
identity.3o This supra-national Western, identity has expanded over the centuries into the supremacist" cult of Western civilization. It is now
the consolidation of the imperialist states of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Canada, Australia, and the United States of
America, its most militarized and aggressive partner, in the current internationalization of the new imperialism for global capitalist
exploitation. The northern European states of Poland, Denmark, and Finland are now part of this Western alliance, and attempts to annex
certain eastern European states in this order are currently being made. We have here the reorganization of the lucrative business of the former
individual Western , imperialist orders with their new alliance, united in capitalist accumulation which continues to devastate those Othered
troops of empire "pioneering" Europeans to establish control over peoples whose land they have usurped and occupied. They are racistsupremacist in their very origination, violent states and states of violence
55
No value to life
No value to lifebare life is incalculably worse than death
Agamben 99 (Giorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the
Archive, 1999, pg. 68-69)
There are good reasons for this impossibility of reconciling love and dignity. Both in the case of legal dignitas and in its moral transposition,
dignity is something autonomous with respect to the existence of its bearer, an interior model or an external image to which he must conform and
which must be preserved at all costs. But in
56
genocide is indeed
the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because
power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of
the population. For Foucault, this is the point where racism intervenes. It is not that all racisms are invented at this moment. Racisms have
existed in other forms at other times: Now, "what inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is the emergence of
biopower. ... racism inscribes it self as a fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern
states." What does racist discourse do? For one, it is a "means of introducing ... a fundamental division between
those who must live and those who must die" (TM: S3). It fragments the biological field, it establishes a break inside
the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of race s, a set of subdivisions in which certain
races are classified as "good," fit, and superior.
57
Eradication of Populations
Biopower causes eradication of entire populations
Dean 01 [Mitchell Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, Demonic Societies:
Liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty. Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed.
Hanson and Stepputat, p. 55-58]
Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final
chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled
"Right of Death and Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of
government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill
was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life.
Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down. The right of death can also be
understood as "the right to take life or let live"; the power over life as the power "to foster life or disallow
it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare
life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power by Its very exclusion from political
life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence
becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of
a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of
life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of
death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had
earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the
sovereign to put to death his enemies but to disqualify the lifethe mere existenceof those who are a
threat to the life of the population, to disallow those deemed "unworthy of life," those whose bare life is
not worth living. This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics
(Foucault 1979a: 13637). In Foucault's account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it
provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be
reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state
that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole
populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process of the power to put whole populations
to death. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical weapons that seek an
extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which they live
to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the
killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killingwhether by an "ethnic cleansing" that
visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the
name of the Utopia to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is
only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to
the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The
biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence
wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of
Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise
of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of
modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of
population" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more
notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over
life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical racism in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this homogeneity always
threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental
mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 8485). For Foucault, the
58
primary function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those
who must die, and to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and
techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among
population, the internal organization of states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an
imperial social and political program, would plot the ranking of individuals, populations, and nations
along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure eflicienqp6 However, the series "population,
evolution, and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of
justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates and the abnormals in one's
own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and most important function
for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a positive relation
between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the population, its vigor,
its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the elimination of internal and external
threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunctions of the eugenic project:
identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to
forced sterilization: encourage those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those
whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake of a
sovereign existence and of moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a
positive justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand
the type of racism engaged in by Nazism, however, we need to take into account another kind of
denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of sovereignty. This
version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of the
juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of
sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a: 148). For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in
bloodas a reality and as a symboljust as one might say that sexuality becomes the key field on which
biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and
deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold by the torturer
and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance,
"blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health,
vigor, fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault
1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 14950), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated
"the oneiric exaltation of blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immensely cynical
and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the
detailed administration of the life of the population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and
education.'Nazism generalized biopower without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right,
but it could not do away with sovereignty. Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the
conduct of the individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood
and the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into
the eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the
themes of the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland. In such an articulation of these elements of
sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the administration of life and the right to
kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary
relation. The administration of life comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore
war, will be exercised at the level of an entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life
of other races becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of
other races is only one face of the purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is
to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total
destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous
state and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final
Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for
whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hitler's last acts, the order
to destroy the bases of bare life for the German people itself "Final Solution for other races, the absolute
59
suicide of the German race" is inscribed, according to Foucault. in the functioning of the modern state
(232).
60
Nuclear ominicide
Magnitudebiopolitics is the root cause of nuclear omnicide
Foucault 78 (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p. 136-137)
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction"
has tended
to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite,
reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces,
making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to
define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social
body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars
61
Alts
Alt reject the aff
Godiwala 6 Godiwala, Dimple. [Dimple Godiwala was educated at the Universities of Bombay and Oxford. She is the author of
'Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream] "The Western patriarchal impulse" Interactions 15.1 (2006): Web.
Dimple is quoting Foucault in this.
Maybe the
target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to
imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of [a] political 'double bind',which is the simultaneous
individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the
political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is notto try and liberate the individual
from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of
individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through
refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed upon us for several centuries.
62
Neg Answers To
63
AT Perm
64
specifically rejects the idea of an essential antagonism, but he does indicate that there is an essential obstinacy affiliated with the exercise of
freedom. Thus our relations with one another are not characterised by a primordial essence that would
determine our relations to be fundamentally antagonistic, but principles of freedom on the other
hand, do indicate points of insubordination and struggle.
65
An agonistic stance emerges in response to a political determination that an intolerability has been
identified, which according to Foucault, threatens to break our connections (whether personal or communal) with one
another, isolate us, and/or attempt to bind us to an identity which limits and constrains us. Agonism
is a particular type of resistant response that seeks to change the political dynamic that would usher
in and or sustain such isolating and constraining effects. Agonistic engagements are characterised by the search for
difficult truths where morality itself is at stake, because within the terms of an agonistic encounter the rights of each person are in some sense
immanent in the discussion [emphasis added].64
66
been a way of being free. Instead, what it may suggest is that the freedom that has been so long associated with a particular organization under the
banner of sovereign right may need to be rethought so that we may better understand and give shape to a politics of freedom more commensurate
with the conditions of late modernity. I believe that this is what Foucault may be thinking when he urges us to rethink the form that the idea of
right might take as sovereignty and normalization vitiate the very possibility of repression in a disciplinary age.
67
perils involved in
making any intervention in liberal-legalist terms for critical scholars. the first is that as per their own analysis liberal legalism is not a
neutral ground, but one which is likely to favour certain claims and positions. Consequently, it will be incredibly difficult to win the
argument. Moreover, even if the argument is won, the victory is likely to be a very particular one inasmuch as it will foreclose any wider
consideration of the structural or systemic causes of any particular violation of the law. All of these issues are to some degree considered by the
authors.44 However, given the way in which strategy is understood, the effects of these issues are generally confined to the immediate,
conjunctural context. As such, the emphasis was placed upon the way that the language of liberal legalism blocked effective action and criticism
of the war.45 Much less consideration is placed on the way in which advancing such argument impacts upon the long term effectiveness of
achieving the strategic goals outlined above. Here, the problems become even more widespread.
considerations of
this. It seems likely therefore, that again context is understood in purely tactical terms. Martti Koskenniemi can be seen as representative in this
respect, when he argued: What works as a professional argument depends on the circumstances. I like to think of the choice lawyers are faced
with as being not one of method (in the sense of external, determinate guidelines about legal certainty) but of language or, perhaps better, of style.
the various styles including the styles of academic theory and professional practice are neither derived from nor stand in determinate
hierarchical relationships to each other. the final arbiter of what works is nothing other than the context (academic or professional) in which one
argues.50 On this reading, the context in which prudence operates seems to the immediate circumstances in which an intervention takes place.
this would be consistent with the idea, expressed by the authors, that the strategic context for adopting liberal legalism was that
the debate
was conducted in these terms. But the problem with this understanding is surely evident. As critical scholars have shown time and
time again, the contemporary world is one that is deeply saturated with, and partly constituted by, juridical relations.51 Accordingly, there are
really very few contexts (indeed perhaps none) in which political debate is not conducted in juridical terms. A brief perusal of world events would
bear this out.52 the logical conclusion of this would seem to be that in terms of abstract, immediate effectiveness, the context of public debate
will almost always call for an intervention that is couched in liberal legalist terms. This raises a final vital question about what exactly
distinguishes critical scholars from liberal scholars. If the above analysis holds true, then the strategic interventions of critical scholars in legal
and political debates will almost always take the form of arguing these debates in their own terms, and simply picking the left side. thus, whilst
their academic and theoretical writings and interventions may (or may not) retain the basic critical tools, the public political interventions will
basically be liberal. The question then becomes, in what sense can we really characterise such interventions (and indeed such
scholars) as critical? The practical consequence of understanding strategy in essentially tactical terms seems to mean always
68
struggling within the coordinates of the existing order. Given the exclusion of strategic concerns as they have been
traditionally understood, there is no practical account for how these coordinates will ever be transcended (or how the debate will be
reconfigured). As
such, we have a group of people struggling within liberalism, on liberal terms , who may or may
not also have some critical understandings which are never actualised in public interventions. We might ask then, apart from good
intentions (although liberals presumably have these as well) what differentiates these scholars from liberals? Because of course liberals too
can sincerely believe in political causes that are of the left. It seems therefore, that just as in practical terms strategic
essentialism collapses into essentialism, so too does strategic liberal legalism collapse into plain old
liberal legalism.53
approaches that try to balance security and liberty are rarely able , or
willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative presuppositions : [T]he metaphor of balance is used as
often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them (Zedner, 2005: 510). Finally, political responses to threats never
overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events. To ignore this uncertainty, in other
words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements
that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely
that security gradually seizes political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They establish political spaces of dispute
and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a culture of justification, as David
Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be justified by law, in a fundamental sense of a commitment
to the principles of legality and respect for human rights (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most
dissent. The recent torture debate is an extreme example of this, whereby torture can be regarded as a touchstone of laws resistance to its own
abrogation. Law and reasoning The idea that a political and juridical culture of justification would be able to bring about the desired results
should be treated with cautionfor one thing, with regard to the particular logic of legal reasoning and justification and, for another thing,
because of at least two empirical observations that shed light on laws limitations vis-a-vis the governance of security. First of all, the
establishment of a culture of justification itself presupposes what has yet to arise, namely a common concern about governmental encroachment
in the name of security and a willingness of all parties to join in that discourse, if not share in its related arguments. This presupposition, to be
sure, is indispensable for inspiring communication and facilitating the exchange of arguments. Moreover, in order to take effect the tried and true
liberal legal principles, like that of proportionality and necessity, clearly need to be concretized by reasoning about actual cases. Yet, the
assumption of a common concern goes hand in hand with a general trust in a form of
communicative reason that will allow for transparency eventually on the matters at stake. Reason
and to reason within a transparent, structured process of analysis to determine what degree of
erosion is justifiable, by what measure, in what circumstances, and for how long (Zedner, 2005: 522), is
considered basic to the solution. However, just as legal norms and principles are open to
interpretation, they do not determine any normative orientations underlying the interpretative
process. As Benjamin Goold and Liorna Lazarus (2007b: 11; see also Poole, 2008: 16) observe: [P]re-emptive measures
designed to increase security can never be truly objective or divorced from our political concerns
and values. Typical for the acknowledgement of competing claims still to be weighed (Zedner, 2005: 508),
therefore, is that they end up being couched in a rather appealing rhetoric (we should, judges
should). In a liberal vein, this requires a resorting to the least intrusive measures. Competing claims are thus relegated to the
normative framework of balance (see Waldron, 2003; Zedner, 2005: 528). As regards the empirical observations, there is, first, a move in security
legislation that is noticeable in western countries in which the threshold of governmental intervention has been gradually disposed in order to
forestall actual offences, concrete suspicion and danger. 9/11 may be regarded as a catalyst here, as well as the fight against terrorism in general.
But rather than being recent phenomena, these transformations in fact represent a continuity over decades in the identification of ever new
dimensions of threats, from sexual offenders and organized crime right up to transnational terrorism.4 Although a tendency can be discerned, this
is not to suggest that there have not been any disruptions to it. Civil
70
AT Alt
71
AT Alt fails
The world is in a constant state of change proper theorization is necessary to
mobilize effective counter-discourses that can combat liberalism
Guillaume and Der Derian 10 [Laura, PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University, and James, Michael Hintze Chair of
International Security Studies and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies and Research Professor of International Studies at
Brown University, Revolutionizing Virtual War: An Interview with James Der Derian, Theory & Event 13:2, 2010]
This means that the
world order, to the extent we can even call it such, is permanently becoming different, and, pace
Foucault, that this century, the twenty-first, might well become known as Deleuzian. A premium will be placed on how quickly
we will adapt to de-territorialized global events, networked accidents , and the other in your face with every 24/7
global news cycle. On how easily we will feel at home rather than seek refuge from the singularities of
world politics that appear as paradoxes, synchronicities, feedback, white noise, phase shifts, spatio-temporal rifts, and, not
least, dreams. On how easily technologies, especially those in the service of war, can actualize the worst
as well as the best possibility. Or how important, when observation (let alone participation) can actualize
an event, reflexivity and responsibility becomes. This all comes with a hard-earned caveat. We need to recognize that such
open-ended attitudes often produce defensive actions in others and even inactivity in oneself; or as William
Connolly once told me, a little vertigo is a good thing but a lot can turn you into a zombie. Back to the undead! The social sciences
more so than the latest theories in the physical sciencesare least comfortable with these free-floating ideas of spatiotemporal rifts where simulacra reverses causality , being is simultaneously here and there, and identity is
deterritorialised by interconnectivity. Its easy to theorize but how to live in this interzone, where critical ethical interventions
routinely precede the retrieval of facts (empirical or social) and technical media constitute new virtual states of meaning and being? Obviously,
both war and peace still need approaches that study what actually happened (realism) and what needs to be changed (idealism). But what
Deleuze teaches us is how world politics is also in need of virtual approaches that explore how
reality is seen, framed, read, and generated in the conceptualisation and actualisation of the global
event. I understand why this kind of talk makes many traditional scholars of international politics
nervous. I have witnessed firsthand the displacement of global contingency as an unease or even
anger toward the messenger rather than the mess itself . Identifying conditions of relativism and
nihilism is not the same as advocating them; but that does not stop critics of Deleuze et al from
disparaging them as cultural relativists or nihilists. Ive taken a few licks like this, and not matter how often
you repudiate the shoddy thinking behind it, you know there will always be more to come . I have also
witnessed how the narcissism of petty differences among social critics can lead to radically impossible prescriptions. This makes me reluctant to
offer any of my own as universally applicable across differing historical epochs and political circumstances. Guillaume I suppose what I am
asking is: what is the status of the idea of newness as applied to twenty first century war and politics? And, what are the tensions contained within
the idea of being Critical itself, taking into account everything Deleuze has to say about flight and breakthrough. In
deploying Deleuze
to diagnose and critique contemporary machinations of power, are we actually missing what is most potentially
productive in his thinking? Der Derian I think the answer lies less in Deleuzes philosophy per se and more in
what healong with Benjamin, Heidegger, Barthes, Virilio, Baudrillard and otherschose to philosophize about: the
newest technologies of reproduction that were changing how we frame the world . That means we need to not
just study and critique but to create media as ubiquitous, diffuse, and appealing as what the infosphere currently has on offer. Contrary to what
uber-pundit Thomas Friedman said recentlyand perhaps prematurelyabout the role of Facebook, blogs, and Twitter in the fraudulent
elections in Iran, sometimes
tweet-tweet can beat bang-bang. We have seen how global media has become
essential for the global circulation of power, the waging of war, and the imagining of peace. It is now an
unparalleled force in the organisation, execution, justification, and representation of global violence ,
as witnessed in the first Gulf War, the Kosovo campaign, 9/11, the Iraq War, and what has followed. Global media continues, in spite
of concentrated efforts by a variety of countries and technical fixes, to evade national management and control.
Networked terror, network-centric warfare, and network attacks will continue to have an intense if
intermittent transnational impact. We need to respond with new strategies, concepts, and policies. But how? Fighting fire with fire, media with
media, and infowar with infopeace. That means
dispensing with the conceit, stretching from Descartes through Marx to Chomsky,
that there exists a universal truth waiting to be discovered once the veil of superstition , religion,
72
media, or false consciousness of one sort or another is lifted by the right technology of knowledge. It might once have been true
but in our current multicultural, multimedia, heteropolar world; it is one more truth competing among a host of others.
To counter the ubiquitous surveillance, information overload, and fundamentalist thinking that has
transformed global media into weapons of mass distraction, deception, and destruction, we need to not just consume
but produce counter-media now. It will not happen by primetime broadcast or even on public television: whatever independence they once
enjoyed has been hijacked by corporate interests, partisan politics, and the need to meet the lowest common denominator of public culture. I think
it falls upon universities and non-governmental organizations, as the last quasi-independent institutions, to
develop the content as well as techniques for counter-media.
73
AT No Alternative
Outlining a specific discourse of resistance is a totalitarian means of exercising
power: we must outline a broad alternative means of resistance to power
Pickett 05 Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College 2005 [On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics pp.
47]
Any reasonable interpretation of Foucaultian resistance will necessarily have a large amount of indeterminacy. While it is non-hierarchical
and concerned with memory and the body and the negation of power while still potentially affirmative of something else, these various
elements of resistance are compatible with a range of practical political engagements, such as broadly liberal or even anarchist positions. This is
because Foucault cannot lay down how or why one should struggle. Such a globalistic theory would become one more agent of power; a
totalizing theory is itself "totalitarian."66 Still, it is possible to draw a broad political orientation out of Foucault's celebration of
struggle.67 If resistance is worthwhile, as Foucault clearly believes it is, then the conditions which make struggle possible should be
fostered. This is why Foucault believes there is a daily "ethico-political" choice to be made.68 We need to decide what constitutes the
greatest danger and struggle against it. From this vantage point it is possible to see why the charge of pessimism or hopelessness that is
frequently brought against Foucault is misguided. He is accused of presenting power as something so ubiquitous and overwhelming that all
resistance becomes pointless. On the contrary, the fact that everything is dangerous means that there are multiple opportunities for resistance. And
far from being pointless, Foucault maintains that engagement presents several possibilities. Resistance gives us the possibility of changing the
practices he labels 'intolerables.' Once the asylum inmate, factory worker, or "sexual deviant" is enabled to speak, and his memory of struggles
and subjugated knowledge is allowed its insurrection, those who are subjected to power can force change.
74
AT Impacts
75
AT Biopower Good
We have never said all biopower is bad --- just the biopolitical surveillance of
life in liberal modernity our alternatives conception of power is key to
transformative change
Chambon 99 [Adrienne, director of Ph. D program at U Toronto, Ph. D in Social Work from U Chicago, Columbia University Press
New York , Reading Foucault for Social Work, Foucaults Approach, p. 67-8]
More fundamentally, Foucault
76
of the most important aspects of your work has been to argue why the original sentiment
which provoked Deleuze and Guattaris Nomadology narrative needed to be challenged . With the
onset of a global war machine which showed absolutely no respect for state boundaries, matched by the
rise of many local fires of resistance which had no interest in capturing state power, the sentiment that History is always written
from the victory of States could now be brought firmly into question. On a theoretical level alone, the need to bring the Nomadology Treatise up
to date was an important move. However, there was something clearly more at stake for you than simply attempting to canonise Deleuze and
Guattari. One
gets the impression from your works that you were deeply troubled by what was taking place
with this new found humanitarianism. Indeed, as you suggest, if we accept that this changing political
terrain demanded a rewriting of war itselfaway from geo-political territorial struggles which once monopolised the
strategic field, towards bio-political life struggles whose unrelenting wars were now to be consciously
fought for the politics of all life itself, then it could be argued that the political stakes could not be higher . For
not only does a bio-political ascendency force a re-conceptualisation of the war effortto include those forces which are less militaristic and
more developmental (one can see this best reflected today in the now familiar security mantra War by Other Means), but through this process a
new paradigm appears which makes it possible to envisage for the first time in human history a Global State of War or a Civil War on a planetary
scale. Whilst it
was rather easy to find support for this non-State paradigm during the 1990sespecially
when the indigenous themselves started writing of the onset of a Fourth World War which was enveloping
the planet and consuming everybody within, some have argued that the picture became more clouded with the invasion of Iraq which was simply
geo-politics as usual. The
Exceptionalism. My concern is not really to attend to this revival of an out-dated theoretical persuasion. I agree with your sentiments in
Multitude that this account can be convincingly challenged with relative ease . Foucault has done enough himself to
show that Liberal War does not demand a strategic trade-off between geo-political and biopolitical
aspirations. They can be mutually re-enforcing, even, or perhaps more to the point, especially
within a global Liberal Imaginary. And what is more, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was when major
combat operations were effectively declared over, that is when the borderlands truly ignited. My
concerns today are more attuned to the post-Bush era, which going back to the original War on Terrors life-centric remit is once again calling for
the need to step up the humanitarian war effort in order to secure the global peace. Indeed, perhaps more worrying still, given that the return of
the Kantian inspired humanitarian sensibility can now be presented in an altogether more globally enlightened fashion, offering a marked and
much needed departure from the destructive but ultimately powerless (in the positive sense of the word) self-serving neo-con, then it is possible
to detect a more intellectually vociferous shift taking place which is rendering all forms of political difference to be truly dangerous on a
planetary scale. With this in mind, I would like your thoughts on the Global State of War today. What for instance do you feel have been the most
important changes in the paradigm since you first proposed the idea? And would you argue that war is still the permanent social relation of global
rule? Hardt: The notion of a
global civil war starts from the question of sovereignty. Traditionally war is
conceived (in the field of international relations, for instance, or in international law) as armed conflict between two
sovereign powers whereas civil war designates conflict within a single territory in which one or both of the parties is not sovereign. War
designates, in other words, a conflict in some sense external to the structures of sovereignty and civil war a conflict internal to them. It is clear
that few if any of the instances of armed conflict around the world today fit the classic model of war between sovereign states. And perhaps even
the great conflicts of the cold war, from Korea and Vietnam to countries throughout Latin America, already undermined the distinction, draping
the conflict between sovereign states in the guise of local civil wars. Toni Negri and I thus claimed that in our era there is no more war but only
civil wars or, really, a global civil war. It is probably more precise to say instead that the distinction between war and civil war has been
undermined, in the same way that one might say, in more metaphorical terms, not that there is no more outside but rather that the division
between inside and outside has been eroded. This claim is also widely recognized, it seems to me, among military and security theorists. The
change from the framework of war to that of civil war, for instance, corresponds closely to thinking of armed conflicts as not military campaigns
but police actions, and thus a shift from the external to the internal use of force. The general rhetorical move from war to security marks in more
general terms a similar shift. The security mantra that you cite war by other means also indicates how the confusion between inside and
outside implies the mixture of a series of fields that are traditionally separate: war and politics, for example, but also killing and generating forms
of social life. This opens a complicated question about the ways in which contemporary military actions have become biopolitical and what that
77
conception helps us understand about them. Rather than pursuing that biopolitical question directly, though, I want first to understand better how
the shift in the relationship between war and sovereignty that Toni and I propose relates to your notion of liberal and humanitarian war. In
a
war conventionally conceived, it is sufficient for the two sovereign powers to justify their actions
primarily on the basis of national interest as long as they remain within the confines of international law. Whereas those inside , in
other words, are at least in principle privilege to the liberal framework of rights and representation, those outside are not. When the
relationship of sovereignty shifts, however, and the distinction between inside and outside erodes, then there are no such
limits of the liberal ideological and political structures . This might be a way of understanding why contemporary
military actions have to be justified in terms of discourses of human rights and liberal values . And this
might be related, in turn, to what many political theorists analyze as the decline of liberal values in the US political
sphere at the hands of neoliberal and neoconservative logics.1 In other words, perhaps when the division declines between the inside and
outside of sovereignty, on the one hand, the liberal logic must be deployed (however inadequately) to justify the use of violence over what was
the outside while, on the other, liberal logics are increasingly diluted or suppressed in what was the inside. Evans: What I am proposing with the
Liberal War Thesis borrows from some pioneering works which have already started to cover the main theoretical ground2 . Central to this
approach is an attempt to critically evaluate global Liberal governance (which includes both productive and non-productive elements) by
questioning its will to rule. Liberal
Peace is thus challenged, not on the basis of its abstract claims to universalityjuridical or
otherwise, but precisely because its global imaginary shows a remarkable capacity to wage war
by whatever meansin order to govern all species life. This is not, then, to be confused with some militaristic
appropriation of the democratic body politica situation in which Liberal value systems have been completely undermined by the onslaught of
the military mind. More revealing, it exposes the intricate workings of a Liberal rationality whose ultimate pursuit is global political dominance.
Traces of this account can no doubt be found in Michael Ignatieffs (completely sympathetic) book Empire Lite, which notes how the gradual
confluence between the humanitarian and the military has resulted in the onset of an ostensibly humanitarian empire that is less concerned with
territory (although the State no doubt still figures) than it is with governing life itself for its own protection and betterment. Liberalism
as
species endangerment. As a form of rule whose referent object is that of species existence, the liberal way of rule is simultaneously also
a problematisation of fear and danger involving threats to the peace and prosperity of the specie s. Hence its
allied need, in the pursuing the peace and prosperity of the species, to make war on whatever threatens it. That is the
reason why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to foster the
peace and prosperity of the species... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of
war...
could then support the types of hypothesis you mention, which rather than affirming the best of the
enlightened Liberal tradition actually correlate the hollowing out of Liberal values to the inability to carve
out any meaningful distinctions between inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy, good/evil, truth/falsehood and so forth. However, whilst this
approach would no doubt either re-enforce the militaristic paradigm or raise further critical doubts about the post-modern/post-structural turn in
political thought, it is nevertheless misleading. The
79
As we know, the principle of calculation is constitutive of biopower which gave itself the function of administering life [of the population].25 In
a post-biopolitical context (i.e. in a neo-liberal environment), this calculation paradigm remains effective. It finds its expression in various
techniques of domination that administer virtual possibilities (not facts) considered to be dangerous. However, calculation is not the only
component of the new liberal art of governing. Foucault states that in
domination prevail over disciplines there is also room for a specific mode of counter-conduct associated with the spiritualization of the
self. Foucaults interest in spiritual exercises (techniques of liberation) is part of a larger topic he explores in his ethics. Therein, Foucault
commemorates the old traditions of the care of the self (epimeleia heautou) and the art of living (techne tou biou), which he now presents in
terms of aesthetics of existence, ethopoietic or art of existence to better designate the transformative process of the self in a world deprived
of cosmic and divine orders. Are the spiritual transformations of the self merely irrational? It is perhaps this interesting question that opened the
dialogue between the later Foucault and the Frankfurt School. The representatives of the Frankfurt School (at least those of the first generation)
worked and thought on the opposition between power and freedom: the less capitalistic power is exercised over it, the higher level of freedom this
consciousness will ideally attain. According to Foucault, this view is typical of the general intellectual who, in search of universalities,
misses the subtleties of power. For Foucault, freedom cannot be dissociated from power, and escape from all forms of power relations is
impossible. Therefore, let us use forms of power intelligently, to liberate ourselves. In a neo-liberal environment, certain types of power over the
self, namely spiritual exercises, can be useful for giving a specific sense of resistance and liberation. This is precisely what spiritual improvement
is about. Foucaults critical ontology of ourselves presented in the various versions of his text on Kant and the Enlightenment 26 constitutes an
answer to the Frankfurt Schools critical theory of society. The critical ontology of ourselves states that we are not merely theoretical
observers, but rather are directly, unceasingly and locally involved in practical process of transformation. Above all, critique for Foucault pursues
ethical aims of self-transformation; for instance, those associated with the creation of innovative relations with the media, the creation of new
duties for independent journalists, the formation of non-ideological views by individuals who put themselves in danger, etc. Foucault believes
that the creative process of self-transformation eventually leads to the creation of a better or more tolerant society. This self-fashioning has
nothing to do with individualism. Indeed, Foucault
introducing a spiritual dimension into liberalism, the later Foucaults ethics combine the
best of the two worlds he saw in action during the Iranian uprising . In his dialogue with Iranian writer Baqir
Parham, Foucault asserts that there have been two painful experiences in the last two centuries of western culture. 30 The first was the theory
of the all-powerful state endorsed by the French and German intellectuals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries; Foucault is referring here to
the Napoleonic Empire resulting from the French Revolution and the Prussian Empire legitimized by German idealists. The second was the
80
Marxist socialist state. Foucaults (unachieved) political spirituality is an alternative to those experiences. Is it Utopian to think that the
spiritualization of liberalism will neutralize the principle of calculation? Is it Utopian to think that the technologies of the self will help improve
ourselves and resist the technologies of domination? Is it Utopian to think that the tradition of the care of the self can still play a concrete role in
the reorganization of society? Is it Utopian to think that spiritual exercises are not other means to discipline bodies? The answer to all of these
questions is Yes. But would not there be different types of Utopias? The search for a liberal Utopia was one of the later Foucaults
preoccupations. Beaulieu 8118
liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the optimization of life, it has
shown itself permanently incapable of arrestingfrom eugenics to contemporary genetics---the emergence of
rationalities that make the optimization of the life of some dependent on the disallowing of the life
of others. I can only suggest some general reasons for this. Liberalism is fundamentally concerned to govern
through what it conceives as processes that are external to the sphere of government limited by the
respect for rights and liberties of individual subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters forms of knowledge
of vital processes and seeks to govern through their application. Moreover, to the extent that liberalism
depends on the formation of responsible and autonomous subjects through biopolitics and
discipline, it fosters the type of governmental practices that are the ground of such rationalities.
Further, and perhaps more simply, we might consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics are so heterogeneous
to one another that the derivation of political norms from the democratization of the former cannot
act as a prophylactic for the possible outcomes of the latter . We might also consider the alternative to this thesis, that
biopolitics captures and expands the division between political life and mere existence, already
found within sovereignty. In either case, the framework of right and law can act as a resource for forces
engaged in contestation of the effects of biopower; it cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy of
such struggle and may even be the means of the consolidation of those effects.
Mills and other liberalism apologists are so vague and amorphous that its
political useless even if there is a theoretical philosophy of perfect liberalism
that can exist, our links and DAs to the aff prove its not them
Schmitt 12 [Richard, professor emeritus of philosophy at Brown University, Comment on Charles Mills, "Occupy Liberalism!", Radical
Philosophy Review, Volume 15 number 2 (2012): 331-336]
Mills's argument begins with a distinction between Liberalism (capital "L") as theory and liberalism as practices and institution. The
dominant liberalism that radicals are so critical of is not the core Liberal theory but a particular
incarnation of that theory. Liberalism as theory is an "umbrella" that can be constitutive of the views of Rawls, as well as of Nozick.
It can also be at the heart of both exclusionary liberalismwhat Mills likes to call "Her- renvolk liberalism"and the egalitarianism of genuine
radicals. What
oppressing people who are not white menradicals can do one of two things: they can follow Mills's recommendation
and stick to Liberalism as theory and thus stick to extremely abstract declarations about equality,
making very sure that they never explain what they mean by equality . (We might call this
"Commencement Address Liberalism.") That might make them more acceptable to actually existing liberals but only at the
price of giving up the fight for justice and equality as radicals understand it. Or they can confront their political enemie s, e.g.,
contractarian liberals ("Herrenvolk liberals") and then they will have to draw sharp lines between
themselves and the individualist, impoverished understanding of inequality that dominant liberalism
uses to disguise the glaring injustices of our society. Then the cat is out of the bag: the commonalities between liberals and
radicals are very tenuous. You cannot mouth the liberals' platitudes and fight against sexist, racist, and other group oppressions and hope that
liberals will still agree with you. Once you talk about race and class they will discover what you are hiding under your liberal sheep's clothing.
Mills supports his plea to radicals to employ the language of liberalism by claiming that, for instance, liberal denial of group oppression is not
something their theory forces them to do but that it is "contingent." But it is not clear to me what that means. Liberals
have denied,
overlooked, looked away from group subjugation for 400 years at least, since the accusation of class oppression was first
raised by the Diggers and Levellers in seventeenth-century England. That's simply what liberals do; they make the clearly
false empirical claim that prince and pauper, cleaner and billionaire owner are fundamentally the
same except that one is more successful than the other due to greater effort . Calling that
"contingent" makes it no less predictable. There is no reason to think that liberals will not do that
for a long time to come. Calling the denial of group oppression "contingent" suggests that liberals do not have to act as if we were all
separate individuals endowed with more or less the same opportunities. Well, no, of course they don't have to do it but they have been doing it for
centuries to the point where today they have managed to make "class struggle" a dirty word. Do
answer to that question goes more or less as follows: Radicals and liberals
share some extremely abstract principles, such as a commitment to freedom and equality. Many
Liberals tend to interpret those commitments in ways that are demonstrably inadequate.
In modern forms of government, concepts of the norm and normal have played a kind mediating role in the formulation and execution of
normative projects (Canguilhem 2005 [1966]; Ewald 1990). It
82
Within liberal forms of government, at least, there is a long history of people who, for one reason or
another, are deemed not to possess or to display the attributes (e.g. autonomy, responsibility) required of the
juridical and political subjects of rights and who are therefore subjected to all sorts of disciplinary,
bio-political and even sovereign interventions. (Dean 1999: 134) The list of those so subjected would include at various
times those furnished with the status of the indigent, the degenerate, the feeble-minded, the native, the savage, the homosexual, the delinquent,
the dangerous etc. Modern so-called liberal
designates a much more general practice which introduces a rift in the biological continuum that is
the human species between those who are worthy of citizenship and those who are not. Internal
threats to the health and wellbeing of a social body come from those who were deemed to lack an
ethics of how to live and thus the ability to govern themselves. It is worth remembering that the
Nazi concentration camps housed not only Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Bolsheviks and
other inassimilable elements. To sum up, Foucault understands racism as a sort of permanent feature of
biopower and not as the paroxysmal convulsion of a decaying moral order (Stoler, 1995: 64). Foucaults argument is that racism is not
only confined within those obviously racist forms of authoritarian government such as the German
Nationalist Socialist state, but that it is intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalising
governmental rationalities and their bio-political technologies. By showing how racism possesses a polyvalent
mobility, he shows that racism is not merely an ideological discourse of exceptionally cruel regimes, but a
fundamental feature of modern processes of government.
84
AT Impact Defense
Maintaining liberalisms legitimacy cements violent grand strategy and
disdain for democracy
Morrissey 11 [John, Lecturer in Political and Cultural Geography, National University of Ireland, Galway, has held visiting research fellowships
at University College Cork, City University of New York, Virginia Tech and the University of Cambridge, Geopolitics, 16.2, Liberal Lawfare
and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror, DOI DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2010.538872]
A bigger question, of course, is what the US military practices of lawfare and juridical securitization say about our
contemporary moment. Are they essentially exceptional in character, prompted by the so-called exceptional character of global
terrorism today? Are they therefore enacted in spaces of exceptions or are they, in fact, simply contemporary examples of Foucaults spaces of
security that are neither exceptional nor indeed a departure from, or perversion of, liberal democracy? As Mark
Neocleous so aptly puts it, has the liberal project of liberty not always been, in fact, a project of security?116 This project of security has long invoked a
powerful political dispositif of executive powers, typically registered as emergency powers, but, as Neocleous makes clear, of the permanent kind.117 For
Neocleous, the pursuit of security and more specifically capitalist security marked the very emergence of liberal democracies, and continues to frame our
contemporary world. In the West at least, that world may be endlessly registered as a liberal democracy defined by the rule of law, but, as Neocleous reminds us,
the assumption that the law, decoupled from politics, acts as the ultimate safeguard of democracy is simply
false a key point affirmed by considering the US militarys extensive waging of liberal lawfare. As David Kennedy observes, the military lawyer
who carries the briefcase of rules and restrictions has long been replaced by the lawyer who participate[s] in
discussions of strategy and tactics.118
The US militarys liberal lawfare reveals how the rule
Can a focus on lawfare and biopolitics help us to critique our contemporary moments proliferation of
practices of securitization practices that appear to be primarily concerned with coding, quantifying, governing and anticipating life itself? In the context of the
US militarys war on terror, I have argued above that it can. If, as David Kennedy points out, the emergence of a global economic and commercial order
has amplified the role of background legal regulations as the strategic terrain for transnational activities of all sorts,
this also includes, of course, warfare; and for some time, the US military has recognised the opportunities for creative strategy made possible by proactively
waging lawfare beyond the battlefield.125 As Walter Benjamin observed nearly a century ago, at
lawmaking character.126 And it is this lawmaking character that is integral to the biopolitical technologies of power that secure US geopolitics in
our contemporary moment. US lawfare focuses the attention of the world on this or that excess whilst
simultaneously arming the most heinous human suffering in legal privilege, redefining horrific
violence as collateral damage, self-defense, proportionality, or necessity.127 It involves a mobilisation of the
law that is precisely channelled towards evasion, securing classified Status of Forces Agreements and
offering at once the experience of safe ethical distance and careful pragmatic assessment, while
parcelling out responsibility, attributing it, denying it even sometimes embracing it as a tactic of statecraft and war.128
Since the inception of the war on terror, the US military has waged incessant lawfare to legally securitize, regulate and empower its operational
capacities in its multiples spaces of security across the globe whether that be at a US base in the Kyrgyz Republic or in combat in Iraq. I have
sought to highlight here these tactics by demonstrating how the execution of US
85
biopolitical securitization of US troops at the frontiers of the American leasehold empire. For the US military, legal-biopolitical
apparatuses of security enable its geopolitical and geoeconomic projects of security on the ground; they plan for and legally condition the
milieux of military commanders; and in so doing they render operational the pivotal spaces of overseas intervention of contemporary US
national security conceived in terms of global governmentality.129 In the US global war on terror, it is lawfare that facilitates what Foucault
calls the biopolitics of security when life itself becomes the object of security.130 For the US military, this involves the eliminating of
threats to life, the creating of operational capabilities to make live and the anticipating and management of lifes uncertain future.
Some of the most key contributions across the social sciences and humanities in recent years have divulged how discourses
of
security, precarity and risk function centrally in the governing dispositifs of our contemporary
world.131 In a society of (in)security, such discourses have a profound power to invoke danger as requiring
extraordinary action.132 In the ongoing war on terror, registers of emergency play pivotal roles in the justification of military
securitization strategies, where risk, it seems, has become permanently binded to securitization. As Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster
point out, the perspective of risk
It s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop.
Although since
1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in
the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources
badly needed for development, --many invisible wars are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty,
unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical
terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or
religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the war against Nature, i.e. the disturbance
of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and
fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and invisible wars we find striking international and
intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as
international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and visible wars . It is a commonplace now that peace is not
merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve not only though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of
the roots of violence, of the causes of invisible wars, of the structural and institutional bases of
large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression . Peace requires a
process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all
people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate
system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and
thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global
peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. Sustainability of
development (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological
balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no
ecological
balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are
substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any zero-sum-games, in which one can gain at the expense of others,
but, instead, the negative-sum-games tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual
86
question is not about sustainability of development but rather about the sustainability of human life, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind because
of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state
and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as
well as the former socialist countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation,
requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even
instead of) development studies we must speak about and make survival studies. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost
permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural and
political aspects. The
narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the
political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that
great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of
socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise
of international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by
multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and
system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless,
extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common
solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly
ideological or terminological
camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the
coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural
environment.
87
88
Alt
89
Alt Bad
There is no alternative to the law/legal system---neg alternative brings more
inequality and abuse
Auerbach 83 [Jerold S., Professor of History at Wellesley, Justice Without Law?, 1983, p. 144-146]
As cynicism about the legal system increases, so does enthusiasm for alternative dispute-settlement
institutions. The search for alternatives accelerates, as Richard Abel has suggested, "when some fairly powerful interest is threatened by an increase in the number or magnitude of
legal rights.*'6 Alternatives are designed to provide a safety valve, to siphon discontent from courts. With the danger of political confrontation reduced, the ruling power of legal institutions is
appeal of alternative institutions. They may deflect energy from political organization by groups of
people with common grievances; or discourage effective litigation strategies that could provide
substantial benefits. They may, in the end, create a two-track justice system that dispenses informal "justice" to poor people with "small" claims and "minor" disputes, who cannot afford
legal services, and who are denied access to courts. (Bar associations do not recommend that corporate law firms divert their clients to mediation, or that business deductions for legal expenses
a gigantic government subsidy for litigationbe eliminated.)
Justice according to law will be reserved for the affluen t, hardly a novel
development in American history but one that needs little encouragement from the spread of alternative dispute-settlement institutions. It is social context and political choice that determine
whether courts, or alternative institutions, can render justice more or less accessibleand to whom. Both can be discretionary, arbitrary, domineeringand unjust. Law can symbolize justice, or
conceal repression. It can reduce exploitation, or facilitate it. It can prohibit the abuse of power, or disguise abuse in procedural forms. It can promote equality, or sustain inequality.
Despite the resiliency and power of law, it seems unable to eradicate the tension between legality
and justice: even in a society of (legal) equals, some still remain more equal than others. But diversion from the legal system is likely to accentuate that
. Without legal power the imbalance between aggrieved individuals and corporations, or
inequality
government agencies, cannot be redressed. In American society, as Laura Nader has observed, "disputing without the force of law ...
[is| doomed to fail."7 Instructive examples document the deleterious effect of coerced informality (even if others
demonstrate the creative possibilities of indigenous experimentation). Freed slaves after the Civil War and factory workers at the
turn of the century, like inner-city poor people now, have all been assigned places in informal
proceedings that offer substantially weaker safeguards than law can provide . Legal institutions may not provide equal
justice under law, but in a society ruled by law it is their responsibility. It is chimerical to believe that mediation or arbitration can
now accomplish what law seems powerless to achieve . The American deification of individual rights requires an
accessible legal system for their protection . Understandably, diminished faith in its capacities will encourage the yearning for alternatives. But the rhetoric of "community" and
"justice" should not be permitted to conceal the deterioration of community life and the unraveling of substantive notions of justice that has accompanied its demise. There is every reason why
the values that historically are associated with informal justice should remain compelling: especially the preference for trust, harmony, and reciprocity within a communal setting. These are not,
recognition into a stunted off-shoot of the legal system. The historical progression is clear: from community justice without formal legal institutions to the rule of law, all too often without justice.
But injustice without law is an even worse possibility, which misguided enthusiasm for alternative
dispute settlement now seems likely to encourage. Our legal culture too accurately expresses the individualistic and materialistic values that most Americans deeply
cherish to inspire optimism about the imminent restoration of communitarian purpose. For law to be less conspicuous Americans would have
to moderate their expansive freedom to compete, to acquire, and to possess, while simultaneously
elevating shared responsibilities above individual rights. That is an unlikely prospect unless
Americans become, in effect, un-American. Until then, the pursuit of justice without law does incalculable harm to the
prospect of equal justice.
90
Deploying the jargon of exception and especially Agambens conception of the exception-being-therule for reconfiguring conceptions of politics in a biopolitical age comes at a serious cost, though. It inserts
both a diagnosis of our time and a conceptual apparatus for rethinking politics that has no place for
the category that has been central to the modern democratic tradition: the political significance of
people as a multiplicity of social relations that condition politics and that are constituted by the
mediations of various objectified forms and processes (for example, scientific knowledge, technologies, property relations, legal
institutions). Even if one would argue that Agambens framing of the current political conditions are valuable
for understanding important changes that have taken place in the twentieth century and that are continuing in the
twenty first, they also are to a considerable extent depoliticizing . Agambens work tends to guide the analysis to
unmediated, factual life. For example, some draw on Agamben to highlight the importance of bodily strategies
of resistance. One of the key examples is individual refugees protesting against their detention by sewing
up lips and eyes. They exemplify how individualized naked life resists by deploying their bodily, biological condition against sovereign
biopolitical powers (for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004:1517). I follow Adorno and others, however, that such a conception of
bodily, naked life is not political. It ignores how this life only exists and takes on political form
through various socioeconomic, technological, scientific, legal, and other mediations . For example, the
images of the sewed-up eyelids and lips of the individualized and biologized refugees have no political significance
without being mediated by public media, intense mobilizations on refugee and asylum questions,
contestations of human rights in the courts, etc. It is these mediations that are the object and
structuring devices of political struggle. Reading the politics of exception as the central lens onto
modern conceptions of politics, as both Agamben and Schmitt do, erases from the concept of politics a rich and
constitutive history of sociopolitical struggles, traditions of thought linked to this history, and key sites and
temporalities of politics as well as the central processes through which individualized bodily resistances
gain their sociopolitical significance.
Alt fails abstract movements wont produce political results besides violence
embrace the hard work of pragmatic reform
Condit 15 [Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, Multi-Layered Trajectories for
Academic Contributions to Social Change, Feb 4, 2015, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015]
Thus, when
iek and others urge us to Act with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an
alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his appeal both a
failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and
the historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what
I call AnarchoNiceness to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian
states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible
for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not
imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into
is biological predispositionsthe first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is
what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is
merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth
pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of the kill in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void
91
because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of
capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of
communism (e.g., iek9). The
The rejection of all liberalism strips political judgments that are necessary for
progressive reform
Smith 8 [Nick, University of New Hampshire Department of Philosophy, Questions for a Reluctant Jurisprudence of Alterity,
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~nicks/pdf/Levinas%20and%20Law%20Questions%20for%20a%20Reluctant%20Jurisprudence.pdf]
These are sobering questions for me. I find the challenges that Levinas and Adorno pose to modernity and the history of philosophy quite
powerful, yet their resistance to practical philosophy is deeply frustrating. Surely not all philosophers must satisfy our desire to put philosophy to
use, but Levinas and Adorno seem to have relinquished their ability to judge legal and political activity. This seems far from an apolitical, prepolitical, or meta-political position. I cannot help but think that no
Even if we couldagainst Levinas and Adornos spiritactivate a coherent program of reform around theories of
alterity, I doubt they could match the powers promoting their antithesis. Prevailing instrumental
institutions gain momentum and crush or integrate theories of alterity, and the strategy of abstaining from political
life in order to preserve the protest against instrumentality seems more desperate than ever. Our objective should not merely be to use thought to
remember the nonidentical, but rather to safeguard the thought of the non-identical while acting to release it from blind domination. Without
both a practical orientation toward transforming material conditions and a tolerance for the organizational
categories necessary to implement such reform, deconstruction and critical theory seem severed from
their radical traditions. Pretending that these critiques provide a form of resistance when they live
harmlessly in their academic niche only reinforces the status quo. As Adorno and Marx recognized, reason struggles
to navigate a course that gives it effect in the concrete world without sacrificing it to the instrumentalities of that world. I like to think that law is
an ally in this project, but I now wonder if there is any practical upshot for a jurisprudence of alterity. Any
92
at its altitude. From this perspective, a jurisprudence of alterity seems most relevant as a regulative ideal for all legal activity. Yet for those of
us inclined to seek guidance for law in Levinas or Adorno because we are moved by the threats of authoritarianism and consumerism, we find
ourselves on strangely familiar ground as we stand on this summit. Though
93
Granted, social activists do "win" occasional battles in these adversarial arenas, but the root causes of
their concerns largely remain unaddressed and the larger "wars" arguably are not going well.
Consider the case of environmental activism. Countless environmental protests, lobbies, and lawsuits mounted in recent generations throughout
the Western world. Many small victories have been won. Yet environmental degradation continues to accelerate
at a rate that far outpaces the highly circumscribed advances made in these limited battles the most committed environmentalists acknowledge
things are not going well. In addition, adversarial
94
Perm
Permutation do bothwe can work within a dominant system and still resist
Michel Foucault, biopower dude, 1980, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, pg. 154
FOUCAULT We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and
remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I
even believe that the two things go together.
In the works of these authors, one can identify a tendency to see security as inherently connected to
exclusion, totalization and even violence. The idea of a logic of security is now widely present in the critical security studies
literature. Claudia Aradau (2008: 72), for example, writes of an exclusionary logic of security underpinning and legitimizing forms of
domination. Rens van Munster (2007: 239) assumes a logic of security, predicated upon a political organization on the exclusionary basis of
fear. Laura Shepherd (2008: 70) also identifies a liberal and highly problematic organizational logic in security. Although there would probably
be disagreement over the degree to which this
and that security as a paradigm of thought or a register of meaning is also a construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance
through practice. The exclusionary and violent
95
our core values and the means of their protection, we cannot afford to allow dominant discourses of security to be confused with the essence of
security itself. In sum, the trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations. The
politicization of security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security ideas and practices; however, it has
paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the meaning of security itself. By
The nature of the relation between the individual and the political order concerned Foucault in his studies of 'bio-power' and 'bio-politics'. In this
work, he implicitly negates his earlier claims that rights in the West were unequivocally linked to the sovereign (1980b, 1988, 199 1). Foucault
introduced the notion of 'bio-power' in his work on sexuality to designate the proliferation of a technology of power-knowledge primarily
concerned with life. Bio-power
was a mechanism that took charge of life by 'investing the body, health ,
modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence' (Foucault 1980b: 14344, emphasis added ). The notion
of bio-power is useful for our understanding of the phenomenon of resistance because while it represents a totalizing or universal
mechanism -one that interpellates the subject as a member of a population - it also contains the seed for a counterpower or a counter-politics because that mechanism individualizes the subject of a population. It is this aspect of biopower, its simultaneous totalizing and individual-izing tendencies, that is of importance in understanding the strategies by which individual
subjects can claim the right to self-determination. Foucault explains that against this [bio-]power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the
forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being . Since the last century, the great
struggles that have challenged the general system of power were not guided by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old dream of a
cycle of time or a Golden Age. (. . .) [Wlhat was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man's
concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plentitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that was wanted is of little importance;
what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the
system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated
through affirmations concerningrights. The 'right' tolife, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the
oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' (. . .) was the political response to all these new
procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980b: 144-5) If life, understood here as
'man's concrete essence', is affirmed through rights claims, then, like Foucault we
96
different but simultaneous forms, both as a schema for the regulation of governmental practice and as a theme for sometimes radical opposition to
such practice. (Foucault 198 1 : 356) What
97
Impact
Democracy checks biopower impact
Edward Ross
Dickinson 4, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, Central European History, Vol. 37 No. 1, p. 34-36
And it is, of course, embedded in a broader discursive complex (institutions, professions, fields of social, medical, and psychological expertise) that pursues these
same aims in often even more effective and inescapable ways.89 In short, the continuities
The
concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and
entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the
same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as
Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be
combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the
democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate .
opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it.
The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
Their terminal impact is so reductive thats its useless for political analysis--ignores context and history
Chandler 9 [David, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of
Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War', Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 243]
98
states of the twentieth century (Agamben, 1998: 4; see also Chandler, 2009a). Agambens view of liberal power is that of the concentration camp
writ globally, where we are all merely objects of power, we are all virtually homines sacri (Agamben, 1998: 115). In focusing on biopower as a
means of critiquing universalist policy discourses of global security, critical
these critical frameworks, global war is understood as the exercise of global aspirations
for control, no longer mediated by the interstate competition that was central to traditional realist framings of international
relations. This less-mediated framework understands the interests and instrumental techniques of power in
global terms. As power becomes understood in globalized terms , it becomes increasingly abstracted
from any analysis of contemporary social relations: viewed in terms of neoliberal governance, liberal
power or biopolitical domination. In this context, global war becomes little more than a metaphor for
the operation of power. This war is a global one because, without clearly demarcated political subjects, the unmediated
operation of regulatory power is held to construct a world that becomes, literally, one large concentration
camp (Agamben, 1998: 171) where instrumental techniques of power can be exercised regardless of frameworks of rights or international
law (Agamben, 2005: 87). For Julian Reid (2006: 124), the global war on terror can be understood as an
inevitable response to any forms of life that exist outside and are therefore threatening to liberal
modernity, revealing liberal modernity itself to be ultimately a terrorising project arraigned against the
vitality of life itself. For Jabri, and other Foucauldian critics, the liberal peace can only mean unending war to
pacify, discipline and reconstruct the liberal subject:
99
ethics of alterity usually soars above urgent concrete issues that involve
politically and economically charged self-other transactions. Levinass other is disembodied, not in Dr.
Laings sense (e.g. The Divided Self). Rather, Levinass alterity cannot be substantiated. Defining or embodying the
other violates its alterity and sublimity. Hence, any grand appeal such ethics may initially spark
becomes questionable when juxtaposed to our existing realities and the factors that regulate self/other
different modes of relations. 6 Statement of the Problem, Limitations of the Study and Methods In this study, I attempt to dislodge
postmodern ethics from its speculative and elitist tendencies through turning to self-other ethical relations in various literary, discursive and
political situations. I focus on bridging the gaps between theory and practice in order to expose the rifts and blind spots in postmodern ethics of
alterity. I think that the demands that alterity as a generalized abstract term exert differ from those raised by placed and temporalized others. For
example, there is an urgent need to know how well Levinass concept of absolute alterity or Derridas concept of undecidability fares in
political situations. In other words, to argue for prioritizing alterity as a new ethical turn is not the same as to motivate and effect such
prioritization. While I agree that Levinass infinite obligation to the other sounds uplifting, realizing/effecting such a formula is a different
story. Theoretically speaking, alterity is embraceable, but in lived realities, others fall on a spectrum of difference (sometimes opposition) from
self according to various criteria. Actually, there is a general tendency to posit self and others in terms of difference and opposition, when in fact
these are relative and operational terms. Polarizing self and other risks ossifying them into rigid negatively defining entities at the expense of their
interdependence and mutual constitution. The terms other and self do not only designate metaphysical figures or linguistic relations, they also
describe ontological realities. The metaphor of the embrace may in it turn conceal a whole repertoire of idealism, philanthropy, and
the
demand to meet the other on a neutral ground, pre-ontologically, looks more like an aesthetic
ideal/condition that cannot be achieved as we always meet the other in context with our conceptions,
motivations and values. Blaming Western Metaphysics, or ontology, for the imbalanced self-other
relations somehow brackets subjects role and agency in the self-other various equations. 7 Moreover, we
may indulge alterity ethics in closed and limited contexts that favor our train of thought and take that for a sufficient action.
We may embrace the other or theorize about embracing and preserving alterity as ethics per se, but we may
still live according to dialectical alterity-blind institutions and practices. In such cases, we are either,
consciously or subconsciously, acknowledging and maintaining theory/practice divisions, or we know that acting
ethically toward the other entails more than theorizing about what form the most ethical relation should
take. Acting ethically demands sharing power and taking risks. More problematically, the theoretical
formulas may not function in the first place as the roots of unethical self-other relations cannot be
automatically corrected by theoretically replacing modernist self-centered by alterity-centered ethics.
logocentrism/humanism. Worse, sometimes Levinasian ethics seems so good to be true or realizable, at least if taken literally. For
Furthermore, most of the writings about postmodernismengage strenuous debates and often deploy elitist jargon, a practice that limits their
accessibility and descriptive value. Very often philosophical
constructed by linguistic, economic and media systems. Thus, the ethical turn toward alterity loses its
halo when one considers the diminutive role played by human agency and intentionality . Emphasizing
the negative side of constructivismbeing constructed by external or upper systems postmodernism glosses over the subjects
other various roles in sustaining and continuing, sometimes disrupting, dominant epistemological,
economic and political systems. In other words, modernist subjects are primarily products of metaphysically
pre-ordained itineraries sidestepping other senses such as being a subject by initiating and
performing actions by choice. If subject primarily means subjected to, the ethics, responsibility and
obligations, all become paradoxical. Furthermore, Levinass dictum to pre-ontologically encounter alterity makes sense; he thinks
that the ethical should, or actually does, precede the ontological. But practically, such divisions may be
divisions of convenience rather than of actuality as if the political and ethical belonged to different modes
of living. I think that we do not need to submit to modernist disciplinary divisions of convenience nor do we need to separate the ethical from
the political or from the ontological. I believe that ethics is not a formula or a prescription we choose to apply or we choose to leave behind.
Ethics is intrinsic to action. Levinass move, however, has to be contextualized. It is his desire to remove self other
relations from under modernist epistemological reductions and pragmatic/utilitarian arrangements that he wants
to go back to a pure self-other encounterbefore self-other dialectics. He wants to encounter the other before reductive logic moves in. Yet
such a move ends in an impasse. Leaping back into the pre-ontological stems from Levinass ontological
or epistemological consciousness. The irony is that one just cannot exit the ontological and still use its
structures and vocabularies. Still, Levinass ethical dictum exposes the working of unconscious ethnocentrism or conscious bias in our
self-other relations, systems and existence, unless we always foreground alterity. Consequently, alterity ethics is both a meta-ethical argument, or
for some it constitutes a moral principle, or a basic revelation about our human conditions: We are always in relation toindebted tothe other.
We may choose to elide such a realization, but we cannot change it.
notion of 'national
fitness', in terms of bio- political competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous
decline thanks in large part to a crisis of the perceived unity of the national state as a viable political project (ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again,
"the idea of 'society' as a single, if heterogeneous, domain with a national culture, a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and
the powers of a national political government" no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the
governmentalization of the state here, Rose claims that the
programmes of the molar enclosure known as the nation-state have fallen into
disrepute and have been all but abandoned.
101
Biopower Good
102
Saves lives
Even if biopower can be destructive, it is on balance necessary to save lives
NOTE: we reject the gendered language in this evidence
Ojakangus in 05 (Mika, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies , Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power http://www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)
In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form o power
which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing peoples lives. The effectiveness of biopower can be seen
lying precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would
derive from the demand of justice. In bio-political societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be
maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: One had
the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.112 However, given that the right to kill is
precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the biopolitical societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely bio-political. Perhaps, there
neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present-day European societies have
abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It is the very right to kill that has been called into question.
However, it is not called into question because of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of bio-political thinking
and practice. For all these reasons, Agambens thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.113 The bio-political paradigm of the West is not the
concentration camp, but, rather, the present-day welfare society and, instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of
the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social democrat. Although this figure is an
object and a product of the huge bio-political machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing
homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest crime against the machinery. (In biopolitical societies, death is not only something to be hidden away, but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing of all.114)
Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In
fact, the bio-political machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual
capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily even when, in biological terms, he should have been dead long ago.115 This
is because bio-power is not bloody power over bare life for its own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of the
living. It is not power but the living, the condition of all life individual as well as collective that is the measure of the
success of bio-power.
103
The nature of the relation between the individual and the political order concerned Foucault in his studies of 'biopower' and 'bio-politics'. In this work, he implicitly negates his earlier claims that rights in the West were unequivocally linked to the sovereign
(1980b, 1988, 199 1). Foucault introduced the notion of 'bio-power' in his work on sexuality to designate the proliferation of a technology of
power-knowledge primarily concerned with life. Bio-power was a mechanism that took charge of life by 'investing the body,
health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence' (Foucault 1980b: 14344, emphasis added). The
notion of bio-power is useful for our understanding of the phenomenon of resistance because while it represents a totalizing or
universal mechanism -one that interpellates the subject as a member of a population - it also contains the seed for a counterpower or a counter-politics because that mechanism individualizes the subject of a population. It is this aspect of bio-power, its
simultaneous totalizing and individual-izing tendencies, that is of importance in understanding the strategies by which individual subjects can
claim the right to self-determination. Foucault explains that against this [bio-]power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the forces that
resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being . Since the last century, the
great struggles that have challenged the general system of power were not guided by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old
dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. (. . .) [Wlhat was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plentitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that was wanted is of little
importance; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned
back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter
were formulated through affirmations concerningrights. The 'right' tolife, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and
beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' (. . .) was the political response
to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980b: 144-5) If life,
understood here as 'man's concrete essence', is affirmed through rights claims, then, like Foucault we can no longer conceive
law as necessarily linked to the sovereign. It must be linked to a different political rationality, one I believe, in which
human rights are at the centre. While Foucault never specifically addressed the question of human rights, his lectures on 'bio-politics' (at the
College de France between 1978 and 1979) suggest that struggles for life and for self-determination are to be understood in the
context of liberalism. In his lectures, he explores the relation between bio-power -the mechanisms taking charge of life
-and the emergence of bio-politics, by which he means the way in which a rationalization was attempted, dating from the eighteenth century, for
the problems posed to governmental practice by the phenomena specific to an ensemble of living beings: health, hygiene, birthrate, longevity,
races . . .(198 1 :353) Foucault's statement is significant because it suggests that we cannot dissociate the problems posed
by the question of population (bio-power) from the political rationality within which they emerged, liberalism. Far from
conceiving it as a political theory or a representation of society, Foucault understands liberalism as an 'art of government', that is,
as a particular practice, activity and rationality used to administer, shape, and direct the conduct of people (1981 :358).
As a rationality of government - a 'governmentality' -liberalism, towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, breaks from reason of
state (la raison d'e'tat) which since the sixteenth century had sought to 'justify the growing exercise of government' (Foucault 198 1 :354). What
distinguishes liberalism from reason of state as an art of government is that for liberalism 'there is always too much
government' (Foucault 1981: 354-5). In fact, far from being organized around the principle of a strong state, liberalism
upholds the principle of maximal economy with minimal government (Foucault 1981: 354). The question of liberalism,
that of 'too much governing,' regulates itself, according to Foucault, 'by means of a continuing reflection' (1 98 1: 354). The idea of
reflexivity here is significant because it refers to a mechanism of self-critique, and self-limitation, inherent in
liberalism. Foucault claims that Liberalism (. . .) constitutes - and this is the reason both for its polymorphous character and for its recurrences an instrument for the criticism of reality. Liberalism criticizes an earlier functioning government from which one tries to
escape; it examines an actual practice of government that one attempts to reform and to rationalize by a fundamental analysis; it criticizes a
practice of government to which one is opposed and whose abuses one wishes to curb. As a result of this, one can discover liberalism under
different but simultaneous forms, both as a schema for the regulation of governmental practice and as a theme for sometimes radical opposition to
such practice. (Foucault 198 1 : 356) What allows liberalism to oppose state power, then, is not the principle of sovereignty
or the idea of a natural right external to the state; rather it is a rationality, a governmentality of life that takes on 'the
character of a challenge' (Foucault 1981 :353). People resist the conditions under which they live, they make claims for
or against the state, because they have been submitted to government. In other words, the political technologies that
seek to render us governable as a population (bio-power and bio-politics) simultaneously make possible the critique of
these same technologies.'
104
Rights
Biopower in a DEMOCRATIC government is vital to rights, tolerance, and
inclusionthis takes out their all of their impacts
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some
Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
In the Weimar model, then, the
rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution and substantively by the
welfare system, were the central element of the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no
one in this period advocated expanding social provision out of the goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social management,
of social engineering. The mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing basic social rights the substantive or positive
freedom of all citizens was the best way to turn people into power, prosperity, and profit. In that sense, the democratic welfare state
was and is democratic not despite of its pursuit of biopower, but because of it. The contrast with the Nazi state
is clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a system of social and population policy founded on the concept of
individual duties, on the ubiquitous and total power of the state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by
organizations that could implant that power at every level of their lives in political and associational life, in the family, in the workplace, and
in leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create an institutional framework that would give
individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully into the national society, economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give
the state the wherewithal to do with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be constructing
a system of knowledge and institutions that would manage social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by
eradicating by finding a final solution to social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare
structure were open to the idea that stubborn cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health could easily be
redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the difference between a strategy of social management
built on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a
semantic one; such differences had very profound political implications, and established quite different constraints.
The rights-based strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied too
heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic
institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its
rhetorical structure was too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
105
General Good
Biopower is neither inherently good, nor bad. Our specific context is more
important than their sweeping generalization.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some
Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge
no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of
organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a
universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey,
are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have
varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive
elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different
strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure,
but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities,
modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
further
conjecture that this micropolitical dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of
the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy in
Germany left liberals and Social Democrats have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social
engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even
eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization
has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more
frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to
be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What
is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen
including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an
ever more restrictive iron cage of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation
between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true.
106
Inevitable
Biopower is inevitable
Dreyfus 1996 (Hubert L., Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault,
http://www.johnkeane.net/pdf_docs/teaching_sources/foucault/foucault_being_and_power.pdf)
Like Heidegger, Foucault speaks of this non-violent way of guiding action as governance:
Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of
government. ... To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. One might say, paraphrasing Heidegger, that
power is that on the basis of which human beings already understand each other. As Foucault puts it: In the idea of governmentality, I am aiming
at the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have
in regard to each other. Since Foucault is not interested in how things show up but exclusively in people, "Power", which is normally used to
describe the way governments govern people's actions, seems an appropriate, if perhaps misleading, name for what controls the way people
understand themselves and others. It should be clear that some type of power in this ontological sense, like some particular understanding of
being, is essential to any society. According to Foucault, "A society without power relations can only be an
abstraction."
Biopower is inevitable
Wright, 2008 (Nathan, Fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy, Camp as Paradigm: Bio-Politics and State Racism in
Foucault and Agamben, http://ccjournal.cgu.edu/past_issues/nathan_wright.html)
Perhaps the one failure of Foucaults that, unresolved, rings as most ominous is his failure to further examine the problem of bio-political state
racism that he first raises in his lecture series, Society Must Be Defended. At the end of the last lecture, Foucault suggests that bio-
power is here to stay as a fixture of modernity. Perhaps given its focus on the preservation of the population of the
nation it which it is practiced, bio-power itself is something that Foucault accepts as here to stay. Yet his analysis of biopolitics and bio-power leads inevitably to state-sanctioned racism, be the government democratic, socialist, or fascist. As a result, he ends the
lecture series with the question, How can one both make a bio-power function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the
function of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem. It was a problem to which he never
returned. However, in the space opened by Foucaults failure to solve the problem of state racism and to elaborate a unitary theory of power
(Agamben 1998, 5) steps Agamben in an attempt to complete an analysis of Foucauldian bio-politics and to, while not solve the problem of state
racism, at least give direction for further inquiry and hope of a politics that escapes the problem of this racism .
107
the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit
us to broaden our inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics that is, attempts to
produce meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and political action. This vision rejects a shared theory
of social reform, rejects formal programmatic agendas, and embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices . Thus, it is described in such terms as a
plan of no plan,211 a project of projects,212 anti-theory theory,213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 practice over theory,216 and chaos and openness over order and formality. As
Both
a result, the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and
social vision that existed during the civil rights movement has disappeared.217 There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns that
securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of conservative public interest lawyer[ing].220 Although public interest law was originally associated exclusively with liberal projects, in the past three
conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of traditional
legal strategies to promote their causes.221 This growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in
juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested that there may be something
inherent in the lefts conception of social change focused as it is on participation and empowerment that
produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.
decades
108
Law good
Foucault's conception of power within the law is outdated---law now protects
subjects from state coercion
Smith 2k [Carole, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at Univ of Manchester, The sovereign state v Foucault: law and
disciplinary power, The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, p. 291-2]
Foucault's analysis has much to offer in terms of his creative and radical thinking about the nature of power, the relationship
between power and knowledge, the role of disciplinary power as it works to regulate the subject from without and to constrain the subject from
within, and forms of modern government. The rise of liberal democracy, the thrust of welfare policy, government by administrative regulation and
the enormous influence of expert knowledge and therapeutic intervention (Giddens. 1991; Rose. 1990; Miller and Rose. 1994) have all had an
impact on law and operations of the juridical field. I would argue, however, that Foucault's
109
AT heg
Decline ensures lash out precludes resolution to collective action problems
Beckley 12 [The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Persists and Chinas Rise Is Limited, Assistant Professor of Political
Science at Tufts University and a U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security fellow at Dartmouth's Dickey, p. online]
One danger is that declinism could prompt trade conflicts and immigration restrictions. The results of this study suggest that the
United States benefits immensely from the free flow of goods, services, and people around the globe; this is what allows American corporations
to specialize in high-value activities, exploit innovations created elsewhere, and lure the brightest minds to the United States, all while reducing
the price of goods for U.S. consumers. Characterizing Chinas export expansion as a loss for the United States is not just bad economics; it blazes
a trail for jingoistic and protectionist policies. It would be tragically ironic if Americans reacted to false prophecies of decline by cutting
themselves off from a potentially vital source of American power. Another danger is that declinism
Arms buildups, insecure sea-lanes, and closed markets are only the most obvious risks of U.S.
retrenchment. Less obvious are transnational problems, such as global warming, water scarcity, and
disease, which may fester without a leader to rally collective action . Hegemony, of course, carries its own risks and
costs. In particular, Americas global military presence might tempt policymakers to use force when they should 317 Gilpin, War and Change, p.
239. See, also, Dale Copeland, Origins of Major War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Charles Doran and Wes Parsons, War and
the Cycle of Relative Power, American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 4, (December 1980), pp. 947-965. Chapter 6 197 choose
diplomacy or inaction. If the United States abuses its power, however, it is not because it is too engaged with the world, but because its
engagement lacks strategic vision. The solution is better strategy, not retrenchment. The first step toward sound strategy is to
recognize that the status quo for the United States is pretty good: it does not face a hegemonic rival and the trends favor continued American
dominance. The overarching goal of U.S. policy should be to preserve this state of affairs. Declinists claim the United States should adopt a
neomercantilist international economic policy and disengage from current alliance commitments in East Asia and Europe.318 But the fact that
the United States rose relative to China while propping up the world economy and maintaining a hegemonic presence abroad casts doubt on the
wisdom of such calls for radical policy change.
Steven Pinker, author of a chaotic book titled The Better Angels of Our Nature, contends that mankind is evolving in a permanent and linear
way. He argues
that war (between states) will fade away like other barbaric practices such as slavery (except it has
110
not vanished not even close), public executions, and lynching. Pinker is not alone: Bruno Tertrais boldly asserted last year in The
Washington Quarterly, we are nearing a point of history where it will be possible to say that war
and Michael Cohen have written in Foreign Affairs that the notion
that our postCold War world is a treacherous place, full of great uncertainty and grave risks, has too strong a hold on our
publics understanding of our security and is simply wrong. They aver that our country faces no plausible
existential threats, no great-power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon.
There are three problems with this analysis: It is flat wrong. It misconceives the foundations of
contemporary stability. And it perpetuates an idealistic view of the linear and inevitable progress of
mankind. While life expectancies and access to Starbucks and the internet are high, there are many forms of risk. There are lethal threats. Many
of these, such as terrorism, may not be existential, but the United States should not limit defense or security to only those threats that can
eliminate us. Moreover, the
United States does have a great power rival, at a regional level in Asia. China exhibits a
belligerence, condescension to its neighbors, and scorn for international opinion that recalls German
behavior in the decades prior to World War I. Zenko and Cohens framework is also warped by its scale. Near-term
competition need not be global to threaten our interests or mandate a substantial reduction in our defenses. The second
omission is the rampant presentism in their interpretation of the state of the world. Pinkers acolytes think only of the recent
past, and fail to account for what the last two generations did to make the world the more stable place it is
today. They ignore the fact that American power is required to sustain an international system weve
invested so much to create during the Cold War and since. By removing that applied hegemonic force,
they would open the playing field to other, less benign forces at the state and sub-state level. They
may also inadvertently reduce other constructive and preventative resources that help dampen
violence. Finally, Pinkers New Peace thesis that is embraced by Tertrais, Zenko and Cohen argues that mankind and history are
on an ineluctable path. In doing so, they ignore longer-term perspectives and potential future trends. The databases
they use to buttress their arguments show that wide fluctuations are normal in the cycle of human conflict .
Zenko and Cohen prefer too narrow a sample so that they can draw their preferred conclusions. They argue that the
world has never been safer. Not true. Weve been at this level of violence twice in history, and it has
spiked frequently. We need to ask why, not deliberately distort the history to win policy points . The
principal basis for positive and optimistic assessments about war and human strife comes from
databases like those generated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute . These indicate that for
the past 20 years the number of conflicts has declined substantially. These research organizations show that the number of ongoing conflicts has
dropped forty percent from 53 to 31 between 1992 and 2010. The statistics also suggest that wars are shorter and less lethal, measuring direct
combat deaths and other human casualties. All these databases show that major interstate warfare is a rare occurrence, but with great fluctuations
and dramatic consequences. The data is not generally contested, but the meaning of these trends is. The observed reduction in both the frequency
and violence of human conflict today confers the appearance of a benign world, one in which states would logically reduce their investments in
security. However, this is a simplistic view of threats and risk. The
111
of moving in only one direction. What this long-term analysis indicates is that interstate war is generally a low probability event, and there is
great variance in intrastate or societal conflict. Such a longer-term view accepts where we are today, but recognizes that history is not reversible.
Understanding this history is important, not because it provides a ready answer, but because it helps frame the right questions. Are these cycles
avoidable or unlikely to reoccur? Will those circumstances be more or less likely to come about after 2015 than now? Can we reduce the
likelihood of disruption, discontent and disorder that history suggests are naturally reoccurring? Are there signposts or other trends we should
consider before we turn our swords into ploughshares and keyboards? Signposts of a Darker Future Signposts in the character of conflict suggest
that challenges are not imminent but they are expanding. Nuclear
programs of the Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea. They cannot pose threats to our
to be closer to being able to harm close allies and seriously injure U.S.
interests with catastrophic impact. In addition to the frequency of conflict, the intensity and lethality of conflict can also swing the
other way. Given the diffusion of lethal means to super-empowered networks and the availability of possibly
toxic bio- or chemical-based weapons, one should pause before suggesting that large-scale violence is no
longer part of the human condition. It may not be massed armor formations, but it could be mass violence. Consider the potential for
homeland at present but they appear
groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, like the al-Nusra group, to gain access to sarin stocks in Syria. These possibilities distinguish the mere frequency
of conflict in the present tense from its consequences or costs in the future. We cannot base our defense on the number of conflicts alone. We seek
to shape the world to prevent wars or mitigate their impact. Preventing
We simply do not live in a world that is, in Chris Fettweis terms, a remarkably safe and secure place.
For these reasons, despite contrary assertions about past trends, the overall risk of interstate war is increasing due to
numerous factors. Shifts in power, demographic declines, emergent regional powers, and
technological diffusion portend more problems rather than less. What Mearsheimer called the tragedy of great
power politics has not gone away. Rising powers, failed states, and the political aspirations of many Arab populations will ensure that
our security remains challenged. The greatest threat wont be our debt. Our principal problem will derive from the real or perceived decline in
U.S. interest and capacity to work with others to preserve the present stable global order. The National Intelligence Council noted in its most
recent long-range assessment that A declining
112
AT liberalism bad
Group their kritiks of liberal humanismyou should embrace a radical
liberalismliberal ideals are not monolithic, but instead leave room for
inclusionary and radical projects
Mills 12 [2012, Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons
Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why Theyre All Wrong), Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 15 number 2 (2012):
305323]
**modified for ableist language
kind of answer is the following (call this the internalist answer): Because there is an immanent conceptual/normative logic to liberalism as a
It
doesnt. The historic domination of conservative exclusionary liberalisms is the result of group interests,
group power, and successful group political projects. Apparent internal conceptual/normative barriers to
an emancipatory liberalism can be successfully negotiated by drawing on the conceptual/normative
resources of liberalism itself, in conjunction with a revisionist socio-historical picture of modernity . Most
self-described radicals would endorseindeed, reflexively, as an obvious truththe first answer. But as indicated from the
beginning, I think the second answer is actually the correct one. The obstacles to developing a radical
liberalism are, in my opinion, primarily externalist in nature: material group interests, and the way they
have shaped hegemonic varieties of liberalism. So I think we need to try to justify a radical agenda with
the normative resources of liberalism rather than writing off liberalism. Since liberalism has always been
the dominant ideology in the United States, and is now globally hegemonic , such a project would have the
great ideological advantage of appealing to values and principles that most people already endorse .
All projects of egalitarian social transformation are going to face a combination of material, political,
and ideological obstacles, but this strategy would at least reduce somewhat the dimensions of the last . One
would be trying to win mass support for policies thatand the challenge will, of course, be to demonstrate thisare
political ideology that precludes any emancipatory development of it. Another kind of answer is the following (call this the externalist answer):
113
justifiable by majoritarian norms, once reconceived and put in conjunction with facts not always familiar
to the majority. Material barriers (vested group interests) and political barriers (organizational difficulties) will of course
remain. But they will constitute a general obstacle for all egalitarian political programs, and as such
cannot be claimed to be peculiar problems for an emancipatory liberalism.
114
AT reform fails
Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than
pushing it away
Delgado 9 [Richard, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D. from the
University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on
human rights in North America, the American Library Associations Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor
Delgados teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities
Want, Arguing about Law, p. 588-590 ]
CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental
change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.
Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression.
Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to , or periodic court
victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or
2. The
using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure. To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to
abandon the case method, give up the effort to nd rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.
reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at
hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret
events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in
subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a
number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic
working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later
outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some
incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all
small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family
may hold a tenants union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars critique of piecemeal reform
often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be
what we want.
115
AT structural violence
War turns structural violence
Folk 78 [Jerry, Professor of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, Peace Educations Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated
Approach, Peace & Change, volume V, number 1, Spring, p. 58]
Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work of researchers and educators coming to the field from the
perspective of negative peace too easily forget that the
The alt lacks a mechanism for resolving global violence -- the impact is global
war
Moore 4 [Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential appointee, & Honorary Editor of the American Journal of
International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton Moore, pages 41-2]
If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an absence of effective
deterrence, what
is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war? Past, and many contemporary, theories of war
have focused on the role of specific disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty or social
injustice, competition for resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, and perceptions of "honor," or many other such factors. Such
factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or in serving as a means for generating fear and manipulating public opinion. The
reality, however, is that while
some of these may have more potential to contribute to war than others, there may well
be an infinite set of motivating factors, or human wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent
existence of such motivating factors for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high risk
decisions leading to war that is the key to more effectively controlling war. And the same may also be true
of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic conflict," as though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other
through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and
orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan Tutsis as well as its Hutu opponents.I1 Certainly
116
AT terror k
Criticisms of terror studies writ large are reductionist and dangerous no
evidence to substantiate their claims and no viable alternative
Jones and Smith 9 [David, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia, and M.L.R., King's College, University of London,
London, UK, We're All Terrorists Now: Criticalor HypocriticalStudies on Terrorism?, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 32,
Issue 4 April 2009 , pages 292 302, Taylor and Francis]
the journal's
ambition is to deconstruct what it views as the ambiguity of the word terror, its manipulation by ostensibly liberal democratic state actors, and
the complicity of orthodox terrorism studies in this authoritarian enterprise. Exposing the deficiencies in any field of study is, of course, a legitimate scholarly
The journal, in other words, is not intended, as one might assume, to evaluate critically those state or non-state actors that might have recourse to terrorism as a strategy. Instead,
exercise, but what the symposium introducing the new volume announces questions both the research agenda and academic integrity of journals like Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and those
who contribute to them. Do these claims, one might wonder, have any substance?
Jackson
Significantly, the original proposal circulated by the publisher Routledge and one of the editors, Richard
, suggested some uncertainty concerning the preferred title of the
journal. Critical Studies on Terrorism appeared last on a list where the first choice was Review of Terror Studies. Evidently, the concision of a review fails to capture the critical perspective the
journal promotes. Criticism, then, is central to the new journal's philosophy and the adjective connotes a distinct ideological and, as shall be seen, far from pluralist and inclusive purpose. So, one
might ask, what exactly does a critical approach to terrorism involve?
What it Means to be Critical
The editors and contributors explore what it means to be critical in detail, repetition, and opacity, along with an excessive fondness for italics, in the editorial symposium that introduces the first
issue, and in a number of subsequent articles. The editors inform us that the study of terrorism is a growth industry, observing with a mixture of envy and disapproval that literally thousands of
new books and articles on terrorism are published every year (pp. l-2). In adding to this literature the editors premise the need for yet another journal on their resistance to what currently
constitutes scholarship in the field of terrorism study and its allegedly uncritical acceptance of the Western democratic state's security perspective.
Indeed, to be critical requires a radical reversal of what the journal assumes to be the typical perception of terrorism and the methodology of terrorism research. To focus on the strategies
practiced by non-state actors that feature under the conventional denotation terror is, for the critical theorist, misplaced. As the symposium explains ,
The complicity of terrorism studies with the increasingly authoritarian demands of Western, liberal state and media practice,
together with the moral and political blindness of established terrorism analysts to this relationship forms the journal's overriding assumption and
one that its core contributors repeat ad nauseam. Thus, Michael Stohl, in his contribution Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism (pp. 5-16), not only discovers ten
myths informing the understanding of terrorism, but also finds that these myths reflect a state centric security focus, where analysts rarely consider the violence perpetrated by the state (p.
5). He complains that the press have become too close to government over the matter. Somewhat contradictorily Stohl subsequently asserts that media reporting is central to terrorism and
counter-terrorism as political action, that media reportage provides the oxygen of terrorism, and that politicians consider journalists to be the terrorist's best friend (p. 7).
Stohl further compounds this incoherence, claiming that the media are far more likely to focus on the destructive actions, rather than on grievances or the social conditions that breed
[terrorism]to present episodic rather than thematic stories (p. 7). He argues that terror attacks between 1968 and 1980 were scarcely reported in the United States, and that reporters do not
delve deeply into the sources of conflict (p. 8). All of this is quite contentious, with no direct evidence produced to support such statements. The media is after all a very broad term, and to
assume that it is monolithic is to replace criticism with conspiracy theory. Moreover, even if it were true that the media always serves as a government propaganda agency, then by Stohl's own
logic, terrorism as a method of political communication is clearly futile as no rational actor would engage in a campaign doomed to be endlessly misreported.
the notion that an inherent pro-state bias vitiates terrorism studies pervades the critical
position. Anthony Burke, in The End of Terrorism Studies (pp. 37-49), asserts that established analysts like Bruce Hoffman specifically exclude states as possible perpetrators of
Nevertheless,
terror. Consequently, the emergence of critical terrorism studies may signal the end of a particular kind of traditionally state-focused and directed 'problem-solving' terrorism studiesat least
in terms of its ability to assume that its categories and commitments are immune from challenge and correspond to a stable picture of reality (p. 42).
Elsewhere, Adrian Guelke, in Great Whites, Paedophiles and Terrorists: The Need for Critical Thinking in a New Era of Terror (pp. 17-25), considers British government-induced media scaremongering to have legitimated an authoritarian approach to the purported new era of terror (pp. 22-23). Meanwhile, Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, in The Terrorist Subject:
Terrorist Studies and the Absent Subjectivity (pp. 27-36), find the War on Terror constitutes the single, all embracing paradigm of analysis where the critical voice is not allowed to ask: what
is the reality itself? (original italics) (pp. 28-29). The construction of this condition, they further reveal, if somewhat abstrusely, reflects an abstract desire that demands terror as an everpresent threat (p. 31). In order to sustain this fabrication: Terrorism experts and commentators function as realist policemen; and not very smart ones at that, who while gazing at the
evidence are unable to read the paradoxical logic of the desire that fuels it, whereby lack turns toexcess (original italics) (p. 32). Finally, Ken Booth, in The Human Faces of Terror:
Reflections in a Cracked Looking Glass (pp. 65-79), reiterates Richard
Jackson's contention that state terrorism is a much more serious problem than non-state
searches in vain in these articles for evidence to support the ubiquitous assertion of state bias : assuming
this bias in conventional terrorism analysis as a fact seemingly does not require a corresponding concern with evidence of this fact,
merely its continual reiteration by conceptual fiat. A critical perspective dispenses not only with terrorism studies but also
with the norms of accepted scholarship. Asserting what needs to be demonstrated commits, of course, the elementary logical fallacy petitio principii. But critical theory
apparently emancipates (to use its favorite verb) its practitioners from the confines of logic, reason, and the usual standards of academic inquiry.
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Alleging a constitutive weakness in established scholarship without the necessity of providing proof to support it, therefore, appears to define the critical posture.
centricity of terrorism studies serves as a platform for further unsubstantiated accusations about the state of the discipline. Jackson
and his fellow editors, along with later claims by Zulaika and Douglass, and Booth, again assert that orthodox analysts rarely bother to interview or engage
with those involved in 'terrorist' activity (p. 2) or spend any time on the ground in the areas most affected by conflict (p. 74). Given that Booth and Jackson spend most of their
time on the ground in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, not a notably terror rich environment if we discount the operations of Meibion Glyndwr who would as a matter of principle avoid pob sais like
Jackson and Booth, this seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. It also overlooks the fact that Studies in Conflict and Terrorism first advertised the problem of talking to terrorists in
2001 and has gone to great lengths to rectify this lacuna, if it is one, regularly publishing articles by analysts with first-hand experience of groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Jemaah
Islamiyah.
A consequence of avoiding primary research, it is further alleged, leads conventional analysts uncritically to apply psychological and problem-solving approaches to their object of study. This
propensity, Booth maintains, occasions another unrecognized weakness in traditional terrorism research, namely, an inability to engage with the particular dynamics of the political world (p.
70). Analogously, Stohl claims that the US and English [sic] media exhibit a tendency to psychologize terrorist acts, which reduces structural and political problems into issues of individual
pathology (p. 7). Preoccupied with this problem-solving, psychopathologizing methodology, terrorism analysts have lost the capacity to reflect on both their practice and their research ethics.
By contrast, the critical approach is not only self-reflective, but also and, for good measure, self-reflexive. In fact, the editors and a number of the journal's contributors use these terms
interchangeably, treating a reflection and a reflex as synonyms (p. 2). A cursory encounter with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary would reveal that they are not. Despite this linguistically challenged
misidentification, reflexivity is made to do a lot of work in the critical idiom. Reflexivity, the editors inform us, requires a capacity to challenge dominant knowledge and understandings, is
sensitive to the politics of labelling is transparent about its own values and political standpoints, adheres to a set of responsible research ethics, and is committed to a broadly defined notion of
emancipation (p. 2). This covers a range of not very obviously related but critically approved virtues. Let us examine what reflexivity involves as Stohl, Guelke, Zulaika and Douglass, Burke,
and Booth explore, somewhat repetitively, its implications.
Reflexive or Defective?
to challenge dominant knowledge and understanding and retain sensitivity to labels leads inevitably to a fixation
with language, discourse, the ambiguity of the noun, terror, and its political use and abuse. Terrorism, Booth enlightens the reader unremarkably, is a
Firstly,
politically loaded term (p. 72). Meanwhile, Zulaika and Douglass consider terror the dominant tropic [sic] space in contemporary political and journalistic discourse (p. 30). Faced with the
serious challenge (Booth p. 72) and pejorative connotation that the noun conveys, critical terrorologists turn to deconstruction and bring the full force of postmodern obscurantism to bear on its
use. Thus the editors proclaim that terrorism is one of the most powerful signifiers in contemporary discourse. There is, moreover, a yawning gap between the 'terrorism' signifier and the
actual acts signified (p. 1). [V]irtually all of this activity, the editors pronounce ex cathedra, refers to the response to acts of political violence not the violence itself (original italics) (p. 1).
Here again they offer no evidence for this curious assertion and assume, it would seem, all conventional terrorism studies address issues of homeland security.
In keeping with this critical orthodoxy that he has done much to define, Anthony Burke also asserts the instability (and thoroughly politicized nature) of the unifying master-terms of our field:
'terror' and 'terrorism' (p. 38). To address this he contends that a critical stance requires us to keep this radical instability and inherent politicization of the concept of terrorism at the forefront of
its analysis. Indeed, without a conscious reflexivity about the most basic definition of the object, our discourse will not be critical at all (p. 38). More particularly, drawing on a jargon-infused
amalgam of Michel Foucault's identification of a relationship between power and knowledge, the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School's critique of democratic false consciousness, mixed with the
existentialism of the Third Reich's favorite philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Burke questions the question. This intellectual potpourri apparently enables the critical theorist to question the
ontological status of a 'problem' before any attempt to map out, study or resolve it (p. 38).
Interestingly, Burke, Booth, and the symposistahood deny that there might be objective data about violence or that a properly focused strategic study of terrorism would not include any
prescriptive goodness or rightness of action. While a strategic theorist or a skeptical social scientist might claim to consider only the complex relational situation that involves as well as the
actions, the attitude of human beings to them, the critical theorist's radical questioning of language denies this possibility.
The critical approach to language and its deconstruction of an otherwise useful, if imperfect, political vocabulary has been
the source of much confusion and inconsequentiality in the practice of the social sciences. It dates from the relativist pall that French
radical post structural philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, cast over the social and historical sciences in order to demonstrate that social and
The problem with the critical approach is that, as the Australian philosopher John Anderson demonstrated, to achieve a genuine study one must either investigate the facts that are talked about or
the fact that they are talked about in a certain way. More precisely, as J.L. Mackie explains, if we concentrate on the uses of language we fall between these two stools, and we are in danger of
taking our discoveries about manners of speaking as answers to questions about what is there. 2 Indeed, in
sees critical theory not only exposing the dubious links between power and knowledge in established
terrorism studies, but also offering an ideological agenda that transforms the face of global politics . [C]ritical knowledge, Booth declares, involves
understandings of the social world that attempt to stand outside prevailing structures, processes, ideologies and orthodoxies while recognizing that all conceptualizations within the ambit of
sociality derive from particular social/historical conditions (original italics) (p. 78). Helpfully, Booth, assuming the manner of an Old Testament prophet, provides his critical disciples with
big-picture navigation aids (original italics) (p. 66) to achieve this higher knowledge. Booth promulgates fifteen commandments (as Clemenceau remarked of Woodrow Wilson's nineteen
Critical
theorists thus should avoid exceptionalizing the study of terrorism, recognize that states can be
agents of terrorism, and keep the long term in sight. Unexceptional advice to be sure and long recognized by more
points, in a somewhat different context, God Almighty only gave us ten). When not stating the staggeringly obvious, the Ken Commandments are hopelessly contradictory.
3
traditional students of terrorism. The critical student, if not fully conversant with critical doublethink, however, might find the fact that she or he
lives within Powerful theories that are constitutive of political, social, and economic life (6th Commandment, p. 71), sits uneasily with Booth's
concluding injunction to stand outside prevailing ideologies (p. 78).
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Their root cause arguments are a logical fallacy and their intervention
arguments are backwards prefer the 1acs scholarship to their agenda
Jones and Smith, 9 - * University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia AND ** King's College, University of London,
London, UK (David and M.L.R.,We're All Terrorists Now: Criticalor HypocriticalStudies on Terrorism?, Studies in Conflict &
Terrorism, Volume 32, Issue 4 April 2009 , pages 292 302, Taylor and Francis)
At the core of this critical, ethicist, relativism therefore lies a syllogism that holds all violence is terror: Western
states use violence, therefore, Western states are terrorist . Further, the greater terrorist uses the greater violence:
Western governments exercise the greater violence. Therefore, it is the liberal democracies rather than Al Qaeda
that are the greater terrorists. In its desire to empathize with the transformative ends, if not the means of terrorism generally and Islamist terror in particular, critical
theory reveals itself as a form of Marxist unmasking. Thus, for Booth terror has multiple forms (original italics) and the real terror is economic, the product it would seem of global
capitalism (p. 75). Only the engagee intellectual academic finding in deconstructive criticism the philosophical weapons that reveal the illiberal neo-conservative purpose informing the
conventional study of terrorism and the democratic state's prosecution of counterterrorism can identify the real terror lurking behind the manipulation of the politics of fear (p. 75). Moreover,
Booth, Burke,
and the editors contend that the only solution to the world-historical crisis that is facing human society globally (p. 76) is universal human
emancipation. This, according to Burke, is the normative end that critical theory pursues. Following Jurgen Habermas, the godfather of critical theory, terrorism is really a form of
the resolution of this condition of escalating violence requires not any strategic solution that creates security as the basis for development whether in London or Kabul. Instead,
distorted communication. The solution to this problem of failed communication resides not only in the improvement of living conditions, and the political taming of unbounded capitalism, but
also in the telos of mutual understanding. Only through this telos with its strong normative bias towards non violence (p. 43) can a universal condition of peace and justice transform the
. In other words, the only ethical solution to terrorism is conversation: sitting around an un-coerced table
presided over by Kofi Annan, along with Ken Booth, Osama bin Laden, President Obama, and some European Union pacifist sandalista, a
transcendental communicative reason will emerge to promulgate norms of transformative justice. As Burke enunciates, the panacea of un-coerced communication
would establish a secularism that might create an enduring architecture of basic shared values (p. 46). In the end, un-coerced norm projection is not concerned with the
globe
not only compounds the logical errors that permeate critical theory,
it advances an ultimately utopian agenda under the guise of soi-disant cosmopolitanism where one somewhat vaguely
recognizes the human interconnection and mutual vulnerability to nature, the cosmos and each other (p. 47) and no doubt bursts into
spontaneous chanting of Kumbaya. In analogous visionary terms, Booth defines real security as emancipation in a way that denies any definitional rigor to either
term. The struggle against terrorism is, then, a struggle for emancipation from the oppression of political violence everywhere. Consequently, in this Manichean struggle for global emancipation
further maintains that universities have a crucial role to play. This also is something of a concern for
those who do not share the critical vision, as university international relations departments are not now, it would seem, in business to pursue
dispassionate analysis but instead are to serve as cheerleaders for this critically inspired vision. Overall, the journal's fallacious commitment to emancipation
against the real terror of Western democracy, Booth
as it is conceals a deep intolerance notable in the contempt with which many of the contributors to the journal appear to hold Western politicians
is the exploitation of this oughtistic style of thinking that leads the critic into a Humpty Dumpty world where
words mean exactly what the critical theorist chooses them to meanneither more nor less. However, in order to justify their disciplinary niche
they have to insist on the failure of established modes of terrorism study. Having identified a source of government grants and academic perquisites, critical studies in fact
and the Western media.6 It
does not deal with the notion of terrorism as such, but instead the manner in which the Western liberal democratic state has supposedly manipulated the use of violence by non-state actors in
order to other minority communities and create a politics of fear. Critical Studies and Strategic TheoryA Missed Opportunity Of course, the doubtful contribution of critical theory by no
means implies that all is well with what one might call conventional terrorism studies. The subject area has in the past produced superficial assessments that have done little to contribute to an
informed understanding of conflict. This is a point readily conceded by John Horgan and Michael Boyle who put A Case Against 'Critical Terrorism Studies' (pp. 51-74). Although they do not
seek to challenge the agenda, assumptions, and contradictions inherent in the critical approach, their contribution to the new journal distinguishes itself by actually having a well-organized and
well-supported argument. The authors' willingness to acknowledge deficiencies in some terrorism research shows that
critical self-reflection
is already present
in existing terrorism studies. It is ironic, in fact, that the most clearly reflective, original, and critical contribution in the first edition should come from established
terrorism researchers who critique the critical position. Interestingly, the specter haunting both conventional and critical terrorism studies is that both assume that terrorism is an existential
phenomenon, and thus has causes and solutions. Burke makes this explicit: The inauguration of this journal, he declares, indeed suggests broad agreement that there is a phenomenon called
terrorism (p. 39). Yet this is not the only way of looking at terrorism. For a strategic theorist the notion of terrorism does not exist as an independent phenomenon. It is an abstract noun. More
precisely, it is merely a tacticthe creation of fear for political endsthat can be employed by any social actor, be it state or non-state, in any context, without any necessary moral value being
involved. Ironically, then, strategic theory offers a far more critical perspective on terrorism than do the perspectives advanced in this journal. Guelke, for
example, propounds a curiously orthodox standpoint when he asserts: to describe an act as one of terrorism, without the qualification of quotation marks to indicate the author's distance from
absolutely illegitimate violence. Intriguingly, Stohl, Booth, and Burke also imply that a strategic understanding forms part of their critical viewpoint. Booth, for instance, argues in one of his
commandments that terrorism should be seen as a conscious human choice. Few strategic theorists would disagree. Similarly, Burke feels that there does appear to be a consensus that terrorism
is a form of instrumental political violence (p. 38). The problem for the contributors to this volume is that they cannot emancipate themselves from the very orthodox assumption that the word
terrorism is pejorative. That may be the popular understanding of the term, but inherently terrorism conveys no necessary connotation of moral condemnation. Is terrorism a form of warfare,
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wholly inaccurate (p. 38). Strategic theory has never excluded state-directed terrorism as an object of study, and neither for that matter, as Horgan and Boyle point out, have more
conventional studies of terrorism. Yet, Burke offersas a critical revelationthat the strategic intent behind the US bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, Israel's bombing of Lebanon, or
the sanctions against Iraq is also terrorist. He continues: My point is not to remind us that states practise terror, but to show how mainstream strategic doctrines are terrorist in these terms and
undermine any prospect of achieving the normative consensus if such terrorism is to be reduced and eventually eliminated (original italics) (p. 41). This is not merely confused, it displays
remarkable nescience on the part of one engaged in teaching the next generation of graduates from the Australian Defence Force Academy. Strategic theory conventionally recognizes that actions
on the part of state or non-state actors that aim to create fear (such as the allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II or the nuclear deterrent posture of Mutually Assured Destruction) can
be terroristic in nature.7 The problem for critical analysts like Burke is that they impute their own moral valuations to the term terror. Strategic theorists do not. Moreover, the statement that this
traditional terrorism research than critical theorists would possibly like to admit. These reviewers agree: they are two sides of the same coin. Conclusion In the looking glass world of critical
terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast, critical theory's ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive
gaze reveals that we are all terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors who have recourse to violence for whatever motive. Despite their intolerable othering by media and
governments, terrorists are really no different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state. Terrorists therefore
deserve empathy and they must be discursively engaged.
At the core of this understanding sits a radical pacifism and an idealism that requires not the status quo
but communication and human emancipation. Until this radical post-national utopia arrives both force and the discourse of evil must be
abandoned and instead therapy and un-coerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama Boston Legal Judge Brown perennially
referred to the vague, irrelevant, jargon-ridden statements of lawyers as jibber jabber. The Aberystwyth-based school of critical
internationalist utopianism that increasingly dominates the study of international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order
incoherence that may be termed Aber jabber. The pages of the journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism are its natural home.
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AT threat inflation
Threat inflation would get our authors fired
Ravenal 9 [Earl C., distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies @ Cato, is professor emeritus of the Georgetown University
School of Foreign Service. He is an expert on NATO, defense strategy, and the defense budget. He is the author of Designing Defense for a New
World Order. What's Empire Got to Do with It? The Derivation of America's Foreign Policy. Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Politics and Society 21.1 (2009) 21-75]
The underlying notion of the security bureaucracies . . . looking for new enemies is a threadbare
concept that has somehow taken hold across the political spectrum, from the radical left (viz. Michael Klare [1981], who refers to a threat bank), to the liberal
center (viz. Robert H. Johnson [1997], who dismisses most alleged threats as improbable dangers), to libertarians (viz. Ted Galen Carpenter [1992], Vice
President for Foreign and Defense Policy of the Cato Institute, who wrote a book entitled A Search for Enemies). What
of other nations. Sub-rational models (such as public choice) fail to take into account even a partial dedication to the national interest (or even
the possibility that the national interest may be honestly misconceived in more paro- chial terms). In contrast, an officials role connects the
individual to the (state-level) process, and moderates the (perhaps otherwise) self-seeking impulses of the individual. Role-derived behavior tends to
be formalized and codified; relatively transparent and at least peer-reviewed, so as to be consistent with expectations; surviving the
particular individual and trans- mitted to successors and ancillaries; measured against a standard and thus corrigible; defined in terms of the
performed function and therefore derived from the state function; and uncorrrupt, because personal cheating and even egregious aggrandizement
are conspicuously discouraged. My own direct observation suggests that defense decision-makers attempt to frame the structure of the problems that
they try to solve on the basis of the most
accurate intelligence. They make it their business to know where the threats
come from. Thus, threats are not socially constructed (even though, of course, some values are). A major reason for the rationality, and the
objectivity, of the process is that much security planning is done, not in vaguely undefined circum- stances that offer scope for idiosyncratic, subjective behavior, but
rather in structured and reviewed organizational frameworks. Non-rationalities (which are bad for understanding and prediction) tend to get filtered out.
People
are fired for presenting skewed analysis and for making bad predictions. This is because something important is riding on the
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causal analysis and the contingent prediction. For these reasons, public choice does not have the feel of reality to many critics who have
participated in the structure of defense decision-making. In that structure , obvious, and even not-so-obvious,rent-seeking would not only be
shameful; it would present a severe
Below is a list of the articles and posts I have written to date on outside websites:
In two related articles, extreme leftists Micah Zenko
and Cohens claims that the world is super secure from Americas
standpoint is probably the most ridiculous and laughable of all , because it was made at a time when the
122
world is, as JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey has pointed out, the most dangerous in his lifetime, and indeed the most
dangerous since World War II. China is arming at an alarming rate , increasing its military budget by double digits
every year for the last 22 years, acquiring large quantities of weapons that can keep the US military out of entire
combat theaters, and behaving ever more aggressively towards other Pacific Rim countries . Russia is
rearming with huge weapon orders, numerous missile tests, bomber exercises, intrusions into US airspace ,
and numerous nuclear weapon usage threats. Iran is speeding towards a nuclear weapon. North Korea
already has a dozen of them, and has received ICBMs whose TELs (if not the missiles themselves) were produced in China. Venezuela is
arming itself with advanced Russian conventional weapons while allowing Iran to build an IRBM base on its soil. And yet, these two anti-defense
hacks claim that the world is super secure from the US standpoint. Their two articles are utterly ridiculous, and the Council on Foreign
Relations has utterly discredited itself by publishing their screeds in its Foreign Affairs bimonthly. In FAs pages, Paul D. Miller has ably
countered Zenkos and Cohens claims. But he has not stated the fact that the overseas threats hes listed, and other threats to US interests, are
dangers to America just as much as they threaten Americas allies. Millers argument is essentially that these regimes, as well as terrorist groups,
threaten Americas allies and thus the US. Unmentioned is the fact that these regimes and terrorist groups pose a threat to America itself first and
foremost. Thus, Miller correctly accuses Zenko and Cohen of narrowing down the definition of a threat to something that threatens US citizens
bodily, but he does not mention that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do threaten US citizens bodily whether they be in the US or abroad
and, with the temporary exception of Iran, pose a grave threat to the US homeland. Iran will, too, once it acquires an ICBM, which US intel says
it will do by 2015. No,
threats to America are not being vastly exaggerated. They are being vastly
UNDERESTIMATED. And that will bring about disastrous results for the US, because intellectual
disarmament always precedes actual disarmament.
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