AT: HEG ADVANTAGE

Heg Adv 1NC

Predominance theory fails to explain the post-world war II era history proves
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part1-
CausesOfPeace.pdf
As with other realist claims, thereare reasons for skepticism about the peace through preponderance thesis. First,
if it were true, we might expect that the most powerful states would experience the least warfare. However,
since the end of World War II, the opposite has in fact been the case. Between 1946 and 2008, the four countries
that had been involved in the greatest number of international conflicts were France, the UK, the US, and
Russia/USSR.19 Yet, these were four of the most powerful conventional military powers in the worldand they
all had nuclear weapons.
The fact that major powers tend to be more involved in international conflicts than minor powers is not surprising. Fighting
international wars requires the capacity to project substantial military power across national frontiers and often over very long
distances. Few countries have this capacity; major powers have it by definition.
But there is a more serious challenge to the preponderance thesis. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s,
nationalist struggles against colonial powers were the most frequent form of international conflict. The
failure of the far more powerful colonial powers to prevail in these conflicts poses a serious challenge to
the core assumptions of preponderance theoriesand marked a remarkable historical change.
During most of the history of colonial expansion and rule there had been little effective resistance from the
inhabitants of the territories that were being colonized. Indeed, as one analyst of the wars of colonial conquest noted, by
and large, it would seem true that what made the machinery of European troops so successful was that native troops saw fit to die,
with glory, with honor, en masse, and in vain. 2
The ease of colonial conquest, the subsequent crushing military defeats imposed on the Axis powers by the superior military industrial
might of the Allies in World War II, and the previous failure of the UNs predecessor, the League of Nations, to stop Fascist
aggression all served to reinforce the idea that preponderancesuperiority in military capabilitywas the key both to peace through
deterrence and victory in war.
But in the post-World War II world, new strategic realities raised serious questions about assumptions
regarding the effectiveness of conventional military superiority. In particular, the outcomes of the wars of
colonial liberation, the US defeat in Vietnam, and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan demonstrated that in some
types of conflict, military preponderance could neither deter nationalist forces nor be used to defeat them. The
outcomes of these conflicts posed a major challenge for preponderance theories.
Not only did the vastly superior military capabilities of the colonial powers fail to deter the nationalist rebels from going to war but in
every case it was the nationalist forces that prevailed. The colonial powers withdrew and the colonies gained
independence. Military preponderance was strategically irrelevant.
Writing about US strategy in Vietnam six years before the end of the war, Henry Kissinger noted: We fought a military war; our opponents fought a
political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal
maxims of guerrilla warfare: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. 21
For the nationalist forces, military engagements were never intended to defeat the external power militarilythat was impossible. The strategy was rather
to seek the progressive attrition of the metropoles political capability to wage warwill in the language of classical strategy.22 In such conflicts, if the
human, economic, and reputational costs to the external power increase with little prospect of victory, support for the war in the metropole will steadily
erode and the pressure to withdraw will inexorably increase.
But asymmetric political/military strategies were not the only reason that relatively weak nationalist forces prevailed over militarily preponderant colonial
powers in the post-World War II era. In the aftermath of World War II, there had been a major shift in global norms with respect to the legitimacy of
colonial rulea shift that made crushing nationalist rebellions politically more difficult for the colonial powers.
In 1942 Winston Churchill had defiantly declared that I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British
Empire. 23 Less than 20 years later, another British prime minister, Harold MacMillan, sounded a very different note: The wind of change is blowing
through this [African] continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and
our national policies must take account of it. 24
The wind of change made crushing anticolonial uprisings fought in the name of self-determination politically difficult for the colonial powers who
were after all signatories to the UN Charter that had strongly proclaimed the right to self-determination.
Understanding this shift in global norms helps explain the failure of the colonial powers to prevail in the wars of colonial liberation.
The anticolonial nationalists had history on their side, plus international political, and sometimes material, support from the US, from European countries
that were not colonial powers, and, of course, from the Soviet Union. In many cases power was transferred to nationalist movements without any
violencefighting was often more about the timing of independence than its principle.
Traditional realist peace through strength theories,
with their focus on the importance of material capability in
deterring war, and winning if deterrence fails, and their deep skepticism about the importance of ideas as
drivers of change in the international system, have never been able to provide compelling explanations for
the strategic successes of militarily weak insurgents in national liberation wars.
Hegemony doesnt solve global conflicts
Mearsheimer 2011 (John J., R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University
of Chicago, The National Interest, Imperial by Design, lexis)
One year later, Charles Krauthammer emphasized in "The Unipolar Moment" that the United States had emerged from
the Cold War as by far the most powerful country on the planet.2 He urged American leaders not to be reticent about using that power
"to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them." Krauthammer's
advice fit neatly with Fukuyama's vision of the future: the United States should take the lead in bringing democracy to less developed
countries the world over. After all, that shouldn't be an especially difficult task given that America had awesome power and the
cunning of history on its side. U.S. grand strategy has followed this basic prescription for the past twenty years, mainly because most
policy makers inside the Beltway have agreed with the thrust of Fukuyama's and Krauthammer's early analyses. The results, however,
have been disastrous. The United States has been at war for a startling two out of every three years since 1989, and there is no end in
sight. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of world events knows, countries that continuously fight wars invariably build
powerful national-security bureaucracies that undermine civil liberties and make it difficult to hold leaders accountable for their
behavior; and they invariably end up adopting ruthless policies normally associated with brutal dictators. The Founding Fathers
understood this problem, as is clear from James Madison's observation that "no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare." Washington's pursuit of policies like assassination, rendition and torture over the past decade, not to mention the
weakening of the rule of law at home, shows that their fears were justified. To make matters worse, the United States is now
engaged in protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have so far cost well over a trillion dollars and resulted in around forty-
seven thousand American casualties. The pain and suffering inflicted on Iraq has been enormous. Since the war began in March 2003,
more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, roughly 2 million Iraqis have left the country and 1.7 million more
have been internally displaced. Moreover, the American military is not going to win either one of these conflicts ,
despite all the phony talk about how the "surge" has worked in Iraq and how a similar strategy can produce another miracle in
Afghanistan. We may well be stuck in both quagmires for years to come, in fruitless pursuit of victory. The United States has
also been unable to solve three other major foreign-policy problems. Washington has worked overtime-with no
success-to shut down Iran's uranium-enrichment capability for fear that it might lead to Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons.
And the United States, unable to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons in the first place,
now seems incapable of compelling Pyongyang to give them up . Finally, every post-Cold War administration
has tried and failed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; all indicators are that this problem will
deteriorate further as the West Bank and Gaza are incorporated into a Greater Israel. The unpleasant truth is that the United
States is in a world of trouble today on the foreign-policy front, and this state of affairs is only likely to get worse in
the next few years, as Afghanistan and Iraq unravel and the blame game escalates to poisonous levels. Thus, it is hardly surprising that
a recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that "looking forward 50 years, only 33 percent of Americans think the
United States will continue to be the world's leading power." Clearly, the heady days of the early 1990s have given way
to a pronounced pessimism.

US leadership is unsustainable and mass suffering, militarism and conflict

Boggs 2005 (Carl, Professor of Social Science at National University, Imperial Delusions p. x-
xiii)
As, the United States moves to reshape the geopolitical terrain of the world, 'Nith hundreds of military bases in 130 countries added to
hundreds of installations stretched across its own territorial confines, the vast
majority of Americans refuse to
admit their nation possesses anything resembling an Empire. Yet U.S. global expansion is far more
ambitious than anything pursued or even imagined by previous imperial powers. It might be argued that the "new
militarism" is rooted in a "new imperialism" that aspires to nothing short of world
domination, a project earlier outlined by its exuberant proponents and given new life by the Bush II presidency, which has set
out to remove all vestiges of ideological and material impediments to worldwide corporate
power-by every means at its disposal. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the United States, its strong
fusion of national exceptionalism, patriotic chauvinism, and neoliberal fundamentalism
fully in place, has evolved into something of an outlaw, rogue state--the kind of fearsome
entity conjured up by its own incessant propaganda. Celebrations of power, violence, and
conquest long associated with warfare inevitably take its architects and practitioners into
the dark side of human experience, into a zone marked by unbridled fanaticism and
destructive ventures requiring a culture of lies, duplicity, and double standards. Militarism
as a tool of global power ultimately leads to a jettisoning of fixed and universal values, the
corruption of human purpose, the degradation of those who embrace it, and finally social
disintegration. As Chris Hedges writes in liVtzr Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: "War never creates the society or harmony
we desire, especially the harmony we briefly attain during wartime."1 Here the critical observer is entitled to ask
whether the staggering costs and consequences of U.S. imperial domination can possibly be
worth any of the goals or ideals invoked as their political justification. We seem to have
reached a point where U.S. leaders see themselves as uniquely entitled to carry out warfare
and imperial agendas simply owing to the country's status as the world's lone superpower and its preponderance of military
force. In the wake of 9/11 and the onset of Bush's war against terrorism, the trajectory of U.S. militarism
encounters fewer limits in time and space as it becomes amorphous and endless, galvanized
by the threat of far-flung enemies.As at the height of the cold war, the power structure embellishes an image of the
globe where two apocalyptic forces-good versus evil, civilized versus primitiv~e locked in a batde to the death. U.S.
expansionism is thereby justified through its quest, its apparent need, for an increase in
both domestic and global power-a quest destined to bring the superpower to work against even its own interestsc
Empires across history have disintegrated on the shoals of their boundless elite hubris,
accelerated by global overreach, internal decay, and collapse oflegirimacy, and there is little
reason to think that Pax Americana will be able to avoid the same fate. While a feverish
nationalism might sustain elite domestic legitimacy temporarily, it cannot secure the same
kind of popular support internationally, any more than could a United States-managed world
economy that sows its own dysfunctions in the form of mounting chaos, poverty. and
inequality. To the extent the United States is determined to set itself above the rest of the
world, brandishing technologically awesome military power and threatening planetary survival in the process, it winds up
subverting its own requirements for international stability and hegemony. In a perpetual struggle to
legitimate their actions, American leaders invoke the familiar and trusted, but increasingly hollow, pretext of exporting democracy and
human rights. With the eclipse of the Communist threat, U.S. foreign policy followed the path of "humanitarian intervention,"
cynically employing seductive motifs like multiculturalism, human rights, and democratic pluralism-all naturally designed for public
consumption. Few knowledgeable observers outside the United States take such rhetoric seriously, so its
propagandistic
merit is confined mainly to the domestic sphere, although even here its credibility is waning.
"Democracy" becomes another self-serving facade for naked U.S. geopolitical interests, even as its popular credibility has become
nearly exhausted, all the more with the fraudulent claims invoked to justify the war on Iraq. Strikingly, the concept of democracy
(global or domestic) receives litde critical scrutiny within American political discourse, the mass media, or even academia; the
de~ocratic ~umanitarian motives of U.S. foreign policy have become an arncle of fa.tth, and not just among neoconservatives. Yet
even the most cursory inventory of the postwar historical record demonstrates a pervasive legacy of U.S. support for authoritarian
regimes across the globe and a rathe_r flagr~t contempt for democracy where it hinders (imputed) nanonal mterests. Throughout the
Middle East and Central Asia the United States has established close ties with a variety of dictators and monarchs willing to
collaborate with American geopolitical and neoliberal agendas. The
recent armed interventions in the Balkans,
Mghanistan, and Iraq have left behind poor, chaotic, violence-ridden societies far removed
from even the most generous definition of pluralist democracy. The case of Iraq is particularly instructive.
Framing "preemptive" war as a strike against Saddarn Hussein's tyranny and for "liberation;' the Bush administration-its assertions
regarding terrorist links, weapons of mass destruction, and inuninent Iraqi military threats shown to be liesscandalously trumpets the
old myths while corporate boondoggles become more transparent by the day. The recent experience of U.S. involvement in Iraq
reveals everything but democratic intent: support for Hussein throu~hout the 1980s, including his catastrophic wa.t against Iran; two
devastanng military invasions; more than a decade of United States-led economic sanctions costing hundreds of thousands of lives;
surveillance and bombings spanning more than a decade; repeated coup and assassination plots~ cynic~ use of the UN inspections
process for intelligence and covert operatlons; atd to terrorist insurgents; an illegal, costly, and dictatorial military occupation. As
elsewhere, U.S. ambitions in Iraq were never about democracy but were and are a function of resource wars, geopolitical strategy, and
domestic pressures exerted by a powerful war machine.
The Iraqi disaster, occurring fully within the general
trajectory of American global power, illuminates perhaps even more the fragility and
vulnerability of U.S. hegemony than its potency or invincibility, more the weaknesses than
the strengths. A resurgent militarism is both cause and effect of the deepening crisis of
legitimacy that befalls domestic and international realms of U.S. imperial power. As I argue in
the final chapter, the resort to overpowering military force in the service of expansionary U.S.
economic and geopolitical goals is likely to be counterproductive, a sign of eventual if not
immediate decline. Armed interventions, no matter how so phisticated their technology and
logistics, cannot permit elites to shape world politics as they desire where mass support for that military
action is weak or lacking. Great-power operations are bound to provoke challenges from subordinate or competing nations, not to
mention blowback leading to local resistance and terrorism, thus restricting superpower maneuverability. And lopsided domestic
spending priorities favoring a bloated Pentagon budget lead to accelerated decline of the public infrastructure: health services,
education, housing, the environment, and broad social programs vital to the real strength of any society. Increasing assaults from
Republi=s and Democrats on "government bureaucracy" at the very moment allocations for military, law enforcement, surveillance,
and intelligence functions so dramatically increase will ouly hasten this downward trend, eventually calling the imperial mission itself
into question. Historical experience suggests that an elite resort to coercive power works against
the prospects for strong hegemony, notably where a legitimation crisis. is already present,
since hegemony depends more on economic well-being, political stability, culnnal
dynamism, and widespread civic engagement than on brute force. An elite preference for military action
and authoritarian rule weakens the political, cconorrric, and cultural imperatives of effective governance. Those imperatives were
adequately satisfied in the wake of 911, but the situation changed radically once Bush embraced the war on terrorism as a launching
pad for the Iraq venture, at which point the ideological gulf between the lone superpower and the rest of the world deepened. We
now face a predicament where the new militarism, taken up ;vith zeal by virtually every
leading American politician, has through its awesome war-making power already
contributed to destabilization of the same global system it aspires to dominate.

Imperialism necessitates endless systems of war and global inequality

Foster research at the North South Institute 2003 John Imperial America and War, Monthly
Review, May 28 http://www.monthlyreview.org/0503jbf.htm
At present, U.S. imperialism appears particularly blatant because it is linked directly with war in this way, and
points to an endless series of wars in the future to achieve essentially the same ends. However, if we wish to
understand the underlying forces at work, we should not let this heightened militarism and aggression distract us
from the inner logic of imperialism, most evident in the rising gap in income and wealth between rich and
poor countries, and in the net transfers of economic surplus from periphery to center that make this
possible. The growing polarization of wealth and poverty between nations (a polarization that exists within nations
as well) is the systems crowning achievement on the world stage . It is also what is ultimately at issue in the struggle
against modern imperialism. As Magdoff argues in Imperialism without Colonies, there is an essential oneness to economic,
political, and military domination under capitalism. Those seeking to oppose the manifestations of
imperialism must recognize that it is impossible to challenge any one of these effectively without calling
into question all the othersand hence the entire system.

Militarism environmental destruction and extinction

Sanders professor of History of Ideas and English at Pitzer College 2009 Barry Online Excerpt
from The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism
http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/book-excerpt-from-the-green-zone-the-
environmental-costs-of-militarism/
In a nation like ours, where military might trumps diplomatic finesse, the supreme irony may be that the planet, and not human beings,
will provide the most stringent corrective to political overreaching. The
earth can no longer absorb the
punishment of war, especially on a scale and with a ferocity that only the wealthiest, most
powerful country in the worldno, in historyknows how to deliver. While the United States military
directed its Operation Iraqi Freedom solely against the Iraqis, no onenot a single citizen in any part of the globehas escaped its
fallout. Whenwe declare war on a foreign nation, we now also declare war on the Earth, on
the soil and plants and animals, the water and wind and people, in the most far-reaching
and deeply infecting ways. A bomb dropped on Iraq explodes around the world. We have no way of containing the fallout.
Technology fails miserably here. War insinuates itself, like an aberrant gene and, left unchecked, has the capacity for destroying the
Earths complex and sometimes fragile system.
So we can act like honorable and conscientious citizens, conserving all the energy we can.
We can feel good about all those glossy magazine ads from Shell and Exxon Mobil telling us how their
companies now treasure the environment, producing their fuels in the cleanest ways possible. We can fall for
Detroits latest news, too, convincing us of a revolutionary breakthrough in fuel efficiency: 300 horsepower cars that get still 30 or 32
miles per gallon on the highway. But thats just insanity wearing a green disguise. None of those
advertised boasts and claims really matter. They still cling to fossil fuels and further our campaign to kill off
everything on the planet with our addictive need. But, even if those claims did make a slight difference, even
if we could slow down global warming, ultimately it would not matter. For, in the
background, lurking and ever-present, a giant vampire silently sucks out of the Earth all
the oil it possibly can, and no one stops it. And so heres the awful truth: even if every person, every
automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be
headed head first and at full speed toward total disaster for one major reason. The
militarythat voracious vampireproduces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire
globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most immanent danger of extinction.
As we contemplate America in the opening years of the twenty-first century, then, let us reconsider George Washingtons farewell
warning that overgrown military establishmentsunder any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded
as particularly hostile to republican liberty. Today, our own military
has grown beyond an institution hostile
to liberty and has wrapped its arms of death around life itself. And, from all the available evidence, it will
not let go. Unlike most animals, the military has no surrender mechanism. Unless we all summon the
strength to confront the militaryno easy taskit will continue to work its evil.
 Predominance Theory Wrong Ext
Predominance theory is flawed extend the Human Security Report Ev their
theory has no response to historical reality nuclear and conventional
deterrence have failed to prevent international violence or to win when conflict
erupts history is filled with examples of revolutionary actors defeating much
stronger forces even if they win that hegemony would deter great power
wars well win that lesser power wars are inevitable which decreases our
deterrence capabilities
AND Dont trust their studies quantitative data and analysis is too limited to
dictate policy prefer historical trends
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-
Overview.pdf
Quantitative researchers are well aware of these challenges, of course, and a number of promising initiatives are underway that seek to
address them. But some of the limitations are inherent in the nature of the data and models that quantitative
researchers have to work with.
Here we simply note a few of the more critical methodological problems:
*Quantitative datasets do not include direct measures of fear, hatred, grievance, humiliation, or feelings of
identity and solidarity, despite the fact that case-study research indicates these variables can play a critical
role in catalyzing political violence. Quantitative researchers are well aware of this limitation, of course, but there are
simply no sources of usable data on attitudes and beliefs for the vast majority of country-years in the
conflict datasets. The use of indirect proxy measures for psychological variables like grievance has been
widely criticized.
*Quantitative models struggle in trying to deal with the issue of agencythe capacity of individuals,
particularly political leaders, to make choices and act on them. Agency can obviously play a critical role in
transitions from peace to warand war to peace. Researchers using conflict models have little choice but
to ignore agencythere is simply no way to collect cross-national data on 100-plus countries over 50 or
more years on what decisions were made and why.
*The structural dataGDP per capita, infant mortality rates, etc.that conflict models rely on are slow-changing
and are thus rarely able to account for large short-term shifts in global or regional conflict trends. As noted
previously, the most robust finding in the quantitative literature is that the risk of conflict shrinks as incomes rise. But this finding
cannot explain the rapid decline in conflict numbers in the post-Cold War period.
*The standard unit of analysis in most conflict models is the country-year, and here researchers make two
assumptions that are unrealistic. First, it is assumed that observations in successive country-years are
independent of each otherclearly, in many cases they are not. Second, the models assume that increases or
decreases in the risk of war can be explained solely in terms of socio-economic and other changes within
countries. This assumption is often unrealistic because the conflict dynamics of civil war do not stop at
national boundariesthe interconnections between political violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan being an
obvious case in point.
*Statistics for poor countrieswhere most wars take placeare mostly inadequate and frequently terrible.
This in part explains why the number of countries included in different conflict datasets varies so widely. The different
composition of the datasets in turn explains some of the variance in findings.
The limitations of contemporary conflict models and datasets go a long way towards explaining why
researchers have produced such widely divergent findings about the causal impacts of ethnicity, inequality,
grievances, repression, democracy, economic growth, and dependence on primary commodities.
 Heg Doesnt Solve Ext
HEGEMONY DOESNT SOLVE CONFLICT extend Mearsheimer Iran, North
Korea and Middle East conflict all prove the US is declining as a global problem
solver
Their evidence shouldnt be trusted it over values US influence and is a scare
tactic used to justify military intervention
Christopher Layne (Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service
at Texas A&M University) 2006 The Peace of Illusions p 176-7
A second contention advanced by proponents of American hegemony is that the United States cannot withdraw from Eurasia because
a great power war there could shape the post conflict international system in ways harmful to U.S. interests. Hence, the United States
"could suffer few economic losses during a war, or even benefit somewhat, and still find the postwar environment quite costly to its
own trade and investment."sa This really is not an economic argument but rather an argument about the consequences of Eurasia's
political and ideological, as well as economic, closure. Proponents of hegemony fear that if great power wars in Eurasia occur, they
could bring to power militaristic or totalitarian regimes. Mere, several points need to be made. First, proponents of American
hegemony overestimate the amount of influence that the United States has on the international system.
There are numerous possible geopolitical rivalries in Eurasia. Most of these will not culminate in war, but it's a good
bet that some will. But regardless of whether Eurasian great powers remain at peace, the outcomes are going to be caused more by
those states' calculations of their interests than by the presence of U.S. forces in Eurasia. The United States has only limited
power to affect the amount of war and peace in the international system, and whatever influence it does
have is being eroded by the creeping multipolarization under way in Eurasia. Second, the possible benefits of
"environment shaping" have to be weighed against the possible costs of U.S. involvement in a big Eurasian
war. Finally, distilled to its essence, this argument is a restatement of the fear that U.S. security and interests
inevitably will be jeopardized by a Eurasian hegemon. This threat is easily exaggerated, and manipulated,
to disguise ulterior motives for U.S. military intervention in Eurasia .
 Imperialism DA Unq ext
HEG IS UNSUSTAINABLE extend Boggs US hegemony is facing a crisis in
legitimacy both internationally and domestically guarantees a transition away
from military based leadership
AND - no recovery countries are turning to alternative regional actors
Copley June 2012 (Gregory R., editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, Strategic Policy in an Age of Global
Realignment, lexis)
3. Strategic Recovery by the US. The US will not, in 2012 or 2013, show signs of any recovery of its
global strategic credibility or real strength. Its manufacturing and science and technology
sectors will continue to suffer from low (even declining) productivity and difficulty in capital formation (for
political reasons, primarily). A significant US recovery is not feasible in the timeframe given the present
political and economic policies and impasse evident. US allies will increasingly look to their
own needs while attempting to sustain their alliance relationship with the US to the extent feasible. Those outside the US
alliance network, or peripheral to it, will increasingly disregard US political/diplomatic pressures,
and will seek to accommodate the PRC or regional actors. The continued economic malaise of the US
during 2012, even if disguised by modest nominal GDP growth, will make economic (and therefore strategic) recovery more difficult
and ensure that it will take longer. In any event, the
fact that the US national debt exceeds the GDP
hollows the dollar and thus makes meaningful recovery impossible in the short-term. The
attractiveness of a low dollar value in comparison to other currencies in making US manufacturing investment more feasible than in
recent years is offset by declining US workforce productivity and political constraints which penalize investment in manufacturing, or
even in achieving appealing conditions for capital formation. Banks are as afraid of such investment as are manufacturing investors
themselves.

Global perception declining support

Allin Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies & Jones is professor of
European studies at Johns Hopkins's SAIS Bologna Centre 2012 Dana & Erik Special Issue:
Weary policeman: American power in an age of austerity - Chapter Five: Power, influence and
leadership Adelphi series 52(430-431) Taylor & Francis
Whatever the objective merits of the United States as a world actor or global policeman, if
other major actors lack confidence in America's ability to maintain open markets, if they
believe that the global economic system is rigged against them, if they perceive other actors
such as China or Germany to be taking advantage of the system, and if they lose confidence
in the dollar as the ultimate vehicle for international payments, then they may begin to withdraw their
support from an American-centred world order.

Winning that there is a perception of US decline is sufficient to win the

sustainability debate
Allin Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies & Jones is professor of
European studies at Johns Hopkins's SAIS Bologna Centre 2012 Dana & Erik Special Issue:
Weary policeman: American power in an age of austerity - Chapter Five: Power, influence and
leadership Adelphi series 52(430-431) Taylor & Francis
Sometimes perceptions create their own realities. Even if we choose to ignore the material
constraints on the exercise of US foreign policy, the simple fact that there is such intense
debate about the declining influence of the United States could have important implications for
the stability of the global system a system designed by American political leaders to sustain and reinforce America's global
role. Other countries will only buy into an American-centred global order if they believe that
the US government is willing and able to underwrite that system, if they can have an equitable chance to
pursue their own self-interest, if they believe that other powerful actors will not violate the rules of the game and so take advantage of
them.10

Rising economic powers decline

Allin Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies & Jones is professor of
European studies at Johns Hopkins's SAIS Bologna Centre 2012 Dana & Erik Special Issue:
Weary policeman: American power in an age of austerity - Chapter Five: Power, influence and
leadership Adelphi series 52(430-431) Taylor & Francis
Much of the current speculation about the future is that power will follow the growth in relative wealth and
population.12 The gist of the argument is that current trends will not lead to a total eclipse of the United States, but they
will result in its relative decline. And the preliminary evidence in terms of trade, investment
and short-term capital flows suggests that the argument has merit, at least in broad terms. The rise
of Germany within Europe and Europe within the Atlantic Alliance has altered the incentives for Europeans
to accept American hegemony. The rise of China and India outside the Western system and of Turkey
and Brazil as middle-ranking powers has altered the incentives to accept the rules, norms and
conventions of a Western-dominated world (see Appendix: Figure 4 Real historical gross domestic product for
selected countries, page 203).

Decline inevitable domestic politics

Allin Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies & Jones is professor of
European studies at Johns Hopkins's SAIS Bologna Centre 2012 Dana & Erik Special Issue:
Weary policeman: American power in an age of austerity - Conclusion: Realist Dilemmas
Adelphi series 52(430-431) Taylor & Francis
It is not obvious, in other words, how America will escape its current political paralysis.
Leadership on climate change looks unlikely yet failure to lead could be catastrophic.
Economic revival will be difficult yet that revival is a prerequisite to most other goals,
foreign and domestic. Balance, of savings and investment as well as government revenue
and government expenditure, will be hard to achieve yet balance is what is needed for
America to sustain a decent domestic society and a responsible world role. If Barack Obama is re-elected, he
will continue to face a fiercely rejectionist Republican opposition, and will probably have to
settle for incremental progress toward the goals that were boldly proclaimed in 2008. If Romney defeats the incumbent
president, he will be driven by an emboldened, very conservative Republican Party to confront resentful Democrats with long
memories. He would do well, if political circumstance allows, to rediscover the centrist, progressive persona of his Massachusetts
governorship.
Neither scenario would be conducive to any radical departure from the core traditions of American foreign policy. No US government
will renounce the claim to global leadership, and no American president will deny that the United States has an exceptional role in
history. But the foreign policies of the next decades, to be successful, will need to accommodate both American idealism and
common-sense realism, in a world where the distribution of power is increasingly plural. Polarisation at home does not make this
challenge any easier. A bitterly divided America is less attractive for other countries to follow.
After a decade of spectacular terrorism, divisive war and economic trauma, the American state
and society will struggle to restore the national self-confidence that can sustain an inclusive and
equitable position of global leadership. Still, historical reflection and patriotic conviction lead us to a somewhat hopeful
conclusion. We would not bet on failure.
 Imperialism DA Link Ext
US HEGEMONY IMPERIALISM extend Boggs justifications for US
predominance are based in a Fukyaman notion of the end of history this
ideology posits the US as the city on the hill and the rest of the world open for
colonial exploitation
Brun researcher on development issues and international relations & Hersh professor emeritus
of Aalborg University, 2012 Ellen & Jacques Faux Internationalism and Really Existing
Imperialism Monthly Review 63.11 April http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/faux-
internationalism-and-really-existing-imperialism
The ideological mindset that legitimizes Western interference and intervention in the affairs
of non-European countries assumes that the values of the West are and should be accepted
as universal. This became a mantra since the meltdown of the Soviet empire and the adoption of liberal capitalism by the former
socialist East European countries. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama popularized the old liberal
concept of the end of history, meaning that humanity was arriving at the end station of its
societal development. However, what we have been experiencing since the defeat of state socialism is
perhaps the most turbulent period of human history with the prospect of open-ended
outcomes. Not many futurologists dare offer a rosy picture of things to come!
The German sociologist and philosopher Jrgen Habermas raised a question which demands serious reflection on the part of the
cheerleaders of humanitarian interventionism: Does the claim to universality that we connect with human rights merely conceal a
particularly subtle and deceitful instrument of Western domination? The coherent answer is that it
is imperative to
disconnect the struggle for human rights from the violations of the principle of national
sovereignty by leading powers in the world system. In this respect, it is worth recalling the uproar which
greeted the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty for socialist countries that was used to legitimize the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1967.
In the contemporary state of the world, it is questionable whether the mixing of idealism with power politics is a roadmap to the
emergence of a more virtuous international community. The American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who propagated the
Clash of Civilizations thesis in the early 1990s, offered a critique of Western utopianism and practice based on the refutation of the
political use of universalism. As an antidote to the feel-good atmosphere that prevailed after NATOs victory in Libya, it has special
relevance now: Westernbelief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it
is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous. Imperialism is the necessary logical
consequence of universalism.4

AND - This superpower syndrome is founded in threat construction and a desire

for total control
Lifton, visiting psychiatry professor at Harvard, 2003 p. 10-11
(Robert Jay, Superpower Syndrome)
September 11 was a triumphant moment for Islamist fanatics-and a profoundly humiliating one for the leaders
of the
American superpower, who early on decided that their response would be "war" and a specifically American war
at that. They then rejected a measured international response to terrorism, offered specifically by the secretary general of
the United Nations, a response that would have included the use of force in focused ways short of war, to hunt down the
terrorists and bring them to justice, while mobilizing the enormous outpouring of sympathy for our country expressed
throughout the world. Instead, this administration chose to respond unilaterally with the rhetoric of war, making it clear
that we alone would decide what levels of military force to apply and who to apply it to, accepting no restraints in the
process. In that and other ways we have responded apocalyptically to an apocalyptic challenge. We have
embarked on a series of wars-first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, with suggestions of additional targeted
countries in the offingbecause we have viewed the amorphous terrorist enemy as evil and
dangerous. But our own amorphously extreme response feeds a larger dynamic of apocalyptic violence, even as it
constructs a twenty-first-century version of American empire. That prospective empire is confusing to the
world, to Americans, and perhaps even to those who espouse it. It does not follow prior
imperial models of keeping an extensive bureaucracy in place in subject countries and
thereby ruling territories extending over much of the earth. Instead, we press toward a
kind of control from a distance: mobile forays of military subjugation with subsequent
governmental arrangements unclear. Crucial to this kind of fluid world control is our
dominating war machine, backed by no less dominant nuclear stockpiles. Such an
arrangement can lend itself to efforts at the remote control of history. Any such project,
however, becomes enmeshed in fantasy, in dreams of imposing an omnipotent will on
others, and in the urge to control history itself. Driven by superpower syndrome, such
visions of domination and control can prove catastrophic when, as they must, they come up against
the irredeemable stubbornness of reality'>

That preemptive war

Lifton, visiting psychiatry professor at Harvard, 2003 p. 24-25
(Robert Jay, Superpower Syndrome)
Inseparable from this grandiosity is the paranoid edge of the apocalyptic mindset. Leader and
followers feel themselves constantly under attack-threatened not just with harm but with
annihilation. For them that would mean the obliteration of everything of value on this
degraded planet, of the future itself. They must destroy the world in order to survive
themselves. This is why they in turn feel impelled to label as absolute evil and annihilate any group that seems to
impede their own sacred mission. Such a sense of paranoid aggressiveness is more readily detectable in the
case of certified zealots like Asahara or bin Laden. But it is by no means absent from the minds of
American strategists who, though possessing overwhelming military dominance, express
constant fear of national annihilation, and embark upon aggressive or "preemptive"
military actions.

Security via military predominance violence and ressentiment

Zizek in 2005 (Slavoj, In These Times, August 11, http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm)
Classic power functioned as a threat that operated precisely by never actualizing itself, by always remaining a threatening gesture.
Such functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction had to remain a threat. With the
"war on terror", the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization, not of the threat itself, but,
of the measures against the threat. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the
terrorist strike triggers the endless series of preemptive strikes against potential terrorists. We are thus
passing from the logic of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to a logic in which ONE SOLE
MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed to enact its paranoia. The power that presents itself as
always being under threat, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the
most dangerous kind of power-the very model of the Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy.
And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, in Daybreak, provided the best analysis of the false moral
premises of today's "war on terror":
No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for
conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality
that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor
must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-
defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as
much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning
all states are
criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus
now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their
own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At
bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes
immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the
doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.
MILITARISM extend Boggs US leadership necessitates global militarism - any
increase in predominance only greases the wheels of militarism and decreases
popular resistance to war
Brun researcher on development issues and international relations & Hersh professor emeritus
of Aalborg University, 2012 Ellen & Jacques Faux Internationalism and Really Existing
Imperialism Monthly Review 63.11 April http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/faux-
internationalism-and-really-existing-imperialism
The history of capitalist imperialism shows, of course, that the subjugation of people and
nations has not been driven by humanitarian considerations. It is in this context that leftist support for
humanitarian interventionism ought to be discussed. Can it be anything other than an ideological construct legitimizing actually existing imperialism?
The task confronting the process of rebuilding a progressive political culture that takes internationalism seriously is to come to grips with the dichotomy
between human values and imperialism. In his valuable book Humanitarian Imperialism, Jean Bricmont distinguishes two attitudes which have framed
interventions. One is based on the idea of the supremacy of
the response of the contemporary left to Western
universal values which gives the rightand even the dutyof military intervention to
Western powers. As a consequence of this way of conceptualizing international politics, the
opposition to imperialist wars is either reduced or it disappears completely. The second
viewpoint is that of cultural relativism which opposes the idea of one moral position having universal value that can be used to objectively
judge other societies and cultures.
The third position, favored by Jean Bricmont, rejects both humanitarian imperialism and cultural relativism. This worldview recognizes that there is
an objective or universal standard which allows us to criticize societies and regimes perpetrating barbarous customs without giving Western governments
the right to interfere and to violate the sovereignty of these countries.
The challenge for progressives is consequently to avoid becoming useful idiots of imperialism and learn to
navigate between support for the democratic aspirations of peoples in all nations, while at the same time oppose the meddling of imperialist powers in the
affairs of sovereign states. This entails a degree of reflective skepticism toward the mainstream media and Western-funded NGOs and foundations in
Third World countries.

Furthermore the fantasy of hegemony militarism

Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Colorado-
Boulder, Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin 2006)
Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that neocons always offer a statement of enveloping peril and no hypothesis for any real solution. They have no hope of finding a real solution
because they have no reason to look for one. Their story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can
never be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people that things are getting better. Michael
The struggle against evil is going to go on forever.40 This vision of endless conflict is
Ledeen:

not a conclusion drawn from observing reality. It is both the premise and the goal of the
neocons fantasy. Ultimately, it seems, endless resistance is what they really want. Their call
for a unipolar world ensures a permanent state of conflict, so that the U.S. can go on forever
proving its military supremacy and promoting the manly virtues of militarism. They have to admit that the U.S., with its
vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented security against any foreign army. So they must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in
. They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent threats to America,
novel, unexpected ways

make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to destroy.
 Imperialism DA Soft Power Link 1NC
US soft power is key to US power projection globally.
Nye 04 (Joseph Professor of International Relations at Harvard, Soft Power, pg. 26-27)
The 2003 Iraq War provides an interesting example of the inter- play of the two forms of power.
Some of the motives for war were based on the deterrent effect of hard power. Donald Rumsfeld is re-
ported to have entered office believing that the United States "was seen around the world as a paper tiger, a weak giant that couldn't take a punch" and
determined to reverse that reputation.40 America's military victory in the first Gulf War had helped to produce the Oslo process on Middle East peace,
and its zoo3 victory in Iraq might eventually have a similar effect. Moreover, states like Syria and Iran might be deterred in their future support of
terrorists. These were all hard power reasons to go to war. But another set of motives related to soft power. The neoconservatives believed that
American power could be used to export democracy to Iraq and transform the politics of the Middle East. If successful, the war would become self-
legitimizing. As William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan put it, "What is wrong with dominance in the service of sound principles and high ideals?"41
Even when a military balance of
Part of the contest about going to war in Iraq became a struggle over the legitimacy of the war.
power is impossible (as at present, with America the only super- power), other countries can still band together to
deprive the U.S. policy of legitimacy and thus weaken American soft power. France, Russia, and
China chafed at American military unipolarity and urged a more multipolar world. In Charles
Krauthammer's view, Iraq "provided France an opportunity to create the first coherent challenge to that dominance.'"+* Even without directly
countering the superpower's military power, the weaker states hoped to deter the U.S. by making it more costly for us to use our hard power.43 They
were not able to prevent the United States from going to war, but by depriving the United States of the legitimacy of a second Se- curity Council
resolution, they certainly made it more expensive. Soft balancing was not limited to the UN arena. Outside the UN,
diplomacy and peace movements helped transform the global debate from the sins of Saddam to the threat of American empire. That made it
difficult for allied countries to provide bases and sup- port and thus cut into American hard
power. As noted earlier, the Turkish parliament's refusal to allow transport of ground troops and Saudi Arabia's reluctance to allow American use of
air bases that had been available in 1991 are cases in point. Since the global projection of American military force in
the fu- ture will require access and overflight rights from other countries, such soft balancing
can have real effects on hard power. When sup- port for America becomes a serious vote loser,
even friendly leaders are less likely to accede to our requests. In addition, bypassing the UN raised the economic
costs to the United States after the war, leading the columnist Fareed Zakaria to observe, "The imperial style of foreign policy is backfiring. At the end
of the Iraq war the administration spurned any kind of genuine partnership with the world. It pounded away at the United Nations.""
 Soft Power Link - Ext
SOFT POWER IS KEY TO IMPERIALIST HEGEMONY extend Nye 04 soft power
increases our ability to gain support for interventionist policies that leads to
international imperialism
Roland G Simbulan, Professor and Faculty Regent at University of the Philippines System,
Apr 30, 2003, Villegas, E.M. et al. (2002); Unmasking the U.S. War on Terror: U.S. Imperialist
Hegemony and Crisis; The Nature of Modern Imperialism, Left Curve, Iss. 27, pg 134, proquest,
accessed 07/11/07
The cultural hegemony of modern imperialism is not neglected by this book. The use of the so-called "soft power"--
winning hearts and minds of the world--through McDonalds, Levis, Hollywood, Microsoft and other U.S. commercial icons, has
effectively captivated hearts and minds in a globalized environment already dominated by
the military (or hard power) and economic terms of a single superpower. This is not just about the
Americanization of our eating habits. We must not underestimate this "soft power" being effectively
mobilized and used as an asset by this hegemonic hyperpower that is fast replacing
multilateralism with its own active brand of unilateralism in international politics, i.e., "the rule
of force" instead of the multilaterally-defined "rule of law" in United Nations conventions. Also, on the ideological battleground, is
U.S. imperialism's methodical efforts to secure effective legitimacy for American policy in other countries, such as Henry Kissinger's
invocation of European-style raison d'etat or Samuel Huntington and Jeanne Kirkpatrick's glorification of authoritarian rule and U.S.
imperialism's support for it. I am glad that an entire chapter was devoted to a critique of Francis Fukuyama and Huntington, two of
imperialism's foremost contemporary rightwing ideologues today. This has been a serious arena for U.S. hegemonic winning of hearts
and minds, both in the American heartland as well as among the educated elites in other countries.

Soft power privileges militarism

Takacs associate professor and director of American studies at Oklahoma State U 2013 Stacy
Real War News, Real War Games: The Hekmati Case and the Problems of Soft Power
American Quarterly 65.1 project muse
In his defense of smart power, Joseph Nye makes an impassioned case for the increased use of soft power to achieve American
foreign policy objectives. Promoting democracy, human rights, and development of civil society, he argues, is not best handled
with the barrel of a gun.22 True enough, but does the language of power in any manifestation really suit these objectives? Even if US
diplomacy were not thoroughly militarized, would not the recourse to words like soft
power and smart power
still privilege coercion over persuasion, compulsion over attraction, militarism over
diplomacy? The recent cultural wars with Iran, including the arrest of Amir Hekmati, expose the limits
of the new smart power philosophy of global engagement. The low-intensity, tit-for-tat struggle to shape the
interpretation of American power reveals a fundamental coherence between Iran and the United States around the question of power
politics. Iran has clearly been attracted to and persuaded by the US framing of geopolitics as a militarized power struggle. This has not
resulted in enhanced US credibility or trust, however. Instead, the
use of soft power as a weapon has subverted
cross-cultural dialogue and exchange and made peace harder to attain. Just ask Amir Hekmatiif he
survives his current tour of duty on the front lines of contemporary netwar.
 Imperialism DA Impact Ext
TWO IMPACTS
A) IMPERIALISM extend Foster ev pursuit of imperialism leads to infinite
justifications for war makes all of their impacts inevitable and it turns the aff
Foster editor at Monthly Review 2003 John Bellamy The Monthly Review The New Age of
Imperialism http://www.monthlyreview.org/0703jbf.htm
At the same time, it is clear that in the present period of global hegemonic imperialism the United States is
geared above all to expanding its imperial power to whatever extent possible and subordinating the
rest of the capitalist world to its interests. The Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea Basin represent not only the bulk of
world petroleum reserves, but also a rapidly increasing proportion of total reserves, as high production rates diminish reserves
elsewhere. This has provided much of the stimulus for the United States to gain greater control of these resourcesat the expense of
its present and potential rivals. But U.S. imperial ambitions do not end there, since they are driven by economic ambitions that know
no bounds. As Harry Magdoff noted in the closing pages of The Age of Imperialism in 1969, it is the professed goal of U.S.
multinational corporations to control as large a share of the world market as they do of the United States market, and this hunger for
foreign markets persists today. Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation has won prison privatization contracts in Australia,
the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Antilles (Prison Industry Goes Global,
www.futurenet.org, fall 2000). Promotion of U.S. corporate interests abroad is one of the primary responsibilities of the U.S. state.
Consider the cases of Monsanto and genetically modified food, Microsoft and intellectual property, Bechtel and the war on Iraq. It
would be impossible to exaggerate how dangerous this dual expansionism of U.S. corporations
and the U.S. state is to the world at large. As IstvE1n ME9szE1ros observed in 2001 in Socialism or Barbarism, the
U.S. attempt to seize global control, which is inherent in the workings of capitalism and
imperialism, is now threatening humanity with the extreme violent rule of the whole world by
one hegemonic imperialist country on a permanent basis...an absurd and unsustainable way of
running the world order.*
This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other major
powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means, and all sorts of strategies by weaker states and
non-state actors to engage in asymmetric forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented
destructiveness of contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the
population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before witnessed. Rather than
generating a new Pax Americana the United States may be paving the way to new global holocausts.

B) MILITARISM Extend Sanders ev continued reliance on militaristic foreign

policies guarantees extinction via destruction of the environment this
outweighs any alternative cause to environmental destruction even if they
win they deter conflict the build up to war accesses our impact
Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy, 1996 Chris, Hypatia 11.4, proquest
In Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment, William Thomas, a U.S. Navy veteran, illustrates the extent to which
the peacetime practices of military institutions damage natural environments and communities. Thomas argues that even "peace"
entails a dramatic and widespread war on nature, or as Joni Seager puts it, "The environmental costs of
militarized peace bear suspicious resemblance to the costs of war" (Thomas 1995, xi).
All told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense destruction caused by combat, military institutions probably
present the most dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet. The military is the largest
generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute, and military analyst Jillian
Skeel claims that, "Global military activity may be the largest worldwide polluter and consumer of
precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally powered aircraft carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a
day. In less than an hour's flight, a single jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a North American motorist bums
in two years. One F-16 jet engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-
intensive aluminum (Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used by humans is consumed by the global military
(Thomas 1995, 16). The United States Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxins annually, more than the world's top
five chemical companies combined. The military is the biggest single source of environmental pollution in
the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to
military installations (Thomas 1995, 17).
The feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its
destruction in warfare is easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect
the extent to which military ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transnational
capitalism and other forms of human oppression and exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear
bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps and uranium mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of
all United States defense contracts (Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go
on for volumes about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the disruption of wildlife, habitats,
communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices.
 Imperialism DA - AT: Transition Wars

THREAT CONSTRUCTION the fear of transition violence is what the totality of

our argument is criticizing their focus is an attempt to justify continued
imperialist violence the totality of the link and impact debate are responsive
to this argument
Transition away from US hegemony will be stable- international institutions
ensure
Ikenberry 2011 (G. John, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, The
Future of the Liberal World Order Subtitle: Internationalism After America, Foreign Affairs, May/June, lexis)
There is no longer any question: wealth and power are moving from the North and the West to the East and the South, and the old
order dominated by the United States and Europe is giving way to one increasingly shared with non-Western rising states.
But if the great wheel of power is turning, what kind of global political order will emerge in the aftermath? Some
anxious observers argue that the world will not just look less American -- it will also look less liberal. Not only is the United
States' preeminence passing away, they say, but so, too, is the open and rule-based international order that the
country has championed since the 1940s. In this view, newly powerful states are beginning to advance their own ideas and agendas for
global order, and a weakened United States will find it harder to defend the old system. The hallmarks of liberal internationalism --
openness and rule-based relations enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism -- could give
way to a more contested and fragmented system of blocs, spheres of influence, mercantilist networks, and regional rivalries. The fact
that today's rising states are mostly large non-Western developing countries gives force to this narrative. The old liberal international
order was designed and built in the West. Brazil, China, India, and other fast-emerging states have a different set of cultural, political,
and economic experiences, and they see the world through their anti-imperial and anticolonial pasts. Still grappling with basic
problems of development, they do not share the concerns of the advanced capitalist societies. The recent global economic slowdown
has also bolstered this narrative of liberal international decline. Beginning in the United States, the crisis has tarnished the American
model of liberal capitalism and raised new doubts about the ability of the United States to act as the global economic leader. For all
these reasons, many observers have concluded that world politics is experiencing not just a changing of the guard but also a transition
in the ideas and principles that underlie the global order. The journalist Gideon Rachman, for example, says that a cluster of liberal
internationalist ideas -- such as faith in democratization, confidence in free markets, and the acceptability of U.S. military power -- are
all being called into question. According to this worldview, the future of international order will be shaped above all by China, which
will use its growing power and wealth to push world politics in an illiberal direction. Pointing out that China and other non-Western
states have weathered the recent financial crisis better than their Western counterparts, pessimists argue that an authoritarian capitalist
alternative to Western neoliberal ideas has already emerged. According to the scholar Stefan Halper, emerging-market states "are
learning to combine market economics with traditional autocratic or semiautocratic politics in a process that signals an intellectual
rejection of the Western economic model." But this panicked narrative misses a deeper reality: although the United
States' position in the global system is changing, the liberal international order is alive and well . The
struggle over international order today is not about fundamental principles. China and other emerging great
powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more
authority and leadership within it. Indeed, today's power transition represents not the defeat of the liberal order but its
ultimate ascendance. Brazil, China, and India have all become more prosperous and capable by operating inside
the existing international order -- benefiting from its rules, practices, and institutions, including the World
Trade Organization (WTO) and the newly organized G-20. Their economic success and growing influence are tied
to the liberal internationalist organization of world politics, and they have deep interests in preserving that
system. In the meantime, alternatives to an open and rule-based order have yet to crystallize. Even though the
last decade has brought remarkable upheavals in the global system -- the emergence of new powers, bitter disputes among
Western allies over the United States' unipolar ambitions, and a global financial crisis and recession -- the liberal
international order has no competitors. On the contrary, the rise of non-Western powers and the growth of
economic and security interdependence are creating new constituencies for it. To be sure, as wealth and power
become less concentrated in the United States' hands, the country will be less able to shape world politics. But the underlying
foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive. Indeed, now may be the best time for the United States and its
democratic partners to update the liberal order for a new era, ensuring that it continues to provide the benefits of security and
prosperity that it has provided since the middle of the twentieth century.
No transition wars- rising states will integrate into international institutions- no
incentives for aggression
Ikenberry 2011 (G. John, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, The
Future of the Liberal World Order Subtitle: Internationalism After America, Foreign Affairs, May/June, lexis)
REASON FOR REASSURANCE Rising powers will discover another reason to embrace the existing global rules
and institutions: doing so will reassure their neighbors as they grow more powerful . A stronger China will
make neighboring states potentially less secure, especially if it acts aggressively and exhibits revisionist ambitions.
Since this will trigger a balancing backlash, Beijing has incentives to signal restraint. It will find ways to do so by
participating in various regional and global institutions. If China hopes to convince its neighbors that it has embarked on a "peaceful
rise," it will need to become more integrated into the international order. China has already experienced a taste of such a backlash.
Last year, its military made a series of provocative moves -- including naval exercises -- in the South China Sea, actions taken to
support the government's claims to sovereign rights over contested islands and waters. Many of the countries disputing China's claims
joined with the United States at the Regional Forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in July to reject Chinese
bullying and reaffirm open access to Asia's waters and respect for international law. In September, a Chinese fishing trawler operating
near islands administered by Japan in the East China Sea rammed into two Japanese coast guard ships. After Japanese authorities
detained the trawler's crew, China responded with what one Japanese journalist described as a "diplomatic 'shock and awe' campaign,"
suspending ministerial-level contacts, demanding an apology, detaining several Japanese workers in China, and instituting a de facto
ban on exports of rare-earth minerals to Japan. These actions -- seen as manifestations of a more bellicose and aggressive foreign
policy -- pushed ASEAN, Japan, and South Korea perceptibly closer to the United States. As China's economic and military
power grow, its neighbors will only become more worried about Chinese aggressiveness, and so Beijing
will have reason to allay their fears. Of course, it might be that some elites in China are not interested in practicing restraint.
But to the extent that China is interested in doing so, it will find itself needing to signal peaceful intentions -- redoubling
its participation in existing institutions, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit, or working with the other
great powers in the region to build new ones. This is, of course, precisely what the United States did in the decades after World War
II. The country operated within layers of regional and global economic, political, and security institutions and constructed new ones --
thereby making itself more predictable and approachable and reducing the incentives for other states to undermine it by building
countervailing coalitions. More generally, given the emerging problems of the twenty-first century, there will be
growing incentives among all the great powers to embrace an open, rule-based international system. In a
world of rising economic and security interdependence, the costs of not following multilateral rules and not
forging cooperative ties go up. As the global economic system becomes more interdependent, all states -- even large, powerful
ones -- will find it harder to ensure prosperity on their own. Growing interdependence in the realm of security is also
creating a demand for multilateral rules and institutions. Both the established and the rising great powers are threatened
less by mass armies marching across borders than by transnational dangers, such as terrorism, climate change, and pandemic disease.
What goes on in one country -- radicalism, carbon emissions, or public health failures -- can increasingly harm another country.
Intensifying economic and security interdependence are giving the United States and other powerful
countries reason to seek new and more extensive forms of multilateral cooperation. Even now, as the United
States engages China and other rising states, the agenda includes expanded cooperation in areas such as clean energy, environmental
protection, nonproliferation, and global economic governance. The old and rising powers may disagree on how exactly
this cooperation should proceed, but they all have reasons to avoid a breakdown in the multilateral order
itself. So they will increasingly experiment with new and more extensive forms of liberal internationalism.
 Imperialism DA AT: US Lash Out
NOT UNIQUE all of our evidence proves that lash-out is inevitable now Iraq,
Afghanistan etc prove US is aggressively intervening now
No lash-out historical studies prove
MacDonald and Parent 2011 (Paul K. and Joseph M., Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams
College, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, International Security, Graceful Decline?; The Surprising
Success of Great Power Retrenchment, Spring, lexis)
In this article, we question the logic and evidence of the retrenchment pessimists. To date there has been neither a
comprehensive study of great power retrenchment nor a study that lays out the case for retrenchment as a
practical or probable policy. This article fills these gaps by systematically examining the relationship
between acute relative decline and the responses of great powers. We examine eighteen cases of acute relative decline
since 1870 and advance three main arguments. First, we challenge the retrenchment pessimists' claim that domestic or
international constraints inhibit the ability of declining great powers to retrench. In fact, when states fall in
the hierarchy of great powers, peaceful retrenchment is the most common response, even over
short time spans. Based on the empirical record, we find that great powers retrenched in no less than eleven and no more
than fifteen of the eighteen cases, a range of 61-83 percent. When international conditions demand it, states
renounce risky ties, increase reliance on allies or adversaries, draw down their military obligations, and
impose adjustments on domestic populations. Second, we find that the magnitude of relative decline helps explain the
extent of great power retrenchment. Following the dictates of neorealist theory, great powers retrench for the same reason
they expand: the rigors of great power politics compel them to do so . 12 Retrenchment is by no means easy,
but necessity is the mother of invention, and declining great powers face powerful incentives to contract
their interests in a prompt and proportionate manner . Knowing only a state's rate of relative economic decline explains its
corresponding degree of retrenchment in as much as 61 percent of the cases we examined. Third, we argue that the rate of decline
helps explain what forms great power retrenchment will take. How fast great powers fall contributes to whether these retrenching
states will internally reform, seek new allies or rely more heavily on old ones, and make diplomatic overtures to enemies. Further, our
analysis suggests that great
powers facing acute decline are less likely to initiate or escalate
militarized interstate disputes. Faced with diminishing resources, great powers moderate their foreign
policy ambitions and offer concessions in areas of lesser strategic value . Contrary to the pessimistic conclusions of
critics, retrenchment neither requires aggression nor invites predation . Great powers are able to rebalance their
commitments through compromise, rather than conflict. In these ways, states respond to penury the same way they do to plenty: they
seek to adopt policies that maximize security given available means. Far from being a hazardous policy, retrenchment can be
successful. States that retrench often regain their position in the hierarchy of great powers. Of the fifteen great powers that adopted
retrenchment in response to acute relative decline, 40 percent managed to recover their ordinal rank. In contrast, none of the declining
powers that failed to retrench recovered their relative position.

These studies specifically apply to the US

MacDonald and Parent 2011 (Paul K. and Joseph M., Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams
College, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, International Security, Graceful Decline?; The Surprising
Success of Great Power Retrenchment, Spring, lexis)
Our findings are directly relevant to what appears to be an impending great
Implications for Sino-U.S. Relations
power transition between China and the United States. Estimates of economic performance vary, but most observers expect
Chinese GDP to surpass U.S. GDP sometime in the next decade or two. 91 This prospect has generated considerable concern. Many scholars
foresee major conflict during a Sino-U.S. ordinal transition. Echoing Gilpin and Copeland, John Mearsheimer sees the crux of the issue as
irreconcilable goals: China wants to be America's superior and the United States wants no peer competitors. In his words, "[N]o amount of goodwill can
ameliorate the intense security competition that sets in when an aspiring hegemon appears in Eurasia." 92 Contrary to these predictions, our
analysis
suggests some grounds for optimism. Based on the historical track record of great powers facing acute
relative decline, the United States should be able to retrench in the coming decades. In the next few years, the
United States is ripe to overhaul its military, shift burdens to its allies, and work to decrease costly
international commitments. It is likely to initiate and become embroiled in fewer militarized disputes than
the average great power and to settle these disputes more amicably. Some might view this prospect with apprehension,
fearing the steady erosion of U.S. credibility. Yet our analysis suggests that retrenchment need not signal weakness. Holding on to
exposed and expensive commitments simply for the sake of one's reputation is a greater geopolitical
gamble than withdrawing to cheaper, more defensible frontiers . Some observers might dispute our conclusions, arguing that
hegemonic transitions are more conflict prone than other moments of acute relative decline. We counter that there are deductive and empirical reasons to
doubt this argument. Theoretically, hegemonic powers should actually find it easier to manage acute relative decline. Fallen hegemons still have
formidable capability, which threatens grave harm to any state that tries to cross them. Further, they are no longer the top target for balancing coalitions,
and recovering hegemons may be influential because they can play a pivotal role in alliance formation. In addition, hegemonic powers, almost by
definition, possess more extensive overseas commitments; they
should be able to more readily identify and eliminate
extraneous burdens without exposing vulnerabilities or exciting domestic populations .

Attempting to hold on to hegemony is more dangerous than any consequence

of transition
MacDonald Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College & Parent Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami 2012 Paul & Joseph Correspondence:
Decline and RetrenchmentPeril or Promise? International Security 36(4) project muse
Let us be absolutely clear: retrenchment is risky, but not retrenching is riskier. Living beyond one's
means is possible temporarily, but prolonged insolvency invites a terrible reckoning.
Grasping great powers present a brittle, overextended defensive perimeter with strategic
inflexibility and shallow reservesa blatantly ripe target for opportunistic states. This is
likely why so few declining states in our study chose not to retrench, and those that failed to
fared poorly. It is understandable that declining powers retrench reluctantly; it is all the more telling that they tend to do so
quickly.

Prefer history and social science

MacDonald Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College & Parent Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami 2012 Paul & Joseph Correspondence:
Decline and RetrenchmentPeril or Promise? International Security 36(4) project muse
By no means did we intend for our conclusions to be taken as definitive, and the future does not always resemble the past. Yet
Thompson's modesty goes too far. History and the tools of social science are not irrelevant to political predictionthey
are the best available guides for policymakers to prepare for the future. Our critics propose a number
of refinements to our model, but they do not replace it or impair our methods and evidence. As decisionmakers revamp
the U.S. force posture, propose personnel cuts, and draw down foreign entanglements, they need to know which
causal factors are primary and which are secondary to predict the likely effects of potential
actions. Our arguments [End Page 202] and data have laid a foundation to do this, and we welcome
subsequent improvements. Regardless, we agree with Thompson that Chinese dominance is not foreordained; retrenchment alone is no
panacea; and domestic reforms are an indispensable part of great power recovery. These points are so consequential that we discuss
them at length elsewhere.8
***MISC AT:***
 AT: Kagan 1NC
Kagan is poor scholarship we can transition now
Preble VP for defense and foreign policy studies @ Cato 2012 Christopher The Critique of
Pure Kagan National Interest 6/28 http://nationalinterest.org/print/bookreview/the-critique-pure-
kagan-7061?page=1
Kagans latest offering, The World America Made, is a cri de coeur directed at a foreign-policy establishment beset by doubts and a
wider public harboring even deeper ones. In both tone and substance, the book is aimed at soothing American anxieties over the
nations fiscal and geopolitical future. In some respects, his diagnosis is soundthe scope of American decline is often exaggerated
and not to be celebrated. But in several critical respects, Kagans
prescriptions for the present and future of U.S.
foreign policy are shortsighted at best, harmful at worst.
The most important of these is his rejection of calls for the United States to reduce military
spending, recalibrate its global commitments and restrain its interventionist impulses. Kagan
scorns the suggestion that we are entering a post-American world with multiple power centers as opposed to the single U.S. hegemon.
On one hand, dismissing claims that America is in decline, he points to past periods of soul-searching and self-doubt where public
sentiment was far more pessimistic and from which America emerged stronger than ever. On the other hand, he challenges those who
look upon American decline with equanimity and questions their expectation, if not assumption, . . . that the good qualities of [the
present world] orderthe democracy, the prosperity, the peace among great powerscan transcend the decline of American power
and influence.
He advises the United States to continue on its present course, maintain its global posture, and retain or expand
alliance relationships negotiated during the Cold War. But here is a key point: Kagan concedes that
Americans could opt for a different course. We could shed our global burdens, focus on
rebuilding the countrys strength at home and expector merely hopethat others will uphold
the liberal order as American power retreats. That we are afforded such a choice today is itself a historical
anomalyand something of a luxury. Someday, Kagan suggests, we may have no choice but to watch it drift away. In the
meantime, we dont have toand he hopes that we do not.
It is a familiar refrain. But, as with Kagans earlier works, The World America Made combinesquestionable
international-relations theory, questionable economics and questionable politics. To the extent that
Kagan has had a hand in building todays world, he has constructed it around too much
military capacity in the hands of a single power and too little capacity in the hands of nearly
everyone else. The result is a wide and growing gap between the promises Washington has made to protect others from harm
and Americas political will to honor those promises if they ever come due.
The world is both more complicated and more durable than Kagan imagines. The United
States does not need to police the globe in order to maintain a level of security that prior
generations would envy. Neither does the survival of liberal democracy, market capitalism
and basic human rights hinge on U.S. power, contrary to Kagans assertions. Americans need not
shelter wealthy, stable allies against threats they are capable of handling on their own.
Americans should not fear power in the hands of others, particularly those countries and peoples that share
common interests and values. Finally, precisely because the United States is so secure, it is difficult to
sustain public support for global engagement without resorting to fearmongering and
threat inflation. Indeed, when Americans are presented with an accurate assessment of the nations power relative to others and
shown how U.S. foreign policy has contributed to a vast and growing disparity between what we spend and what others spend on
national securitythe very state of affairs that Kagan celebratesthey grow even less supportive.
 AT: Kagan - Ext
KAGAN IS POOR SCHOLARSHIP extend Preble Kagan concedes that we could
safely transition now he only supports the need for military intervention for
ideological reasons his argument is based purely on logical fallacies
Preble VP for defense and foreign policy studies @ Cato 2012 Christopher The Critique of
Pure Kagan National Interest 6/28 http://nationalinterest.org/print/bookreview/the-critique-pure-
kagan-7061?page=1
His ideas represent something close to the reigning orthodoxy in Washington today and for the past two decades. Inside the
Beltway, there is broad, bipartisan agreement on the basic parameters of U.S. foreign policy
that Kagan spells out. This consensus contends that the burden of proof is on those who
argue against the status quo. The United States and the world have enjoyed an unprecedented
stretch of security and prosperity; it would be the height of folly, the foreign-policy
establishment asserts, to upend the current structure on the assumption that an alternative
approach would represent any improvement.
But such arguments combine the most elementary of post hoc fallacies with unwarranted
assumptions and idle speculation. Correlation does not prove causation. There are many
factors that could explain the relative peace of the past half century. Kagan surveys them
allincluding economic interdependence, evolving norms governing the use of force and the existence of nuclear weaponsand
concludes that U.S. power is the only decisive one. But, once again, he concedes that he
cannot prove it.

This leads to threat conflation and turns their transition arguments

Preble VP for defense and foreign policy studies @ Cato 2012 Christopher The Critique of
Pure Kagan National Interest 6/28 http://nationalinterest.org/print/bookreview/the-critique-pure-
kagan-7061?page=1
Kagans too-casual rejection of any reasonable alternative to American hegemony reveals
the crucial flaw in his reasoning, however, given that he predicts we might not be afforded a
choice in the future. If the United States cant sustain its current posture indefinitely, a wiser
long-term grand strategy would set aboutpreferably noweasing the difficult and
sometimes dangerous transitions that often characterize major power shifts. Rather than continuing
to discourage other countries from tending to their security affairs, the United States should welcome such behavior. Kagans
reassuring toneabout Chinas unique vulnerabilities, for exampleactually buttresses that
competing point of view. After all, if a distant, distracted hegemon like the United States can
manage the challenge posed by China, and if it can do so while preventing wars and unrest in several other regions
simultaneously, then Asian nations would be at least equally capable of accomplishing the same
task given that they will be focused solely on their own security primarily in just that one
region.
KAGAN REFUSES to consider this possibility. He writes that the most important features of todays
worldthe great spread of democracy, the prosperity, the prolonged great-power peacehave depended directly and indirectly on
power and influence exercised by the United States. It follows, therefore, that the
world would become considerably
less democratic, less prosperous and less peaceful if the United States were to withdraw
militarily from Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Of course, he cant actually prove either claim to be true, and he concedes as much. Instead, he
bases his case on a particular set of beliefs about how the world works and about the United States
unique characteristics within that system. Kagan asserts that the world requires a single, order-inducing
hegemon to enforce the rules of the game and that America must perform this role because
its global economic interests demand it. He also believes that the United States has a special obligation, deriving
from its heritage as a dangerous nation, to spread democracy and human rights. Whats more, Americas military might is the
essential ingredient that leads to its international influence. The spread of democracy and market capitalism, Kagan claims, is made
possible by U.S. power but would retreat before autocracy and mercantilism if that power were seen to be waning. The attractiveness
of Americas culture, economics and political systemthe vaunted soft power in Joseph Nyes tellingis fleeting and would
dissipate if Americans were to commit what Kagan calls preemptive superpower suicide.
 AT: Nuclear Deterrence
Nuclear deterrence doesnt solve conflict
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part1-
CausesOfPeace.pdf
Waltzs suggestion that the nuclear weapons states enjoy peace because they are nuclear armed is simply
untrue. As mentioned previously, the four countries that have fought the most international conflicts since the
end of World War II France, the UK, the US, and Russia/USSRare all nuclear armed states.
And some of the minor interventions Waltz refers to are not so minor. They include the major international
conflicts fought by the major powers since the end of World War IIincluding the Korean and Vietnam
wars.
Claims that nuclear weapons provide a reliable and consistent deterrent against conventional war, while
plausible in theory, are far from being universally true. From 1945 until the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949, Americas
nuclear monopoly proved powerless to prevent the consolidation of Soviet control over Eastern Europe
the greatest expansion of the Soviet empire during the entire Cold War period .
US nuclear weapons did not deter China from attacking US forces during the Korean War, nor did they
prevent the North Vietnamese from engaging militarily with the US during the Vietnam War. Israeli
nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt from attacking Israel in 1973, Britains independent nuclear deterrent failed to
deter Argentina from invading the Falkland Islands in 1982, and Soviet nuclear weapons did not dissuade the
mujahedeen from waging war against the occupying Soviet army in Afghanistannor did they prevent a
Soviet defeat.
Part of the reason for the non-use of nuclear weapons in these conflicts is that in no case did the nuclear weapons state in question
perceive the strategic issue at stake to be sufficiently important to warrant the huge carnage, the international opprobrium, and the
likely political backlash that the use of nuclear weapons would have caused.
Abhorrence of, and political resistance to, the actual use of nuclear weapons derives in part from what Nina Tannenwald has called the
nuclear taboothe widespread popular and elite revulsion against using weapons that would cause the annihilation of possibly tens
of millions of innocent civilians. 29
It is true that neither the US nor the Soviet Union, nor any of their Cold War allies, has suffered a major conventional attack on its
homeland and it is quite possible that nuclear deterrence was one of the factors that prevented such attacks. But the deterrent
effect of nuclear weapons is by no means the only plausible explanation for the absence of major power
war in this period. As John Mueller has argued: world war in the post-1945 era has been prevented not so much by
visions of nuclear horror as by the generally-accepted belief that conflict can easily escalate to a level,
nuclear or not, that the essentially satisfied major powers would find intolerably costly. 30
The point here is that if the claimed efficacy of nuclear deterrence derives from the fact that the horrific costs of
nuclear war outweigh any conceivable benefits, then much the same argument can be made for the
deterrent effect of major conventional warfare in the aftermath of World War II. According to Muellers argument, the
costs of World War II, where the death toll likely exceeded 50 million, were horrifying enough on their
own to make the Cold War adversaries determined to avoid future world war.
Moreover, the claim that it was nuclear deterrence that had kept the peace during the Cold War is both
speculative and unprovable. While both sides in the Cold Warprudentiallyhad contingency plans for war, there is no
compelling evidence that either side wanted war and was deterred from waging it solely by the existence of
nuclear weapons. The claimed success of nuclear deterrence, in other words, is necessarily speculative; the
deterrence failuressome noted aboveare not.
In the post-Cold War era the strategic relevance of nuclear weapons in the security planning of the major powers
is much reduced. Civil wars and terrorism are the major focus of security for these states in the new
millennium, and nuclear weapons have no conceivable strategic role in either case .
Today nuclear weapons are no longer seen as an indispensable guarantor of peace between the major powers,
but rather as a source of instability rising from their attempted acquisition by minor powers and terrorists.
 AT: Deterrence

Deterrence empirically fails any contrary data is inconclusive

Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-
Overview.pdf
Second, possession of nuclear weapons has signally failed to prevent war on a significant number of occasions since the end of World
War II. US weapons did not deter China from attacking US forces in the Korean War, nor North Vietnam
from attacking South Vietnam and US forces in the 1960s and 1970s. Israeli nuclear weapons did not
dissuade Egypt from attacking Israel in 1973, and the Soviet nuclear arsenal did not deter the mujahedeen
from waging war against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980snor did it prevent a Soviet defeat.
More generally, the statistical evidence on the utility of realist peace-through-strength policy prescriptions is
inconclusive. This is true whether we are talking about the deterrent effect of alliances and military
balance, or seeking peace through military preponderance .
 AT: War Decreasing
Even if state-based war is decreasing armed conflict and non-state conflict is
dramatically increasing
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-
Overview.pdf
From 1992 until 2003, the number of state-based armed conflictsthose involving a government as one of the warring
partiesdropped by some 40 percent. Since 2003, however, the global incidence of armed conflicts has increased
by 25 percent. Meanwhile, non-state conflictsviolent confrontations between communal groups, rebels, or warlords that do
not involve a state as a warring partyincreased by a startling 119 percent from 2007 to 2008. And a quarter of the conflicts
that started or reignited between 2003 and 2008 were associated with Islamist political violence and the so-called War on Terror.

Their studies are outdated conflict increasing 25%

Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part3-
TrendsInHumanInsecurity.pdf
The Human Security Report 2005 challenged the commonly held assumption that armed conflict around the
world had become more widespread and more violent. It showed that the number of state-based armed conflictsthose in
which a government is one of the warring partieshad declined sharply since the end of the Cold War, and that they had become
dramatically less deadly since the end of World War II.
That decline stopped in 2003, and in 2004 conflict numbers started to increase; by 2008 they had gone up
by nearly 25 percent.1 This trend can be explained in part by an increase in conflicts associated with Islamist
political violence and the so-called War on Terror. There are too few years of data to determine whether we are seeing a sustained
reversal of the dramatic downward trend since the end of the Cold War, but this is quite possible.
 Predictions Bad
Bank crisis and uprisings in MENA prove expert predictions inadequate
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-
Overview.pdf
Of course, thefact that something is not obviously foreseeable does not mean it cannot happen. Recent
events, from the banking crises in the developed world to the popular uprisings against repressive regimes in the
Middle East and North Africa, remind us how frequently major changes come as a complete surprise and to the
expert community as well as laypersons. Prediction, as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once noted, is very
difficult, especially about the future.17
 AT: Arms Race Scenario
Arms races are never the cause of war both are effects of dispute more
broadly
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part1-
CausesOfPeace.pdf
Even if 100 percent of arms races culminated in war, it still could not be assumed that the former
necessarily caused the latter. In reality both the arms race and the war are likely being driven by the dispute
itselfi.e., each may be the effect of the same cause.
 AT: Alliance Building

Statistical data is inconclusive

Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part1-
CausesOfPeace.pdf
The statistical evidence on the security benefits of joining or forming alliances, like that on arms-racing, is
inconclusive. Some studies show that nations in alliance relationships are more war-prone than nations that
are not alliance members, while others show they are less war-prone. 12
 AT: Realism Structures IR
Their argument that realism structures reality is false and disproven since the
end of the cold war no mechanism of realist security policies to create peace
Human Security Report Project 2011 Human Security Report Project is an independent
research centre affiliated with Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada, Human
Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
http://hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part1-
CausesOfPeace.pdf
For most of the Cold War period, realist assumptions prevailed in security communities in both the West and the
Communist world, but these assumptions appear to be decreasingly relevant in the post-Cold War era. Realists
believed that it was the common interest in uniting against the Soviet threat that kept the peace between
Western democracies during the Cold War. But as noted earlier, the Cold War has been over for 20 years and the
prospect of war between the OECD democracies seems more remote than ever.
It is quite unclear how traditional realist security policies creating or joining alliances, balancing military power, or
seeking military preponderanceare supposed to contribute to peace between the advanced industrialized countries today.
Most OECD countries feel secure from attack, not because of the mutually deterring effect of their military forces but because they
do not believe that other states wish to attack them. Among the countries of Western Europe, the idea that disputes might be
settled by war has become simply unthinkable.
 AT: China
China wont react aggressively to declining heg
Allin Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies & Jones is professor of
European studies at Johns Hopkins's SAIS Bologna Centre 2012 Dana & Erik Special Issue:
Weary policeman: American power in an age of austerity - Conclusion: Realist Dilemmas
Adelphi series 52(430-431) Taylor & Francis
Getting the balance right is obviously an overriding demand on US strategy and diplomacy. Along with the danger of
provoking Beijing with a posture that might appear aggressive, the obverse risk is that the
spectre of American disarray and decline could embolden nationalists in a still growing China to
demand more aggressive and assertive policies. In theory, such assertiveness would be enabled by the possibility that China's GDP
and military spending could exceed America's by the middle of the century. Yet, we should not let hypothetical future
dangers scare us out of recognising some stabilising realities of the present. China, Dobbins
observes, is seeking neither territorial aggrandisement nor ideological sway over its
neighbours. It shows no interest in matching US military expenditures, achieving
comparable global reach, or assuming defence commitments beyond its immediate
periphery.8 Indeed, insofar as Beijing is not eager to be a supplier of global public goods, its grand strategy at least
implicitly confers upon the United States a continued leadership role. All of this might change, of course, but
the United States would have ample time to observe these changes and adjust its own strategic planning and posture.
 AT: Humanitarian Intervention
Humanitarian intervention creates coalitions between the left and right
endless interventions
Brun researcher on development issues and international relations & Hersh professor emeritus
of Aalborg University, 2012 Ellen & Jacques Faux Internationalism and Really Existing
Imperialism Monthly Review 63.11 April http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/faux-
internationalism-and-really-existing-imperialism
Simultaneously, the ideology of humanitarian interventionism, which stands almost
uncontested, can be interpreted as legitimizing a hidden political agenda. It has the potential
of blurring existing ideological and political differences between neoconservatives, liberal
internationalists in the United States and Europe, and a large section of left-wing forces around the
world. All these currents have found common grounds in vindicating NATOs military violations of the principle of national
sovereignty. Seen in retrospect the process began with the Cold Wars end and its promised peace dividend.
According to Walden Bello, the precedent of the Western
intervention in the Yugoslavian conflict without
regard to that countrys sovereignty provided
the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan; in turn,
these two interventions served to legitimize the invasion of Iraq and NATOs war in Libya.
The regime change in the latter case is being turned into a benchmark for future humanitarian interventions by the international
community with Syria next on the list. Removal of the Baath Party from power would make the Middle East free of
Arab nationalist regimes and add to the pressure on Iran and last, but not least, enhance the regional position of Israel.
In this connection, the
role of the transnational mass media (in alliance with politically motivated human rights
organizations) in
the mobilization of public opinion for the principle and practice of
interventionism should not be underestimated. It was on the basis of an intense media campaign in support of the
Western-sponsored Libyan League for Human Rights that the case found its way to the UN Security Council. In this respect, the role
of the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera news network was of determining importance. Qatar is a key member of the pro-U.S. Gulf
Cooperation Council encompassing repressive monarchies whose alliance with the West belies NATOs professed concerns for
human rights and democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The problem with the conceptual framework of humanitarian interventionism is related to
its abstraction from geoeconomics and geopolitics as well as disregard for the disparity of
power and influence in the world. Notwithstanding the appeal of this discourse, the international system is
not a level playing field. In a world where might makes right, the acceptance of
Responsibility to Protect as the norm in inter-state relations gives the hegemonic powers
ideological legitimization for intervening in weaker countries against noncompliant regimes.
Historical experience shows that there are good reasons to doubt the prevalence of
humanitarian concerns as the foreign policy motivation of most nation-states. Not the least
of which is the tendency of the big powers to cloak their foreign policy behind high-
sounding moralistic discourses. The mixing of humanism and war on the part of an
imperialist power is, and remains, an oxymoron. Humanitarian bombing and occupation are
not measures to further peace, and military destruction is neither environmentally friendly
nor energy saving.

Foreign policy is not benign their justification for intervention is inherently

tied to exceptionalism
Brun researcher on development issues and international relations & Hersh professor emeritus
of Aalborg University, 2012 Ellen & Jacques Faux Internationalism and Really Existing
Imperialism Monthly Review 63.11 April http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/faux-
internationalism-and-really-existing-imperialism
Only the gullible can believe that the United States maintains military bases in about 150
countries and a defense budget accounting for more than two-fifths of global military
spending simply in order to sustain human rights, good governance, etc. in the world. Unless of
course one believes that military Full Spectrum Dominance of the United States is the necessary cost for these goods.
A more realistic position to understand the unfolding of contemporary politics is to look beyond the
discourses and contextualize the practice. The guiding lines for U.S. foreign policy were
established in the immediate post-Second World War period some sixty years ago. It was in 1948, in the
context of the beginning Cold War and the decolonization process, that the State Departments Policy Planning
Staff, under the directorship of George Kennan, formulated what was to become the gist of U.S.
international strategy. There is no evidence to indicate a deviation from the documents
recommendations in the practice of American foreign policy ever since. Still today, it is instructive to
focus on its basic assumptions and strategic considerations as these shed light on the present
attempt to remold the world in order to preserve American exceptionalism:
We have about 50 per cent of the worlds wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. Our real task in the coming period is to
maintain this disparity. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming. We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism. We should cease to talk about vague, unreal objectives such as human rights,
the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts.1
The call for realism does not of course mean that the emphasis on humanitarian values cannot be used to serve the same strategic
intereststhat is, the preservation of the unequal distribution of world resources. As the right to intervene in the internal affairs of a
country is based on the assumption that such actions are per definition earmarked for Third World nations, it is essential to take the
structure of the world system into consideration. In this optic, the
development of the ideology and practice of
the West with regard to economic, political, and military interference in non-European
regions of the world can be seen as the continuation of an age-old historical relationship.

Even if the ideology of interventionism is true the failure of implementation is

reason enough to reject
Brun researcher on development issues and international relations & Hersh professor emeritus
of Aalborg University, 2012 Ellen & Jacques Faux Internationalism and Really Existing
Imperialism Monthly Review 63.11 April http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/faux-
internationalism-and-really-existing-imperialism
Skepticism concerning the rationale for humanitarian interventionism or the Responsibility to Protect
need not, however, be exclusively based on a historical narrative of the development of the
international system and the North-South asymmetric relationship. Even if the principle of
protection is accepted at face value, its implementation leaves much to be desired. This is
connected to the selectivity and the inconsistency with which the triumviratethe United States, the
European Union, and NATO, i.e. the Foreign Legion of the Western alliancemake use of the notion. In addition,
where do they derive the authority for carrying out these violations of other countries national sovereignty?
The short 1996 booklet The Post-Modern State and the World Order by Robert Cooper, the ex-diplomat and personal adviser to then
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, rationalized the use of double standards in international relations. Cooper said that on the one hand,
you have the postmodern Western states that have a monopoly on values and weaponry; and on the other hand, you have entities that
still live in the nineteenth century world of power-seeking states with little regard to values. Consequently, according to Cooper,
Among ourselves we operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of
state we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier eraforce, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.3 In
other words, blaming the victim!
The logic of deceit and lying was exemplified in the latest case of humanitarian
interventionism. Although often overlooked, UN Security Council Resolution 1973 only
authorized NATO to enforce a no fly-zone on Libyan forces after the anti-Qaddafi
insurrection had started. Nonetheless, without further mandate from the Security Council, the mission
almost immediately morphed into an aggressive air war in violation of the UN Charter
itself. As a result, a regimethat had cooperated in the fight against al Qaeda, renounced the attempt to build an atomic
bomb, collaborated on controlling the flow of African refugees to Europe, moved in the direction of implementing a neoliberal
economic policy, and cultivated good personal relationships with democratically elected Western statesmenwas suddenly
demonized as tyrannical, which it may well have been!
Yet, in counterpoint to this demonization, Qaddafi, in the eyes of many, was seen as a nationalist and as a pan-Africanist leader who
had done much to modernize Libya and help African countries emancipate from the stronghold of Western dominance.
The question of interventionism of choice is important to the critique of the doctrine of
Responsibility to Protect: Why is there so-called Western humanitarian intervention and
regime change in some countries, while the same Western democracies maintain excellent
relations with other tyrannical regimes such as those of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, or
refrain from military intervention in countries that are accused of violating human rights
and of being undemocraticeven the Congo, where a virtual genocide is taking place?
Connected to the selectivity argumentation other fundamental questions arise: Why does
the Western alliance under the leadership of the United States accept the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian territory and the suppression of that peoples national aspirations? Considered to
be the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel gets economic, political, and military
support from the United States and the European Union without consideration of its oppressive
policies and occupation being in contravention to international law! The double standard is
crying out loud for those willing to listen.
Without concern for the question of sovereignty and of international law, an entire list of
potential regimes in the Third World are targeted for overthrow with the West sponsoring and supporting internal
anti-government political forces in these countries. The sin of these regimes is their refusal to follow the
hegemonic dictate from Washington. Covert and overt interventions have been a component of U.S. foreign policy
for a long time; seen in this context, regime change is not an innovation. During the Cold War period the United States directly or
indirectly stage-managed the overthrow of numerous democratically elected socialist or nationalist states, including Lumumba in the
Congo, Mossadeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Sukarno in Indonesia, and Allende in Chile. These governments were seen as
threatening to American exceptionalism and therefore had to be removed.
 AT: Cannot Reject All Imperialism
Relative anti-imperialism ignores structural global inequality and leads to
placating of anti-militarism movements
Brun researcher on development issues and international relations & Hersh professor emeritus
of Aalborg University, 2012 Ellen & Jacques Faux Internationalism and Really Existing
Imperialism Monthly Review 63.11 April http://monthlyreview.org/2012/04/01/faux-
internationalism-and-really-existing-imperialism
The position of variable anti-imperialism, taken by the humanitarian-interventionist left,
leads to confusion and reductionism of international politics away from an understanding of
the structural and institutionalized unequal access to and division of resources on the world
scale. Given the hegemony of the humanitarian mindset, much of the left in Europe
supported the NATO air war in Libya as a politically correct preemptive intervention to prevent an alleged potential
massacre of civilians by the Qaddafi regime. The result was an absence of anti-war opposition in Europe
and North America. In the words of Walden Bello, the Libyan case will perhaps go down as one of the worst abuses of the
doctrine of humanitarian intervention.
 AT: Competitiveness 1NC
Not zero sum
Krugman Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton University 1994 Paul Competitiveness- A
Dangerous Obsession Foreign Affairs 73.2 http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html
Moreover, countries do not compete with each other the way corporations do. Coke and Pepsi
are almost purely rivals: only a negligible fraction of Coca-Cola's sales go to Pepsi workers, only a negligible fraction of
the goods Coca-Cola workers buy are Pepsi products. So if Pepsi is successful, it tends to be at Coke's
expense. But the major industrial countries, while they sell products that compete with each
other, are also each other's main export markets and each other's main suppliers of useful
imports. If the European economy does well, it need not be at U.S. expense; indeed, if
anything a successful European economy is likely to help the U.S. economy by providing it
with larger markets and selling it goods of superior quality at lower prices.
International trade, then, is not a zero-sum game. When productivity rises in Japan, the
main result is a rise in Japanese real wages; American or European wages are in principle at least as
likely to rise as to fall, and in practice seem to be virtually unaffected.
It would be possible to belabor the point, but the moral is clear: while competitive problems could arise in
principle, as a practical, empirical matter the major nations of the world are not to any
significant degree in economic competition with each other. Of course, there is always a rivalry for status
and power -- countries that grow faster will see their political rank rise. So it is always interesting to compare countries. But asserting
that Japanese growth diminishes U.S. status is very different from saying that it reduces the U.S. standard of living -- and it is the latter
that the rhetoric of competitiveness asserts.

Strategy of competitiveness creates narrowly focused policy making that

destroys resilience and turns the aff
Bristow 10 - School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University (Gillian, January 27, Resilient regions: re-
place'ing regional competitiveness, Challenge, Vol. 3, Iss. 1)
In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of
competitiveness, such that the ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers
and practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage through superior
productivity performance, or the attraction of new firms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the
developing ubiquitification of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This reflects the
status of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely
significant rhetorical power for certain interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005;
Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony is such that many policies previously
considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic growth tend to be hijacked in
support of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008). This paper will argue, however,
that a particularly narrow discourse of competitiveness has been constructed that has a number of negative connotations for the
resilience of regions. Resilience is defined as the region's ability to experience positive economic success that is socially inclusive,
works within environmental limits and which can ride global economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly
resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and diversification, and the developing understanding of regions as
intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specific development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the
dominant discourse of competitiveness is placeless and increasingly associated with
globalised, growth-first and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson, 2005). However, this paper will
argue that the relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than might at first appear. Using insights from
the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding the construction, development and spread of
hegemonic policy discourses, the paper will argue that the
dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional
development policy is
narrowly constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of place and
the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience
that can be partly overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured
as follows. It begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around regional
development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow conception of
competitiveness has come to dominate regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with
competitiveness and its emerging critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development
firstly, with reference to the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show the different
characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Resilience
is rapidly emerging as an
idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and regions, where it is
developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of
transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for
change from above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable development
(see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for example Regional
Resilience Teams established in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency
situations such as the threat of a swine flu pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable
local and regional development activities and strategies. The recent global credit crunch and the accompanying increase in livelihood
insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater resilience by virtue of being less
dependent upon globally footloose activities, having greater economic diversity, and/or having a determination to prioritise and effect
more significant structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular
strongly in the grey literature spawned by thinktanks, consultancies and environmental interest groups around the
consequences of the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era
of peak oil for localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-
fuelled economies, cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled triple
crunch (New Economics Foundation, 2008) has powerfully illuminated the potentially disastrous material
consequences of the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and
competitiveness, both in the form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in
the inability of the current system to manage global financial and ecological sustainability.
In so doing, it appears to be galvinising previously disparate, fractured debates about the
merits of the current system, and challenging public and political opinion to develop a new,
global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics
Foundation, 2008).

Dont trust their argument competitiveness theory is factually wrong the

consequence turns the aff
Krugman Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton University 1994 Paul Competitiveness- A
Dangerous Obsession Foreign Affairs 73.2 http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html
It was a disappointing evasion, but not a surprising one. After all, the rhetoric of competitiveness -- the view that, in the
words of President Clinton, each nation is "like a big corporation competing in the global marketplace" -- has become
pervasive among opinion leaders throughout the world. People who believe themselves to be sophisticated
about the subject take it for granted that the economic problem facing any modern nation is
essentially one of competing on world markets -- that the United States and Japan are competitors in the same
sense that Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi -- and are unaware that anyone might seriously question that
proposition. Every few months a new best-seller warns the American public of the dire
consequences of losing the "race" for the 21st century. A whole industry of councils on
competitiveness, "geo-economists" and managed trade theorists has sprung up in Washington.
Many of these people, having diagnosed America's economic problems in much the same terms as Delors did Europe's, are now in the
highest reaches of the Clinton administration formulating economic and trade policy for the United States. So Delors was using a
language that was not only convenient but comfortable for him and a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, his diagnosis was deeply misleading as a guide to what ails Europe, and similar diagnoses in the United States
are equally misleading. The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its
success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical
matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading
nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of
their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets.
The growing obsession in most advanced nations with international competitiveness should be seen, not as a
well-founded concern, but as a view held in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. And yet it is
clearly a view that people very much want to hold -- a desire to believe that is reflected in a remarkable tendency of those who preach
the doctrine of competitiveness to support their case with careless, flawed arithmetic.
This article makes three points. First, it argues that concerns about competitiveness are, as an empirical
matter, almost completely unfounded. Second, it tries to explain why defining the economic problem as one of
international competition is nonetheless so attractive to so many people. Finally, it argues that the obsession with
competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and threatening the
international economic system. This last issue is, of course, the most consequential from the standpoint of public policy.
Thinking in terms of competitiveness leads, directly and indirectly, to bad economic policies
on a wide range of issues, domestic and foreign, whether it be in health care or trade.
 Not Zero-Sum Ext
COMPETITIVENESS IS NOT ZERO-SUM extend Krugman - trade flows mean
that competition analogy is insufficient there is no empirical proof of their
argument more evidence
Porter & Rivkin Professors @ Harvard Business School 2012 Michael & Jan The Looming
Challenge to US Competitiveness Harvard Business Review March
http://www.wedc.wa.gov/Download%20files/HBR_LoomingCompetiveness.pdf
Competitiveness is not a zero-sum game, in which one country can advance only if others
lose. Long-term productivityand, along with it, living standardscan improve in many countries.
Global competition is not a fight for a fixed pool of demand; huge needs for improving living standards are
waiting to be met around the world. Productivity improvements in one country create new demand for
goods and services that firms in other countries can pursue. Greater productivity in, say, India can lead to
higher wages and profits there, boosting demand for pharmaceuticals from New Jersey and software from Silicon Valley. Spreading
innovation and productivity improvement allows global prosperity to grow.
 Competitiveness Bad - Ext
COMPETITIVENESS THEORY BAD extend Bristow and Krugman 2 arguments
A) RESILIANCY their focus on competition makes resiliency impossible
resilience is key to solve major global problems including warming,
trade, economy and resources this bad economic ideology spills over to
all issues - turns the aff
Krugman Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton University 1994 Paul Competitiveness- A
Dangerous Obsession Foreign Affairs 73.2 http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html
Perhaps the most serious risk from the obsession with competitiveness , however, is its subtle
indirect effect on the quality of economic discussion and policymaking. If top government
officials are strongly committed to a particular economic doctrine, their commitment
inevitably sets the tone for policy-making on all issues, even those which may seem to have
nothing to do with that doctrine. And if an economic doctrine is flatly, completely and
demonstrably wrong, the insistence that discussion adhere to that doctrine inevitably blurs
the focus and diminishes the quality of policy discussion across a broad range of issues,
including some that are very far from trade policy per se.
Consider, for example, the issue of health care reform, undoubtedly the most important economic initiative of the Clinton
administration, almost surely an order of magnitude more important to U.S. living standards than anything that might be done about
trade policy (unless the United States provokes a full-blown trade war). Since health care is an issue with few direct international
linkages, one might have expected it to be largely insulated from any distortions of policy resulting from misguided concerns about
competitiveness.
But the administration placed the development of the health care plan in the hands of Ira Magaziner, the same Magaziner who so
conspicuously failed to do his homework in arguing for government promotion of high value-added industries. Magaziner's prior
writings and consulting on economic policy focused almost entirely on the issue of international competition, his views on which may
be summarized by the title of his 1990 book, The Silent War. His appointment reflected many factors, of course, not least his long
personal friendship with the first couple. Still, it was not irrelevant that in an administration committed to the ideology of
competitiveness Magaziner, who has consistently recommended that national industrial policies be based on the corporate strategy
concepts he learned during his years at the Boston Consulting Group, was regarded as an economic policy expert .
We might also note the unusual process by which the health care reform was developed. In spite of the huge size of the task force,
recognized experts in the health care field were almost completely absent, notably though not exclusively economists specializing in
health care, including economists with impeccable liberal credentials like Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution. Again, this may
have reflected a number of factors, but it is probably not irrelevant that anyone who, like Magaziner, is strongly committed to the
ideology of competitiveness is bound to have found professional economists notably unsympathetic in the past -- and to be unwilling
to deal with them on any other issue.
To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy, a
government wedded to the ideology of
competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to
creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to
the theory of evolution.

B) TURNS THE ECONOMY focus on competition leads to failed economic

policies and protectionism this leads to trade wars
Krugman Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton University 1994 Paul Competitiveness- A
Dangerous Obsession Foreign Affairs 73.2 http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html
A much more serious risk is that the obsession with competitiveness will lead to trade conflict, perhaps even to a
world trade war. Most of those who have preached the doctrine of competitiveness have not been old-fashioned protectionists.
They want their countries to win the global trade game, not drop out. But what if, despite its best efforts, a country
does not seem to be winning, or lacks confidence that it can? Then the competitive diagnosis
inevitably suggests that to close the borders is better than to risk having foreigners take
away high-wage jobs and high-value sectors. At the very least, the focus on the supposedly
competitive nature of international economic relations greases the rails for those who want
confrontational if not frankly protectionist policies.

AND EPISTEMOLOGY TAKES OUT THEIR OFFENSE there is no empirical or

causal evidence to support their arguments and when their authors do use
data is is usually inconclusive or poorly analyzed
Krugman Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs at Princeton University 1994 Paul Competitiveness- A
Dangerous Obsession Foreign Affairs 73.2 http://www.pkarchive.org/global/pop.html
One of the remarkable, startling features of the vast literature on competitiveness is the
repeated tendency of highly intelligent authors to engage in what may perhaps most tactfully be described as
"careless arithmetic." Assertions are made that sound like quantifiable pronouncements
about measurable magnitudes, but the writers do not actually present any data on these
magnitudes and thus fail to notice that the actual numbers contradict their assertions. Or data
are presented that are supposed to support an assertion, but the writer fails to notice that his own numbers imply that what he is saying
cannot be true. Over
and over again one finds books and articles on competitiveness that seem to
the unwary reader to be full of convincing evidence but that strike anyone familiar with the
data as strangely, almost eerily inept in their handling of the numbers. Some examples can best
illustrate this point. Here are three cases of careless arithmetic, each of some interest in its own right.
 AT: US Credibility
Selective engagement with international norms doesnt help legitimacy only
complete overhaul of FoPo can legitimacy anything else immediately fails
or is not sustainable
Cottrell Assistant Professor of Political Science at Linfield College 2011 M. Patrick Hope or
Hype? Legitimacy and US Leadership in a Global Age Foreign Policy Analysis 7.3 wiley online
While Bolton views are extreme to some, the primacy of sovereignty and strategic national interests that inform his opinion are quite
mainstream. Indeed, the United States and other powerful countries commonly invoke the legal norm of sovereignty in practicing what
Richard Haass refers to as a la carte multilateralism. One
need not look beyond recent US foreign policy
controversies for evidence of this behavior: the questioned legality of the invasion of Iraq,
violations of international humanitarian law in Guantanamo Bay, unilateral incursions into
Pakistan in pursuit of Al Qaeda (which Obama ramped up), and other instances where US
compliance not just with international rules and norms, but its own founding values of
liberal democracy and human rights, come into question.10 Further, the selective engagement
of the United States has been frequently cited as undermining the legitimacy (and, by extension,
efficacy) of international institutions from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to the Kyoto Protocol.
Given the perceptual nature of legitimacy described earlier in the context of international institutions, what would a legitimate US
foreign policy look like? One can envision three evaluative criteria. First, did the United States engage in the right process by
engaging the appropriate international institutions and conducting diplomatic consultations in formulating and implementing a given
policy? Secondly, was the given policy action widely seen to conform with the broader values of the international community, as
enshrined by global institutions? Third, to the extent that these actions are perceived to be procedurally and substantively legitimate,
are they implemented consistently and cohesively over time?
The answers to these questions, of course, lie to a significant degree in the eye of the beholder. However, international
institutions often provide the focal point for these legitimacy contests. Institutions are not simply
reflections of great power preferences or equilibrium outcomes among self-interested states. They also reflect a normative and
ideational consensus. Global regulatory politics are not only driven by problems of trust and credible contracting, but also by deep
disputes over the causal assumptions and normative values that are at stake in dealing with a problem (Hurrell 2005:36). The
interpretive communities that revolve around a given institutionstates, NGOs, expert groups, international lawyers, and governance
networksthus assign meaning to foreign policy actions and inform broader views on whether a given policy is legitimate (Johnston
2001, Johnstone 2005).11
Many across the globe hold high hopes that a new brand of US leadership that will reverse
the trend of a la carte multilateralism, enact legitimate policies, thereby reinvigorating
international efforts to address the threats posed by weapons proliferation, terrorism, climate change, poverty, and
beyond. But until the day that US national interest and the common interest align completely,
legitimate action by even the most internationalist US administrations will continue to be
very difficult to formulate and implement consistently, thereby perpetuating legitimacy
contests in the context of international institutions. And, as the next section argues, even if the Obama
administration makes headway in reducing the US legitimacy deficit, domestic political
considerations make it impossible to eliminate it entirely or sustainably.

No US credibility
Cottrell Assistant Professor of Political Science at Linfield College 2011 M. Patrick Hope or
Hype? Legitimacy and US Leadership in a Global Age Foreign Policy Analysis 7.3 wiley online
However, such a goal is extremely difficult to achieve and sustain. The world is chafing at perceived US double
standards with respect to international institutions. Most treaty-based institutions establish a principle of legal
equality, but in political reality this is simply not the case, especially in terms of the distribution of the costs and benefits of
institutional participation. Power
disparities and corresponding social roles can have a profound
impact on institutional legitimacy. Powerful states do, of course, provide a disproportionate share of the
resources for institutions to function, and their support is usually required to manage the institution and secure compliance. But they
also use this leverage
to pursue their strategic interests and perpetuate their relative power in
the international system, which can undermine institutional legitimacy both in terms of
process and substance.8
The United States, in particular, has received much criticism along these lines, causing a general
perception of an American problem in international politics (Mian 2004). Many perceive that
the United States enjoys disproportionate amount of institutional outputs, contradicts collective
values and norms, and uses its power to design procedural advantages (for example, the UN veto or
appointment of the Chairman of the World Bank Group) that fuel perceptions of a democratic deficit in
institutions. While there are some exceptions, such as the NATO intervention in Kosovo deemed by many to represent an illegal,
yet legitimate action, the view that the United States too frequently acts above the law is widespread.9

Detention alt cause to legitimacy

Welsh J.D. from the University of Utah & doctoral student in the Eller School of Business at the
University of Arizona 2011 David Procedural Justice Post-9/11: The Effects of Procedurally
Unfair Treatment of Detainees on Perceptions of Global Legitimacy University of New
Hampshire Law Review http://law.unh.edu/assets/images/uploads/publications/unh-law-review-
vol-09-no2-welsh.pdf
Although a variety of political, economic, and security policies have negatively impacted the
perceived legitimacy of the United States, one of the most damaging has been the detention,
treatment, and trial (or in many cases the lack thereof) of suspected terrorists. While many
scholars have raised constitutional questions about the legality of U.S. detention procedures,6 this article offers a psychological
perspective of legitimacy in the context of detention.
I begin with a discussion of the psychology of terrorism. Next, I argue that the
U.S. response to terrorism has been
largely perceived as excessive, which has undermined global perceptions of U.S. legitimacy. I
address this issue by drawing on a well-established body of social psychology research that proposes a
causal chain in which procedural fairness leads to perceived legitimacy, which leads to the
acceptance of policies.7 In other words, the fairness of the procedures through which
individuals are detained and tried will significantly affect the perceived legitimacy of U.S.
conduct in the War on Terror. In contrast to current detention policies, which have largely been implemented in an ad hoc manner,
I suggest that procedural fairness can be increased through the establishment of a domestic terror court specifically designed to try
detainees. Finally, I balance fairness with the competing values of effectiveness and efficiency to provide a framework through which
U.S. legitimacy in the War on Terror can be enhanced.
AT: DEMOCRACY ADVANTAGE
DEFENSE
 Democracy Bad Method - 1NC
Democratic peace theory conflates causation with correlation democracy is
neither sufficient nor necessary to produce peace
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
The autocratic peace involves a class of arguments about the conflictual consequences of
regime similarity and difference. Theories disagree over whether democratic and autocratic relations are distinct or equivalent.
Early studies of the autocratic peace typically focused on certain geographic regions. Despite having little democracy, low
levels of economic development, arbitrary national borders, and widespread civil conict,
Africa experiences surprisingly little interstate war. Several studies attribute the African peace to historical norms and to the
strategic behavior of insecure leaders who recognize that challenging existing borders invites continental war while encouraging secessionist movements
risks reciprocal meddling in the countrys own domestic affairs (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Herbst 1989, 1990).6 However, these arguments fail to
address tensions between individual (state, leader) interests and social goods. The security dilemma implies precisely that leaders act aggressively despite
lacking revisionist objectives (Jervis 1978).
Initial statistical
evidence of an autocratic peace emerged in a negative form with the observation
that mixed democraticautocratic dyads are more conict prone than either jointly
democratic or jointly autocratic dyads (Gleditsch and Hegre 1997; Raknerud and Hegre 1997). Studies have sought
systematic evidence for or against an autocratic peace. Oren and Hays (1997) evaluate several data sets, nding that autocracies are
less war prone than democracyautocracy pairs. Indeed, they nd that socialist countries with advanced industrialized
economies are more peaceful than democracies. Werner (2000) nds an effect of political
similarity that coexists with the widely recognized effect of joint democracy. She attributes
the result to shared preferences arising from a reduced likelihood of disputes over domestic
politics. Peceny, Beer and Sanchez-Terry (2002) break down the broad category of autocracy into multiple subgroups and nd
evidence that shared autocratic type (personalistic dictatorships, single-party regimes, or military juntas) reduces conict, although the
observed effects are less pronounced than for joint democracy. Henderson (2002) goes further by arguing that there
is no
empirically veriable democratic peace. Instead, political dissimilarity causes conict. Souva
(2004) argues and nds that similarity of both political and economic institutions encourages peace.
In the most sophisticated analysis to date,
Bennett (2006) nds a robust autocratic peace, though the effect is smaller than for joint
democracy and limited
to coherent autocratic regimes. Petersen (2004), in contrast, uses an alternate categorization of autocracy and nds no support for the
claim that similarity prevents or limits conict. Still, the
bulk of evidence suggests that similar polities are
associated with relative peace, even among nondemocracies.
The autocratic peace poses unique challenges for democratic peace theories. Given that the democratic peace
highlights apparently unique characteristics of joint democracy, many explanations are
predicated on attributes found only in democratic regimes. An autocratic peace implies that scholars
should focus on corollaries or consequences of shared regime type, in addition to, or perhaps even
instead of democracy. In this context, arguments about democratic norms (Maoz and Russett 1993; Dixon 1994), improved
democratic signaling ability (Fearon 1994; Schultz 1998, 1999, 2001), the peculiar incentives imposed on leaders by democratic
institutions (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999, 2003), and democratic learning (Cederman 2001a) all invite additional scrutiny. While
it is theoretically possible that a democratic peace and an autocratic peace could arise from
independent causal processes, logical elegance and the empirical similarities inherent in
shared regime type provide cause to explore theoretical arguments that spring from regime
similarity in general.
Democratic peace research produces illogical results refusing this
methodology opens the possibility for studying other methodologies for peace
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
Democratic peace research offers a vision of the future of politics here on earth that has tremendous
normative appeal. We all hope that the countries of the world can continue to form a more
cooperative system. However, the role of scholarly research is not to enunciate our hopes
and dreams (or our fears), but to focus as nearly as possible on what we can derive from logic
and infer from available evidence. If the results of such an inquiry are not so optimistic as we should like, we may at
least be forewarned. News that the world is not necessarily going to become more peaceful with the
fruition of democracy may even mobilize efforts to achieve normative change by other
measures, efforts that may not materialize if we become complacent in our optimism. Today
and in the recent past, democracies exhibit higher levels of cooperation, and less conict, than other regime types (Doyle 1997). Our
research suggests the need to treat democratic peace as conditional.
No endeavor as important and tenuous as world peace should be allowed to rest on a single
support. Certainly no one wants to abandon democracy. Instead, researchers should be helping to bolster existing positive insights
about the causes of peace, an effort that will no doubt also impact normative initiatives as well. If there are many paths to peace, or
possibly even synergies or complementarities in promoting international cooperation, the discovery and elucidation of such
relationships is one of the most important contributions international relations researchers can make to seeking to improve the human
condition. While this analysis may raise more questions than it answered, we hope that our efforts serve as a stimulus to think outside
the democratic peace box which has informed but also constrained so much of resent research in international relations.
 Democracy Bad Method Ext
DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY IS ILLOGICAL extend the Gartzke & Wisiger ev
multiple arguments
A) CAUSATION vs. CORRELATION DPT can only make statements about the
correlation of peace and democracies but has failed to provide sufficient
evidence that democracy causes peace the example of autocratic peace
disproves the logic of their argument
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
Table 1 presents results for a representative run of the model within the specied range of democracy values (that is, between 3% and
46%).20 Prior research reveals that democratic dyads experience less violence than autocratic dyads, but that jointly autocratic dyads
ght less than mixed dyads (c.f. Bennett 2006). As the results of the model conrm, a jointly democratic dyad is likely to experience
conict only 0.57% of the time, while a jointly autocratic dyad experiences conict 0.83% of the time. The model thus conforms quite
closely to observed reality, despite the fact that regime type is simply a label around which otherwise identical actors sort themselves.
The role of regime type as a cue becomes apparent when comparing the relative probability
of conict across different dyad combinations for the entire sample (that is, from 0% to 100% democracy in the
system). Across the whole sample, jointly democratic dyads experience conict in 0.77% of
interactions, compared with 0.78% of interactions in jointly autocratic dyads.21 Once all
possible values are considered, jointly democratic dyads behave no differently than jointly
autocratic dyads.

B) SUFFICIENCY - Regime similarity is not sufficient to solve conflict or lead to

cooperation other issues overwhelm
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
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Similarity is not a guarantee of absolute or permanent friendship, however. To the degree that
local conditions vary, or when issues have strong distributional implications, political
similarity may not always be enough. Tito and Mao found that they could not cooperate with Moscow, even under the
banner of socialism. Afnity for democracy has not lead the United States to embrace leftist or
fundamentalist governments, no matter how popular their mandates. Thus, while similar
politics can make countries more alike on one dimension of potential conict, it cannot
make them identical on other dimensions, and even identical objectives often lead to conict
when payoffs cannot be shared. The trade-off between malleability and incomplete transformation mean that the
propagation of similar regimes will at most only partially affect the afnity of nations.
Other forces, including the zero-sum nature of resource distribution in any political system,
will lead to a change in the focus on a given set of cues of difference as these cues become
less capable of differentiating categories of actors. Race or ethnicity are not salient in societies with
homogeneous populations, but competition remains a part of politics, and so other cleavages appear and are propagated. It is the need
to authoritatively allocate limited resources or prerogatives that causes differentiation.
C) PANACEA democratic peace studies suffer from an exclusionary optimism
that does not consider the full spectrum of democratic violence
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
Much democratic peace research, especially in the theorys early years, has been criticized for its trivial
optimism, one that takes democratization to be a panacea for world peace. Equipped with notions of
linear causality and an alleged seal of approval from established science, the theorys supposed practical relevance found fertile
ground among political elites from the 1990s onwards, beginning with Bill Clintons doctrine of democratic enlargement and
subsequently peaking in the neoconservative verve to spread democracy by force during the George W. Bush administration (as
criticized, for example, in Russett, 2005). Yet, more skeptical scholars
had long been objecting that the self-
congratulatory picture of democracy should be thoroughly questioned and that even the
pivotal analytic concept of democracy itself is both value-laden and historically contingent
(see, for example, Oren, 1995; Hobson, 2009).
So, while some scholars settled with the empirical finding without giving the theoretical basis much further thought (see the critique
by Ray, 1998: 39), others felt inspired to dig deeper. As Anna Geis and Wolfgang Wagner (2011: 1555; see also Hasenclever and
Wagner, 2004: 465) point out, many of these studies are inspired by Immanuel Kants famous essay on Perpetual Peace, and they
have by now led to a more critical and broader liberal study of international conflict. Instead of focusing on the interdemocratic
peace as such, this democratic distinctiveness programme brings together research on such diverse issues as specific democratic
compliance with international law (Morrow, 2007; Slaughter, 1995), the special interest and capability of democracies in establishing
and maintaining international institutions (Hasenclever and Weiffen, 2006), why democracies tend to win the wars they fight (Reiter
and Stam, 2002), and how they fight these wars (Mandel, 2004; Shaw, 2005; Watts, 2008).
One concrete tie-in into this strand of research is the concept of antinomies of the democratic peace (Mller, 2004). This approach
highlights the ambivalence of democratic behavior, particularly in relation to the empirical observation that democracies
tend
to keep the peace among themselves while at the same time behaving in a strikingly
belligerent fashion towards non-democracies.6 Focusing on democratic aggressiveness,
scholars coined the notion of democratic wars (Geis et al., 2006) that is, wars that are typical for democracies
and consistent with specific norms, such as a humanitarian intervention in a non-
democracy to end human suffering (see also Freedman, 2006/7). In this line of thought, the gap between the
ambivalent empirical findings of the democratic peace theory is closed (Geis et al., 2012), yet liberalisms plain
progressivism towards general peacefulness is fundamentally questioned in turn (Rengger, 2006:
133). The antinomy concept helps to expose how classic democratic peace theory systematically turns a
blind eye to some unwelcome conclusions deriving from most basic assumptions and
empirical observations. More precisely, since, as proposed by Harald Mller (2004: 516n6), an antinomy is understood as
a law-like proposition from which a secondary proposition and its very opposite can be deduced (see also Mller and Evangelista,
2008: 2), democratic
peace theory can be said to suffer from an optimistic bias when deducing
democratic behavior only one way. After all, this simply ignores the potentially wider variety of
behavior derivable from the same assumptions, in particular the belligerent behavior
democracies display towards non-democracies. Consequently, the antinomic approach acknowledges that
democracies are distinct but harbor inherent tendencies for both nonviolent and violent behavior, both democracy-specific.
 Democracy Bad Method Ext Dyad Bad
Dyad focus fails
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
One implication of this study is the need to pay much greater attention to system-level
inuences on the behavior of dyads. Research of a generation or two ago was dominated by systemic theories, models,
and empirical work. The system fell out of favor as theory and evidence pointed to the critical role of the dyad as the locus of
interstate conict. Rather than advocating a return to systemic analysis, we believe that the
maturation of dyadic theory
and statistical analysis may afford an opportunity to begin to re-examine systemic
inuences in the context of dyadic analysis, as we have done here. Dyads do not function in
isolation. Dyadic behavior, properly understood, includes the system. Thus, bringing the system back in is a
logical next step for international relations. Indeed, it is system-level effects that uniquely characterize international politics.
A second, related implication involves identity. Debates
about the self, community, and the other are
endemic to the study of politics on all levels because politics is social. The dyad is too small a
unit to contain everything of relevance in international relations, just as ignoring or downplaying dyadic
micro-foundations is a mistake. Dyadic research will increasingly nd it necessary to draw on insights of constructivist theory to
explain the origin of afnities even as constructivists can benet from using incentive-based dyadic models as a framework to
examine how identity becomes behavior. Our
ndings suggest that a growing democratic community
need not lead to reduced conict among democracies, while increasing cooperation among autocracies is
perhaps best explained by a growing sense that they are under threat by powerful democracies. The development of antagonisms may
be based on socially constructed categories, but this is not the same as saying that no such antagonisms exist. Competition
may persist, even as the specic structure of friendships and enmities is likely to evolve.
Nations will continue to compete in a material world. Yet, who is us and who them will
depend on malleable notions of the other. Recognizing that social identity is not itself a remedy for the security
dilemma should help to focus attention on where ssures are likely to develop and what kinds of fault lines are most pernicious.
This in turn leads to a third implication of our research. Difference is most likely an important proximate determinant of conict.
Following Fearon (1995) and the bargaining school of war causation, it would be incorrect to say that difference
causes disputes, since states or other opponents will often forge bargains by mutual
consent. Instead, difference provides the basis for conict and serves to dene the realm where force becomes an option.
Regime type difference is just one among many possible bases for difference. Realist theory
emphasizes power disparities as a cause of conict. While in our view power relations are less salient as a precipitant than other
factors, it is important that realist theory has captured one other possible basis for tension among states. Other
differences
(ethnic, religious, linguistic, ideological, cultural) can serve to create groups with different
interests. These relationships may operate in similar ways to that reported here for dynamic
changes in the distribution of regime type. Future research may explore these possibilities, mindful that reality
is invariably more complex and surprising than we anticipate.
 A2: Diamond
Diamonds theories on democracy fail- lying leaders, economic downturns and
no protection for human rights
Serunkuma 11 (Yusuf, student of interational politics and guest writer for the Observer, February 9,
http://www.observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12107&Itemid=66, 7/9/11)
What Larry Diamond fails to understand is that the world is searching for leaders that will not tell
them lies; Islamist regimes often play their politics on this premise. It is indeed no wonder that the Islamist
Party and the Muslim Brotherhood are smelling victory in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively. Surely then, there is no hope
that democracy as we know it will ever address the conscience of the leaders of these movements. It will
probably be something else, found in either religion or culture. In the US, Harvard, Stanford and Yale graduate politicians
and lobbyists have plundered America for long, telling lies while accumulating wealth. The hardships that
have fomented revolt in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria are quite visible in many European countries and
North America. So many Americans are out of work and there are many struggling economies in Europe. But all these are
fully fledged democracies. It will be rather absurd to imagine that the Arabs will unquestioningly tread the same line one that
disconnects leaders from their consciences as we have seen, because, the majority has decided. As long as democracy
does not translate into economic growth and human rights there will be reason to doubt the outcomes of this
wave of change.

Diamonds categorization of democracies undermines his theories

Leicht & Jenkins 10 (Kevin T., The University of Iowa Department of Sociology, J. Craig, The Ohio State University
Department of Sociology, http://wxy.seu.edu.cn/humanities/sociology/htmledit/
uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724163814618.pdf, 7/9/11)
Our point is that because Diamond adds qualifiers even to the baseline type of electoral democracy, his
characterizations of intermediate democracy are then invariably just as vague as his subsequent
characterizations of democratic society. In both cases, he lacks threshold standards or cut points which
are proceduralist and bright line. In addition, as noted, intermediacy itself is a residual category , and all such
categories are intrinsically vague. Yet, unlike his occasional references to the democratic society, this residual category is far
more important for Diamonds purposes at both a conceptual or theoretical level and in empirical application.
After all, this categorys potential scope of application is extraordinarily expansive. It can potentially include
nearly every established or consolidated democracy in the world as well as many new democracies.
OFFENSE
 Democracy Bad Democracy Prolif 1NC
Proliferation of democracy conflict amongst democratic dyads
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
As predicted, the effect of systemic regime type heterogeneity changes considerably when we introduce the interaction term between
dyadic and systemic difference. As Model 2.4 demonstrates, both dyadic and systemic political differences now appear to signicantly
interaction between dyadic regime afnity and systemic
increase MID propensity. In contrast, the
democracy is negative, while the effect of threshold democracy is now statistically
insignicant.33 As anticipated by our theory, similar regimes are less likely to ght, but this effect is
declining in the relative abundance of similar polities in the system. Difference divides, but
it does so dynamically, with regime afnity within a dyad becoming more or less salient for
conict as the level of democracy varies systemically.
Figure 2 details the substantive effects of systemic regime type variability on conict for a democratic dyad. The horizontal axis lists
observed values of Proportion of Democracy, starting at 3% of the system democratic and increasing to a maximum of 46% of the
system democratic. The vertical axis lists the probability of a MID, as predicted by Model 2.4.34 The democratic peace predicts that
democracies should be very unlikely to ght each other (the probability of a democratic dispute is very low in absolute terms).
Democratic peace research can be interpreted as anticipating that the rise in global democracy will lead to a temporary increase in
conict at the systemic level (Ray 1995; Gleditsch and Hegre 1997). However, this is clearly not the same as arguing that conict in
democratic dyads will increase as more nations become democratic. Even autocratic peace theoriesthat argue that similar regime
types are generally less disputatiousfail to contemplate dynamism in democratic conict propensity. The
probability of a
MID among democracies almost triples over the observable domain from two democracies
in the system to just short of half of all states as democracies. This nding is anticipated by our theory of
dynamic difference. The special peace among democracies may be diminishing as democracy
proliferates.
Figure 3 reports the complementary image, where estimates are for dissimilar dyads. The horizontal axis again varies the proportion of
likelihood of conict
democracies in the international system, while the vertical axis reports the probability of a MID. The
among dissimilar regimes is initially much higher than among democracies, but this
probability is decreasing with rising systemic democracy. The lowest estimated point in Figure 3 (roughly a
0.07% chance of a MID) is almost identical to the highest probability of dispute behavior in Figure 2 (approximately 0.06%
probability of a MID) when roughly half of the dyads in the world are democratic. The
difference in conict behavior
between democracies and heterogeneous dyads diminishes as the proportion democracies in
the system increases. This result is consistent with, and helps to account for, recent evidence
that the democratic peace has weakened in the post-Cold War period (Sobek et al. 2006; Gowa 2010).
Rather than democratization simply making the world more peaceful (Mitchell 1997; Crescenzi and
Enterline 1999), it appears that increasing democracy may begin to shift the locus of conict
away from inter-regime to intraregime disputes. Again, dynamic difference implies that democratic and
autocratic dyads will appear most similar in their conict behavior when each regime type represents approximately half of all states
in the system.
(MID = militarized disputes)
 Democracy Bad Democracy Prolif Ext
PROLIFERATING DEMOCRACY CONFLICT extend Gartzke & Weisiger as
the number of democracies increase the potential for conflict between even
democratic dyads exponentially grows
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
The regressions in Table 3 provide similar substantive results to those reported in Figures 2 and 3. To a surprising degree,
it appears that the special relationship of democratic dyads, or even of similar regime types, is
contingent on the global distribution of political similarity and difference. As the number of
democracies in the international system changes, so too does the relationship of democracies
with other democracies, and of democracies with autocracies. As democracy becomes less
exclusive, there is a tendency for democracies to nd more reason to differ, to dispute, and
possibly eventually to ght among themselves.35 Conversely, declining autocracies may have more reason to cooperate,
and less incentive to provoke conict with increasingly powerful democracies.

AND - the probability of inter-democratic wars increases as democracy becomes

more common
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
A closer investigation of the model reveals additional patterns of interest. In particular, we highlight two relationships not predicted by
prior research, which are captured in Figure 1. First, jointly
democratic dyads are more likely to experience
conict as democracy becomes more common in the model. To be more precise, given that a
democracy is chosen to act, the probability that it targets another democracy increases as
the system becomes more democratic. Second, and less obviously, an increase in the proportion of the system that is
democratic is associated with a clear decrease in the probability that a given mixed dyad will experience conict. In other words, as
we move from a system dominated by autocracies to one with a more equal mix of autocracies and democracies, the model predicts
that the probability of inter-regime conict will decrease. These novel predictions from our extremely simple dynamic model are
amenable to empirical testing.22

AND - Proliferating democracies reduces similarities between democracies

reduces the impetus for cooperation
Gartzke associate professor of political science at UC San Diego & Weisiger Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania 2012 Erik & Alex Permanent
Friends? Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace International Studies Quarterly
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_weisiger_isq_2013.pdf
Combining the afnity of regime types, the dynamic nature of natural allies, and the
demand for security, we must imagine that the impact of regime type on conict and
cooperation could change over time. Initially, the scarcity of democracies in the world
meant that there were few opportunities for direct conict. Even more important, in a
world full of threats, democracies had enough in common that cooperating, or at least not
opposing one another, was prudent. As democracy has proliferated, however, preferred
policies of democratic countries have become more diverse even as the threat from
nondemocracies has declined. While autocratic threats remain, many of the most powerful countries are democracies.
Differences that were patched over, or overlooked, in ghting fascism and communism have
now begun to surface. Perhaps most notable in the last decade has been a basic tension
among developed democracies over both means and ends in the war on terror. There is
also a rising sense that there exists a two-tiered system of democracy, in which elected
leadership is not sufcient to qualify as liberal.18 Finally, inroads of democracy into the
Middle East and elsewhere have begun to reveal what popular rule might mean in societies
with profoundly different traditions and interests than those of the West. At least initially,
the chief beneciaries of the Arab Spring may prove to be Islamist parties, which is
unlikely to prove popular in London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, or Washington DC. These differences
are certainly not yet sufcient to lead to democratic warfare, but tensions appear more salient than in the past. In
the absence of a common foe, nations with similar regime types but different preferences may
increasingly nd that they are unable to justify glossing over their differences.
 Democracy Bad Transitions 1NC
Limited transitioning democracies conflict
Baliga Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Lucca Federal Reserve
Board & Sjostrom Department of Economics, Rutgers University 2009 Sandeep David &
Tomas Domestic political survival and international conflict: Is democracy good for peace?
Working Papers, Department of Economics, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, No.
2009,07 http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/59499/1/612504468.pdf
Over the full sample, spanning 1816- 2000, the data strongly supports a dyadic democratic peace hypothesis: dyads consisting of two
full democracies are more peaceful than all other pairs of regime types. This is consistent with previous empirical studies (Babst [5],
Levy [49], Maoz and Russett [53] and Russett and Oneal [62]). Over the same period, limited
democracies were the
most aggressive regime type. In particular, dyads consisting of two limited democracies are more
likely to experience militarized disputes than any other dyads, including mixed dyads where
the two countries have different regime types. These results are robust to changing the definitions of the three
categories (using the Polity scores), and to alternative specifications of our empirical model. The effects are quantitatively significant.
Parameter estimates of a linear probability model specification, for example, suggest that the likelihood that a dyad engages in a
militarized dispute falls roughly 35 percent if the dyad changes from a pair of limited democracies to a pairof dictatorships. We also
found that if some country j faces an opponent which changes from a full democracy to another regime type, the estimated equilibrium
probability of conflict increases most dramatically when country j is a full democracy. This suggests that as
the environment
becomes more hostile, democracies respond more aggressively than other regime types, which
is also consistent with our theoretical model.
A more nuanced picture emerges when we split the data into sub-samples. Before World War II, the data strongly suggest that limited
democracies were the most conflict-prone. It is harder to draw conclusions for the post World War II period, when very few countries
are classified as limited democracies, and full democracies have very stable Polity scores. The Cold War was a special period where
great power wars became almost unthinkable due to the existence of large nuclear arsenals (Gaddis [32]). Did the weakening and
demise of the Soviet Union bring a return to the pre-1945 patterns? Although the time period is arguably short, in
the post-1984
period it does seem that dyads of limited democracies are again the most prone to conflict.
It is commonly argued that a process of democratization, for example in the Middle East, will lead to peace (George W. Bush [16]).
But boththeory and data suggest that the relationship between democracy and peace may be
complex and non-monotonic. Replacing a dictatorship with a limited democracy may
actually increase the risk of militarized disputes. Even if a dictatorship is replaced by a full
democracy, this may not reduce the risk of militarized disputes if the region is dominated
by hostile non-democratic countries. In the data, only dyads consisting of two full democracies are peaceful.
Democratic countries such as Israel and India, with hostile neighbors, do not enjoy a low level of conflict.
 Democracy Bad Transitions - Ext
Democracies dont lead to peace transitioning democracies are most likely to
go to war and full democracies are most likely to escalate aggressive conflicts
Baliga Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Lucca Federal Reserve
Board & Sjostrom Department of Economics, Rutgers University 2009 Sandeep David &
Tomas Domestic political survival and international conflict: Is democracy good for peace?
Working Papers, Department of Economics, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, No.
2009,07 http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/59499/1/612504468.pdf
According to Paine and Kant, democracy is good for peace because wars are disadvantageous to the population at large. But if wars
are caused by fear and distrust, then the link between democracy and peace is not obvious.
In our simple model of Schellings dilemma, the average citizen wants peace, but he is not a dominant strategy dove,
so he supports aggressive actions against enemies he perceives as hostile. The model suggests a
possibly non-monotonic relationship between democracy and peace, which is in fact found in
the data. Our empirical analysis of militarized disputes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals that
dyads consisting of two limited democracies are the most conflict-ridden of all dyads
(including mixed dyads). Dyads consisting of two full democracies are peaceful, but as the
environment becomes more hostile, full democracies become more aggressive faster than
other regime types. These empirical findings are consistent with the simple model.
 Democracy Bad Social Inequality 1NC
Democratic cooperation global inequality
Lees DPhil International Relations University College, University of Oxford 2013 Nicholas
Structural Inequality, Quasi-rents and the Democratic Peace: A Neo-Ricardian Analysis of
International Order Millennium - Journal of International Studies June Sage Journals
This analysis is based on a neo-Ricardian approach to political economy focusing on quasi-
rents, temporary above-market returns that accrue to actors temporarily shielded from
normal market competition. The asymmetric process of bargaining over quasi-rents constitutes a key causal mechanism
in the maintenance of inequalities operating on multiple scales within the world economy. The present global division of
labour gives rise to quasi-rents in some geographical regions and not others within the
world economy. Within the advanced industrialised economies, workers have been able to
bargain for a share in the quasi-rents that arise at the leading edge of production, giving
rise to enfranchised working classes occupying niches which provide a level of security
against global competition. Insulated through unionisation and occupationalisation, the majority of the
working populations of the industrialised North have not had to sell their labour at its bare
market price in a fluctuating world economy. The institutions of a regulated social market economy, established
through class-based political mobilisation, further consolidated the economic security enjoyed by large segments of the population
within the North. These material and organisational structures are identified as exerting a probabilistic influence on diffuse patterns of
values and ideational beliefs within advanced industrialised nations. As the cultural materialist approach in anthropology claims,
Connecting the
normative values can be interpreted as being grounded in the concrete material circumstances of agents.1
neo-Ricardian sociology of global inequality with recent contributions to the democratic
peace theory debate, the article contends that the values of openness to cooperation which arise
from widespread economic security in the advanced industrialised states contribute to
pacific relations amongst democracies. In doing so, the article grounds the long peace within
the democratic North in a sociology and political economy of global inequality.

Social inequality outweighs the 1AC

Nixon 2011 (Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-4)
Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically,
imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs
gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time
and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and
spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to
engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous,
but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a
range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative,
and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change,
the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive
aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental
catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to
mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted
casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are
underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated
invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been
perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating
invading countries with mass forms of
slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to
include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional
assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event
focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion
of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from
domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is
representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the
pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just
attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-
term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become
increasingly but gradually degraded. Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft.
Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have
a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over
years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse
gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are
scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for
generations. In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily
around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how
can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the
making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional
and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How
can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse
public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions
have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? This books second, related focus
concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal
casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the
slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence
exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while
simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called
disposable people.2 It is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent
environmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not exclusively) across the so-called global South. So a central issue that emerges
is strategic: if
the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on resources, it has also intensified
resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or through activism that has
reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal alliances.
 Social Inequality DA Link Ext
Democratic unity global inequality
Lees DPhil International Relations University College, University of Oxford 2013 Nicholas
Structural Inequality, Quasi-rents and the Democratic Peace: A Neo-Ricardian Analysis of
International Order Millennium - Journal of International Studies June Sage Journals
Where workers have no access to quasi-rents, they must sell their labour power as a homogeneous commodity and experience the
consequent insecurity which arises from fluctuations in supply and demand. Under such circumstances, participation in patronclient
networks may provide the necessary source of security by ensuring a flow of rents in return for loyalty to a patron. To maintain their
position, patrons of clientelist networks must maintain a flow of rents to their supporters. As a result, politics tends towards negative-
sum competition between rival patronclient networks. Such circumstances provide little opportunity for the internalisation of norms
of personal autonomy and openness to cooperation with strangers on which liberal values rest. Because rent-seeking is an intrinsically
rivalrous activity, it is not surprising that participation in such networks instead encourages strong in-group identification and hostility
to out-groups values which Mousseau argues are externalised in the foreign policy of states which are not social market
democracies.104 But whether a solid majority can enjoy economic security within the market seems dependent on the extent to
which quasi-rents are available in a particular economy. Because of their greater socio-spatial distance from
the leading edge of innovation and technological development, the democratic peace has not
extended to the majority of states of the global South.
Structuralism and social market theory are also in agreement that the advanced industrialised democracies are
status quo actors in international relations, united by their highly congruent interests and values.105 A
neo-Ricardian perspective would identify this status quo posture as having its basis in a
distribution of quasi-rents in the global economy favouring these actors. As Mousseau suggests,
because they benefit from the institutional framework of an open world economy, dominant actors within these states have come to
identify with the principles of a market civilisation.106 The
advanced industrialised democracies have thus
acted with a historically unprecedented degree of unity in pushing forward the global
integration of the world economy,107 rebuffing the demand by states of the global South for
a New International Economic Order based on non-liberal principles of economic allocation
in the 1970s108 and advancing an ambitious agenda to establish the security of new flows of quasi-rights in emerging industries
through the aggressive pursuit of agreements over intellectual property rights within the World Trade Organisation in the 1990s.109
The status quo powers of the North have sought to protect a particular distribution of quasi-
rents in the world economy, a distribution that provides them with both security and
prosperity.
 Social Inequality Impact Ext
These everyday forms of violence are the largest proximate cause of conflict
and genocide
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of
Anthropology @ UPenn) 04
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg.
19-22)
This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to thisanthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the
routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in
Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys
version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed
by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is
located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions,
interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US inner city to be normalized (Bourgois,
Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-
destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer,
Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and
peacetime violence. Close attention to the little violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of
everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the
voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into
complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus,
in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible
genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools,
clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public
morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the
socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or
soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide
studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the
term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that,
to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to
those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in
overextending the concept of genocide into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and
there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily
enacted as normative behavior by ordinary good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic
development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial
complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the
small wars and invisible genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in
Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are invisible genocides not because they
are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite . As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are
hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted . In this regard,
Bourdieus partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our
task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of normal social practices - in the architecture
of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader
meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state
repression, Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and
peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent
applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and
wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on illegal
aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Peacetime crimes suggests
that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal stability is
purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied strangle-holds.
Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify
peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly,
but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial
complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus
is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How
many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent?
What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society,
i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of
a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less
dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible
(under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum
we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and
reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant
hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamins view of late modern history as a chronic state of emergency (Taussig,
Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills,
and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations,
i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total
institutions. Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if
not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against
categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is
ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this
category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson
referred to pseudo- speciation as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully
honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites
for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast
Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who
celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence enco mpasses the implicit,
legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by symbolic
violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All
these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977)
finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various
uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies
rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family
farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci,
Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it
is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues
persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against
a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and
individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses
on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass
mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially
violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that
incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims
themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social
sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early
warning signs (Charney 1991), the priming (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the genocidal continuum (as we call
it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social
support and humane care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare queens, undocumented immigrants,
drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of
heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
 Social Inequality Impact D-Rule
Any risk that democracy entrenches global poverty is a reason to vote negative
Caranti Associate Professor of political philosophy at the Universit di Catania (Italy) 2010
Luigi The Causes of World Poverty Reflections on Thomas Pogges Analysis Theoria
December
http://www.unipa.it/dottoratodirittocomparato/sites/default/files/20052009/Materiale%20Caranti(
2).pdf
While epistemic modesty may undermine the Strong Thesis, it leaves our responsibilities untouched. It also leaves the kind of
obligation we have (negative as opposed to positive duties) unaltered. If
we contributed to cause the problem, we
have a direct obligation to do our best to solve it, even if we dont know for sure what is the
best course of action. In particular, we have a most stringent obligation to reform those features
of the global system that still contribute to generate poverty quite independently of how
significant this contribution is and we have a most stringent obligation to compensate for the harm we have already
done. Both duties, as Pogge holds, are negative duties and I take this claim to be of the highest importance, even if we have to
abandon the exciting, promising and optimistic Strong Thesis. Epistemic
modesty, minimal-ecumenical
assumptions about the causal mechanism of world poverty, and minimal-ecumenical
considerations of justice considerations that even libertarians would endorse all point to the necessity to
reshape the way we conceive of world poverty and to the urgency of action.
 Democracy Bad Drones 1NC
Democracy drones turns their conflict arguments
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
Today, it is commonly believed that 40 or more countries are developing military unmanned systems (Singer, 2009: 241). Much of the
data behind such a claim is hearsay and quite tough to verify. However, the most recent edition of Military Balance, published
annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, can serve as a guidepost and a first handle on numbers. Here, 34
countries are listed as holding either medium- or heavy-sized UAVs (IISS, 2011: 246). The list of
UAV holders reveals a peculiarity: two-thirds of these countries are democratic states.
While the drone hype is commonly said to be driven mainly by the United States and Israel, it seems that democracies in
general have been the first to jump on the unmanned bandwagon. Democracy indices such as Polity IV,
on which we draw here need to be taken with an appropriate grain of salt, yet they can be helpful in systemizing and corroborating
this first impression. With Polity IV ranging from 10 (strongly democratic) to 10 (strongly autocratic), 24
of those 34
countries listed in Military Balance turn out to have a polity score of 6 or higher in other words, they
can safely be called democratic. So, why are democracies in the driving seat of this
development?
Some might point to a fairly obvious answer: because they can be. The financial and technological
resources required for pursuing drone warfare are most readily available to wealthy states,
the majority of which are democracies. Adhering to the technological imperative (for a concise
summary, see Reppy, 1990: 1023), so this theoretical argument goes, they employ these superior resources to
build the best technology and arm their militaries with it, simply because it is possible for
them to do so. Yet, no countrys defense budget, not even that of the USA, is limitless. Consequently, political decisions about
how to allocate resources have to be made, all while maintaining the technological edge. So, for instance, why did the US Army
abandon its Comanche advanced helicopter project in 2004, thereby swapping a fast and stealthy hi-tech helicopter for what were
then technologically inferior, slow, and non-stealthy drones (Fulghum and Wall, 2004)? The simplistic argument according to which
technology is the sole driver, while commonplace and not entirely implausible, obviously carries only so far.
We are not the first scholars to raise the question of why democracies are so intrigued by unmanned weapon systems and particularly
drones at the moment, but a review of the burgeoning literature on military use of unmanned systems shows that the issue has hitherto
only been dealt with cursorily and in passing. There is currently no general, systematic, and theory-driven study seeking to probe the
peculiar nexus of democracy and the use of unmanned systems.3 We thus aim to address this lacuna by providing a critical exploration
of the reasons why it is democracies that are spearheading the development of military unmanned systems, as well as the
consequences of this situation. In this regard, we will not deal with specific procurement and employment practices by specific
democratic states in specific cases, but rather try to paint a picture with somewhat broader brush strokes. This is the first goal we are
aiming for with this article. In addition, we wish to contribute to the growing body of theoretical literature that takes a skeptical stance
towards what is known as democratic peace theory. The reasoning behind our adoption of the theoretical framework of the
democratic peace only to critically question it is that, if we are to understand the peculiar nexus between democracy and unmanned
systems, a perspective that retains democracy at the center of the analysis is required. By fleshing out the antinomies of democratic
peace theory (Mller, 2004), we contribute an intrinsic, first-order critique, one that will be more substantiated than an outright
rejection of the entire concept up front.
Our antinomic reading of democratic peace theory ties in with the recent critical turn of the so-called democratic distinctiveness
programme that emerged from the democratic peace debate (Geis and Wagner, 2011).4 Instead of navely taking a supposed
democratic peacefulness at face value, this entails further questioning the precise ways in which democracies are distinct from other
regime types, as we discuss in detail in this articles second section. Such a theoretical framework enables us to systematically account
for the dark side of democratic distinctiveness by identifying the specific inherent ambivalences in democracies that are responsible
for their aggressive behavior behavior that is out of tune with what the conventional, positive bias of classical democratic peace
theory gives reason to expect. More precisely, we argue in the third section that the
same specific interests and norms
that are conventionally taken to be pivotal for democratic peacefulness the need to reduce
costs, the short-term satisfaction of particular risk-transfer rules for avoiding casualties,
and the upkeep of a specific set of normative values constitute the special appeal of
unmanned systems to democracies. In turn, we demonstrate in the fourth section that by relying on these
systems to satisfy said interests and norms, democracies will end up thwarting the latter in the long run inter alia by
rendering themselves only more war-prone. However, despite its skeptical stance, the article ends on an optimistic
note. As we subscribe to the idea that free speech and deliberation are constitutive features of democracies, we believe that critically
self-reflecting the mid- and long-term effects of robotic warfare could lead to more responsible behavior in the future.
Drones depersonalization of war extinction
Bauman Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of Leeds & Lyon director of the
Surveillance Studies Center at Queen's University 2013 Zygmunt & David Liquid Surveillance
pg 88-90
By the start of the twenty-first century, military technology had managed to float and so
'depersonalize' responsibility to an extent unimaginable in Orwell's or Arendt's time. 'Smart', 'intelligent'
missiles and 'drones' have taken over decisionmaking and the selection of targets from both the rank-
and-file and the highest placed ranks in the military machine. I would suggest that the most seminal technological developments in
recent years have not been, sought and accomplished in relation to the murderous powers of weapons, but in the area of the
'adiaphorization' of military killing (that is, removal from the category of acts subject to moral evaluation). As Giinther Anders warned
after Nagasaki but still well before Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, you
dont gnash your teeth when you press a
button . . . A key is a key.' Whether pressing a key starts a contraption to make ice-cream,
feeds current into an electricity network, or lets loose the Horsemen of the Apocalypse makes no

difference. The gesture that will initiate the Apocalypse will not differ from any of the
other gestures and it will be performed, like all other identical gestures, by a similarly
routine-guided and routine-bound operator. If something symbolizes the satanic nature of
our situation, it is precisely that innocence of the gesture,' Anders concludes: the negligibility of the effort and
thought needed to set off a cataclysm - any cataclysm, including 'globocide' . . . What is new is the drone', aptly
called 'predator', which has taken over the task of gathering and processing information. The electronic equipment of the drone excels
in performing its task. But what task? just as the manifest function of an axe is to enable an axeman to execute a convict, the manifest
function of a drone is to enable its operator to locate the object of an execution. But the
drone that excels in that function and
keeps flooding the operator with tides of information he is unable to digest, let alone process promptly and
swiftly, 'in real time', may be performing another, latent and unspoken function: to exonerate the
operator of the moral guilt that would haunt him were he fully and truly in charge of selecting the convicts for
execution; and, more importantly still, to reassure the operator in advance that if a mistake
happens, it won't be blamed on his [or her] immorality. If 'innocent people' are killed, it is a technical fault,
not a moral failure or sin - and, judging from the statute books, most certainly not a crime. As Shanker and Richtel put it, 'drone-based
sensors have given rise to a new class of wired warriors who must filter the information sea. But sometimes they are drowning.' But is
not the capacity to drown the operator's mental (and so, obliquely but inevitably, moral) faculties
included in the drone's design? Is not drowning the operator the drone's paramount function? When in February 2011,
twenty-three Afghan wedding guests were killed, the button-pushing operators could blame it on the screens that had turned into 'drool
buckets': they got lost just by staring into them. There were children among the bomb victims, but the operators 'did not adequately
focus on them amid the swirl of data* - 'much like a cubicle worker who loses track of an important e-mail under the mounting pile'.
Well, no one would accuse such a cubicle worker of a moral failure ...Starting off a cataclysm - including, as Anders insists,
'globocide' - has now became even easier and more plausible than it used to be when Anders wrote down his
warnings. The 'routine-bored operator' has been joined by his [or her] colleague and his probable replacement and successor the
[person] chap with his [or her] eyes fixed on a 'drool bucket', his mind drowning in a 'swirl of data' . . .
 Democracy Bad Drones Link Ext
Democracies causality aversion drones
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
One might say that every military is interested in low casualty rates in order to ensure that it remains
able to fight another day. However, it is plausible to assume that democracies are indeed distinct owing to a
particularly low tolerance for casualties for two reasons, one utilitarian and one normative.
The utilitarian argument suggests that decisionmakers in democracies fear losses among their own more
than authoritarian leaders because rising numbers of casualties in a conflict will have
adverse effects on public support for the military mission (Mueller, 1973; Gartner and Segura, 1998). More
precisely, pertinent research suggests that the relevance of casualties for public opinion differs according to the type of
conflict and is inversely related to the national interest understood to be at stake. In wars of necessity (Freedman, 2006/7) for self-
defense and national survival, any democratic population is willing to tolerate high casualties among its own troops. Yet, the tolerance
for casualties is comparably lower in so-called wars of choice (Freedman, 2006/7), such as humanitarian missions (Larson, 1996).
Democratic publics are thus casualty-phobic insofar as additional casualties create more
disapproval if the public perceives them as being unnecessary or in vain (Gelpi et al., 2006). This is of crucial
relevance with regard to unmanned systems and the types of wars democracies fight, as we will
argue in the third section of this article.

Democratic systems desire to replace soldiers with technology drones

Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
The types of wars fought by democracies have changed over the last decades. In contemporary
asymmetric conflicts and wars of choice, clear criteria for progress or victory are hard to establish and mission objectives may
change significantly over time. Accordingly, decisionmakers
face the possibility of a sudden shift in the
publics mood when casualties rise without palpable progress. This might even lead into a casualty trap
(Schrnig, 2009) a stalemate situation where military operations are ceased to avoid additional casualties, thereby forestalling
mission accomplishment.
Bearing the arguments set out in this articles second section in mind, we
can discern three risk-transfer paths that
are currently followed by democratic decisionmakers in response to the looming casualty
trap. Relying on private military companies (PMCs) rather than regular service personnel to circumvent public scrutiny is one
(Avant and Sigelman, 2010: 259; see also Schooner, 2008), while relying on a combination of air power and locals to limit the
exposure of ones own troops is another way of dealing with democracy-specific casualty-sensitivity. However, both have produced
mixed results; the preferred solution is the third one namely, the replacement of labor (soldiers) by
capital (technology). Advanced cruise missiles and potent conventional warheads might do (Sapolsky and Shapiro, 1996). Yet,
those come into conflict with liberal norms and the law of armed conflict. Excessive firepower is actually a disservice. In order to
minimize civilian casualties, less firepower has to be applied, but in a precise fashion, thereby affecting the militarily relevant target
only (Shaw, 2005: 878) and influencing, not annihilating, the opponent (Mandel, 2004: 71).
Clearly, then, the
liberal weapon of choice should make it possible to minimize civilian casualties
and heed the laws of armed conflict while avoiding friendly casualties by substituting
capital for labor. Yet, this seems irreconcilable with limiting expenditures. It now begins to
become clear why unmanned-systems technology seems so attractive.
First, unmanned systems are considered cheaper than their inhabited counterparts. Hence,
they cater to the distinct democratic interest in limiting military expenditure during
peacetime. Numerous reasons are usually pointed out for this, all seemingly valid at first sight. Obviously, there is no need for
expensive life-support systems. Also, training a drone pilot is cheaper than training a fighter jock.7 Their salaries are lower, too. In
addition, maintenance of unmanned systems is also said to be cheaper, as their airframes are not as complex as those of manned
planes.
Second, and most importantly, unmanned
systems offer themselves in the light of democracies
distinct casualty aversion because they are said to protect troops not merely by distancing
but by removing them from the battlefield.8 With friendlies at less or no risk at all, decisionmakers
have less to fear in terms of a public-opinion backlash. Reaper drones, for example, can simply loiter over a
potential target without risking the life of a human pilot. They can also risk a closer approach for better situational awareness in the
event of doubt. Explosive-ordnance-disposal systems render the issue even more obvious no wonder their
use has risen
exponentially over the last few years and that they are being fetishized as life-savers (Roderick, 2010).

Democracies are more likely to deploy drones programs turns their ability to
prevent conflict
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
Stating that democracies are characterized by a set of distinctive interests and norms, we argued that
this setup causes killer drones and armed robots to appear as a silver bullet for political and
military decisionmakers. These systems are seemingly cheaper and supposedly help states to heed the provisions of
the law of armed conflict. They are considered especially suitable for the casualty-averse risk-transfer
war that democracies prefer. However, we further argued that this supposed silver bullet might well
come back as a boomerang. By fielding more weaponized and autonomous systems, in the long
run democracies will not only be burdened with the mounting costs of an arms race but will
also be rendered more war-prone (in relation to non-democracies), all while employing weapons that are at best
dubious from the perspective of morality and the laws of armed conflict.
 Democracy Bad - Drones Advanced Weapons
Drones are the first step democracies will continue to develop advanced
weapons
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
Unmanned systems seem a perfect fit for democratic warfare through their appeal to the
utilitarian and normative characteristics of democracies. Because they are ascribed the
unique capability of satisfying the rule of risk-transfer war, respecting the laws of armed
conflict and limiting expenditure at the same time, they are even more than the weapon of
choice: they seemingly provide a silver bullet for democratic decisionmakers. Yet, with
current killer drones as only a first stepping stone in what Robert Mandel (2004) has termed the quest
for bloodless war, democracies currently fuel two trends.
The first of these is weaponization. UAVs, for example, started out as single-purpose observation
drones, but have since become both communication relays and multi-sensor ISR and weapon platforms. Since
the sensor (formerly the UAV) and the shooter (formerly a manned airplane, an artillery unit, etc.) no longer have to be coordinated
but are now two-in-one, unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) reduce the sensor-to-shooter gap from hours to minutes or seconds,
increasing efficiency and thus providing an extremely valuable capability from a military point of view. Only a limited number of
countries currently operate weaponized systems. However, the trend is already well underway, and there is little to no opposition to it.
New, small-yield missiles will make weaponized UAVs appear even more suitable for
precision warfare in the future.
The second trend is autonomy that is, the capacity to operate in the real-world environment
without any form of external control, including, eventually, independent intelligent
decisionmaking (Lin et al., 2008: 105; see also Sparrow, 2007: 656). Starting out as mere remote-controlled devices, modern
UAVs are capable of performing a number of tasks on their own for extended periods of
time. Following a preprogrammed route is routine. Even complex tasks like take-off, landing, or responding to emergencies like
damage or even partial wing loss are safely handled. Consequently, UAV operators are changing their role from
pilots in-the-loop to mere supervisors on-the-loop, splitting their attention between several airborne drones. And, even
though current unmanned systems lack strong artificial intelligence, there is an unfaltering trend towards greater
autonomy. Some fully autonomous weapon systems already exist, such as automatic close-in weapon
systems for terminal defense against missiles or artillery shells (like the US Phalanx) and fixed border sentries in South Korea and
Israel (Lin et al., 2008: 1314, 1819; Marchant et al., 2011: 2767). More are likely to follow, as we will argue below.
To sum up our argument so far, killer drones seemingly lend themselves as the silver bullet of democratic warfare, explaining the
distinct democratic eagerness to employ them. Yet, we are going to claim that many of the characteristics ascribed to drones are not
holding up under closer scrutiny. More importantly, in the long run democracies
may be disregarding numerous
problematic normative consequences while striving for more, weaponized, and eventually
autonomous systems.

The logic of democracy automatous weapon systems

Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
Considering in more detail, lastly, the ongoing trend towards greater autonomy in mobile
weaponized systems, it becomes clear that autonomy begets autonomy. Processes and
decisions in automated war will become so swift that residual human interference means an
unacceptable military disadvantage. With humans moving from in-the-loop to on-the-loop today and owing to the
ever-increasing pace of the decisionmaking process out-of-the-loop, the incentive to procure and field more and
more autonomous armed systems will be overwhelming, making it only a matter of time
before autonomous weapon systems armed robots arrive on the battlefield. Their key
characteristic is that they will be making decisions about life and death as they autonomously decide on what or whom to engage. This
raises a whole new set of ethical and legal questions, in particular regarding fundamental rules of discrimination, proportionality, and
responsibility.
 Democracy Bad Drones Arms Race
Drones lead to arms races escalates costs
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
In terms of material costs, the first problem to consider is proliferating technology. Like many
modern military applications today, unmanned systems have been made possible through the spin in of civilian technology into
military hardware (Sparrow, 2009: 28; see also Oudes and Zwijnenburg, 2011: 201). For example, basic drone technology that is,
airframes, propulsion, telemetry, control software, in short everything but sophisticated military components such as sensors,
weaponry, etc. can be borrowed from the civilian sphere. The downside, of course, is that drone technology is comparably easy to
obtain and widespread (accordingly, even non-state entities such as Hamas supposedly use drones, as do a number of PMCs; see
Krishnan, 2011: 62; Singer, 2011: 79). In addition to their distinctive interest in unmanned systems, democratic states possess a
comparative advantage in terms of research and development (R&D), since they can rely on competitive civilian markets to bring up
innovative solutions, generating a broader range of technological choice for both consumers and the military (Mller and Becker,
2008: 103). However, it is easier for authoritarian states to channel massive resources into refining specific systems once the basic
designs have been re-engineered, as the Cold War experience suggests (see, for example, Evangelista, 1988: 2249). China, for
instance, based its first handful of UAV concepts on copies of existing designs, and shortly afterwards, as of 2010, could already
democratic states
display around 25 different UAV models, including weaponized ones, at arms shows (Minnick, 2010). So,
spearhead innovation by investing significant resources in R&D, but in both technology
and war there is no such thing as a permanent first mover advantage (Singer, 2011: 79). In
trying to quickly reap the alleged benefits of using drones and in order to enhance force protection for
currently deployed troops, NATO states have fielded equipment that by former standards was
not sufficiently mature. As a result, many systems have been lost owing to malfunction (the US
drone that crashed in Iran in 2011 is a case in point), increasing the risk of unrecovered wrecks fueling a
technological transfer and drone technology being sold on the international black market.
So, while innovators bear significantly higher costs, followers can adopt a pick-and-choose approach, invest
in (copies of) proven concepts, rely on technology transfer, or substitute individual features
with cheaper civilian technology. The problem of proliferation is hence exacerbated by the
fact that the comparably costly efforts by democracies to keep the edge are paving the way
for aspirants who can simply trail the development with indirect help (Von Kospoth, 2009).
So far, the assessment suggests that democratic efforts to reduce the monetary costs are doomed to
failure owing to the dynamic interaction of innovation and replication. Irony is added by the fact that
while drones are favored by democracies because they are commonly considered cheaper for a number of seemingly plausible reasons
that we laid out earlier, the verdict on this promise is not actually in yet. For example, most US Air Force operating costs, including
those related to drones, are either unknown or misreported (Wheeler, 2011), and a single Predator or Reaper requires as many as 170
personnel to launch, command, recover and repair, plus handle the imagery it gathers, as David Axe (2011) notes. According to Axe,
the Pentagon learned that, counterintuitively, unmanned aircraft actually require lots of manpower, and manpower is, after all, a
major driver of costs.
 Democracy Bad - Drones Terrorism

Backlash to drones terrorism

Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
Unmanned systems are understood to minimize casualties among ones own troops. According
to their proponents, this is particularly helpful in asymmetric conflicts between states and non-state actors. However, the use
of unmanned systems, particularly weaponized ones, may also aggravate the downside of
such conflict settings. Operating them abroad may invite guerilla warfare or even terrorist
attacks as a response to their overwhelming conventional superiority. Paul W. Kahn (2002: 6)
concludes that the asymmetrical capacities of Western and particularly U.S. forces themselves create the
conditions for increasing use of terrorism. Given that democratic states tend to value the lives of their civilians
even more highly than those of their soldiers (Mandel, 2004: 11), attempts to reduce casualties on the battlefield
abroad might backfire. We will return to this train of thought in the next subsection.
Proponents of precision drone strikes also hope that the constant threat of bolt from the blue attacks will frustrate opponents into
surrender, with the civilian population remaining unharmed at the same time. Yet, the drone strikes in the AfghanPakistan border
region are not corroborating such a view. Estimates of the numbers of civilian casualties, even while differing wildly (Rogers, 2010:
1315; see also Ahmad, 2011; Woods, 2011), suggest that the hastily fielded technology is less discriminate and proportionate than
was hoped. Against this background, some critics ask whether relying
on technological supremacy and drone attacks is
helpful in these asymmetric engagements. It might
prove counterproductive by creating a siege
mentality, with public anger ultimately solidifying the power of the extremists, thus
protracting the conflict rather than bringing it to a swifter and less bloody end (Kilcullen and
McDonald Exum, 2009: 1920; see also Sullins, 2011: 1645; Oudes and Zwijnenburg, 2011).10
 Democracy Bad - Drones War
Drones lower democracys conflict threshold
Sauer Lecturer & Research Associate Political Science Dept @ Bundeswehr University,
Munich & Schrnig Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt 2012
Frank & Niklas Killer drones: The silver bullet of democratic warfare? Security Dialogue
43.4 Sage Journals
A more general argument in the debate over the rise of drones and military robotics is that their sheer existence
lowers the threshold for military engagement for democracies. As argued above, the political risk of
casualties provides a major restraint to democratic leaders in their decision to commit troops for so-called wars of choice. But, the
more technology allows for removing soldiers from the battlefield, lifting the Clausewitzian fog of war
and creating a general asymmetric advantage, the less likely losses among ones own troops become and
the lower the threshold to engage with military means. This already applies to unarmed UAVs, as they
provide troops with instant and risk-free high-quality intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Now, to avoid a
misunderstanding: States are of course obliged to provide their troops with the best protection available. However,
implementing this option also leads to the antinomic effect of political decisionmakers
supporting military missions they would not have supported under different, more costly
circumstances. The growing numbers of weaponized drones and robots only make this slope
more slippery. The Obama administrations argument for not having to ask the Congress to
authorize the Libya campaign under the War Powers Act is a case in point. White House
legal counsels argued that the military engagement was limited, conducted without the
involvement of US ground forces, and thus free of any risk of friendly casualties (Savage and
Landler, 2011; Saletan, 2011).11
global and
Finally, and recalling the problem of proliferation, if both major and regional powers continue to build up capacities,
regional robot arms races seem a likely consequence. A whole body of arms control literature raises the
serious conjecture that accelerating arms races will have a destabilizing effect on state relations and
increase the risk of military conflict with, again, more rather than fewer casualties looming.
 Democracy Bad Militarism 1NC
Democracies make militarism appeal to the median voter militaristic foreign
policy
Caverley Asst Prof Political Science Northwestern University 2012 Jonathan The Political
Economy of Democratic Militarism: Evidence from Public Opinion Paper at the International
Relations Workshop UW-Madison 3/28
http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/Uploads/Documents/IRC/Caverley.pdf
After briefly reviewing previous approaches in IR to democratic cost aversion and public goods provision, I present a model of
defense as wealth redistribution that suggests democracies
will build larger, highly capitalized militaries as
inequality in wealth rises. This redistributive process makes the use of the military to
advance grand strategic goals less costly for the average (that is median) voter, resulting in
more aggressive foreign policy goals. I test the microfoundational component of the Meltzer-Richard redistribution
model using public opinion data on defense spending across a wide variety of democracies. I then examine public opinion in Israel to
test the theory's implications for foreign policy preferences. I conclude by speculating on these findings' implications for international
politics.

Militarism environmental destruction and extinction

Sanders professor of History of Ideas and English at Pitzer College 2009 Barry Online Excerpt
from The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism
http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/book-excerpt-from-the-green-zone-the-
environmental-costs-of-militarism/
In a nation like ours, where military might trumps diplomatic finesse, the supreme irony may be that the planet, and not human beings,
will provide the most stringent corrective to political overreaching. The
earth can no longer absorb the
punishment of war, especially on a scale and with a ferocity that only the wealthiest, most
powerful country in the worldno, in historyknows how to deliver. While the United States military
directed its Operation Iraqi Freedom solely against the Iraqis, no onenot a single citizen in any part of the globehas escaped its
fallout. Whenwe declare war on a foreign nation, we now also declare war on the Earth, on
the soil and plants and animals, the water and wind and people, in the most far-reaching
and deeply infecting ways. A bomb dropped on Iraq explodes around the world. We have no way of containing the fallout.
Technology fails miserably here. War insinuates itself, like an aberrant gene and, left unchecked, has the capacity for destroying the
Earths complex and sometimes fragile system.
So we can act like honorable and conscientious citizens, conserving all the energy we can.
We can feel good about all those glossy magazine ads from Shell and Exxon Mobil telling us how their
companies now treasure the environment, producing their fuels in the cleanest ways possible. We can fall for
Detroits latest news, too, convincing us of a revolutionary breakthrough in fuel efficiency: 300 horsepower cars that get still 30 or 32
miles per gallon on the highway. But thats just insanity wearing a green disguise. None of those
advertised boasts and claims really matter. They still cling to fossil fuels and further our campaign to kill off
everything on the planet with our addictive need. But, even if those claims did make a slight difference, even
if we could slow down global warming, ultimately it would not matter. For, in the
background, lurking and ever-present, a giant vampire silently sucks out of the Earth all
the oil it possibly can, and no one stops it. And so heres the awful truth: even if every person, every
automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be
headed head first and at full speed toward total disaster for one major reason. The
militarythat voracious vampireproduces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire
globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most immanent danger of extinction.
As we contemplate America in the opening years of the twenty-first century, then, let us reconsider George Washingtons farewell
warning that overgrown military establishmentsunder any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded
as particularly hostile to republican liberty. Today, our own military
has grown beyond an institution hostile
to liberty and has wrapped its arms of death around life itself. And, from all the available evidence, it will
not let go. Unlike most animals, the military has no surrender mechanism. Unless we all summon the
strength to confront the militaryno easy taskit will continue to work its evil.
 Democracy Bad Militarism Link Ext
Democracy militarism
Caverley Asst Prof Political Science Northwestern University 2012 Jonathan The Political
Economy of Democratic Militarism: Evidence from Public Opinion Paper at the International
Relations Workshop UW-Madison 3/28
http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/Uploads/Documents/IRC/Caverley.pdf
As military capitalization grows, making conscription and casualties less likely, arming and
war evolve into exercises in fiscal, rather than social, mobilization. This paper argues that this
process leads to an increase in the level of militarism within a democracy. At high levels,
militarism is a pathological grand strategy in which a large portion of a society supports the
building of an excessively strong military, believes in its superior efficacy as a foreign policy
tool, and exhibits a heightened willingness to employ it. Militarism is an over-weighting of military power
within the portfolio of investments designed to increase a state's security, its grand strategy. In a highly militaristic state,
the use of force becomes increasingly attractive to a large cross-section of the public relative
to the employment of other foreign policy tools (or doing nothing).
Militarism has generally been used by historians and political scientists alike to describe nondemocratic regimes such as nineteenth
IR's
century Prussia and twentieth century Imperial Japan, where the military penetrates the very fabric of society (Vagts 1959).
lack of inquiry into democratic militarism stems from IR theorists' defining of militarism as
a crisis in civil-military relations in which the military dominates foreign policy decision-
making at the expense of the civilian government (Van Evera 2001). This unnecessarily limited
definition conflates militarism as an outcome with the process causing it, transforming the phrase
democratic militarism" into an oxymoron, because civilian control of the military is generally considered to be an essential element
of a healthy democracy. This
paper argues for the potential for a high level of militarism even in a
state where the military is entirely dominated by the will of the voters. Indeed in a democracy this is a
prerequisite.

Lower costs of war make aggressive democracies more likely

Caverley Asst Prof Political Science Northwestern University 2012 Jonathan The Political
Economy of Democratic Militarism: Evidence from Public Opinion Paper at the International
Relations Workshop UW-Madison 3/28
http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/Uploads/Documents/IRC/Caverley.pdf
If democracies can shift the defense burden away from the median voter by developing a
certain type of military, one cannot assume that the costs of defense (and ultimately of war) are
evenly distributed across society, a crucial assumption of democratic exceptionalism. Scheve and Stasavage (2008)
locate the origins of progressive taxation in the effort to distribute fairly the burdens of conflict in the era of mass warfare. This
paper suggests implications for what happens when the progressive tax system remains, but
technology obviates the need to mobilize large, labor-intensive armies. Democracies with
large amounts of capital relative to their populations are therefore likely to have an advantage building
militaries in which the costs of conflict are relatively low for the median voter. The effect is
exacerbated by economic inequality. Wealthy but inequitable democracies with ready access to capital
may be quite willing to build large militaries and use them aggressively, because arming
and war are, in the minds of many voters, cheap.

Democratic peace theory justifies militarism

Litsas Asst Prof in International Relations Theory at University of Macedonia 2012 Spyridon
Democratic Peace Theory and Militarism: The Unrelated Connectivity Civitas Gentium 2.1
http://cg.turkmas.uoa.gr/~tcgweb/ojs/index.php/cg/article/view/31/45
From the above it can be said that the D.P.T is a political weapon used by a Great Power, to accomplish
its hegemonic objectives. This qualitative course of action promoted by the U.S. since the Cold War ended has
been the primary source of militarism in the 21st century, as the wars in the Balkans and the Middle East
clearly show. Inevitably, Democratic Peace leads to Democratic War and constitutes the
ultimate attempt at imposing radical changes in the domestic socio-political structure of a
state. As Geis et al argue:
As long as democracy is promoted by peaceful means of cooperation and voluntary assistance, one might not object to such a foreign
policy strategy. If regime change is to be achieved by force as in the Iraq war 2003, however, the flip side of the democratic peace,
namely a democratic war becomes obvious. Unfortunately, the
notion of a democratic peace lends itself to
being employed as an ideological underpinning for liberal- expansionist policies. Under the
guise of promoting a seemingly universalist idea of democracy and freedom, some of the
powerful Western democracies arrogate to themselves the right to pursue a liberal
mission. [56]
 Democracy Bad Militarism Internal Link
Median voters shape foreign policy in democracies
Caverley Asst Prof Political Science Northwestern University 2012 Jonathan The Political
Economy of Democratic Militarism: Evidence from Public Opinion Paper at the International
Relations Workshop UW-Madison 3/28
http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/Uploads/Documents/IRC/Caverley.pdf
First, this paper sought to show that individuals respond to incentives as predicted by the theory, and made no effort to establish the
causal role of military capital intensity, nor does it translate voter preferences into actions by states. Comprehensive testing of this
paper's theory will require empirical efforts on both fronts. Second, despite the empirical support found in this paper, the paper's
theoretical model takes a necessarily stylized approach to democracy. The relationship between the government and public opinion is,
to say the least, complex (Baum and Potter 2008). Nonetheless, evidence suggests that the role of the average
voter in shaping the incentives for a state's foreign policy is an important one, and in a
democracy it plays a normatively essential one. The fundamental insight of the median voter
theorem is that the will of voters in the center of an issue preference aggregation exerts a
powerful pull on elected officials and therefore on the state's foreign policy. By relaxing the
selectorate theory's assumption that all citizens are identical, this paper takes a first step beyond the observation
that democracies are sensitive to costs" and begins to delineate what these costs may be
and who pays them (Filson and Werner 2004). More sophisticated institutional models (proportional representation vs.
majoritarian) with multiple issue areas (guns and butter) will improve our understanding of how the burden of defense is spread within
a democracy. While this paper undermines the claim that the less wealthy are more susceptible to being manipulated by myths of
empire," it is equally clear that the
public's perception of the need for security plays an important role
in its cost-benefit calculus. Put another way, the median voter is a necessary member of any log-
rolling coalition of special interests for a sub-optimally aggressive foreign policy by a
democracy (Snyder 1991).
 Democracy Bad Heg Bad 1NC
Democracy is a guise for global hegemonic exploitation & militarism
Litsas Asst Prof in International Relations Theory at University of Macedonia 2012 Spyridon
Democratic Peace Theory and Militarism: The Unrelated Connectivity Civitas Gentium 2.1
http://cg.turkmas.uoa.gr/~tcgweb/ojs/index.php/cg/article/view/31/45
D.P.T represents the American version of those attempts. Nevertheless, it is necessary to differentiate the theoretical approach of
American academia from that of the American politicians. For example Bruce Russet and John Oneal argue that Liberal Democracy,
interdependence[47] and international organizations promote the peaceful co-existence between the states [48]. However,
American politicians, primarily during Clintons and George Walker Bushs administrations, argue that global
peace and prosperity can be established only through the spread of liberal democracy all over
the world. Nevertheless, moralistic arguments cannot disguise the genuine political objectives of the
United States. The U.S. is the undisputed western peripheral hegemonic power and it aspires to
expand its dominance throughout the International System. This, as we have already mentioned before, does not constitute
an innovative course of action, or reveal a unique American egocentrism. It is rather a typical function of a Great Power in order to
achieve its upgraded role in the international arena and, at the same time, confront any kind of threat to its peripheral primacy. As it
can be understood, the main objective of Democratic Peace is not the radical modernization of the
International System through a crusade for the establishment of democracy, but rather
through the decisive elimination of any kind of opposition or threat to its hegemonic might,
without, however, facing the risk of being accused of being a ruthless and immoral despot. It could be seen that D.P.T. is the
Trojan Horse of the 21st century used by the United States, not only for conquering the enemys castle,
but also for preserving the archetypal image that the U.S. has projected within the Western
world since the nations birth on July 4, 1776. The veiling of the United States hegemonic objectives under the moralistic guise of
the D.P.T could initially be perceived as unnecessary. Why, after all, does the superpower feel the need to cover its hegemonic
objectives under such a utopian theory? This question can be answered by observing the structural function of the International
System. A clearly revisionist endeavour can generate serious reactions, both within the western world and in the rest of the
International system, which would place the United States at the mercy of such upheaval. This could occur either by the creation of
counter balancing anti-hegemonic coalitions, or by the gradual disintegration of NATO into a marginal alliance with limited
capabilities of intervention. In other words, the U.S. would plainly reveal its political agenda and its idealistic facade would be
demolished. This, in turn, would jeopardize the position of the U.S. on the International scale of power and would force longtime and
traditional allies to take opposing positions against the U.S. [49]. As a result, it can be concluded that D.P.T cannot possibly exceed
the systemic limitations of the international system. No hegemony has ever managed to bypass the anarchic and antagonistic structure
of the international system and become a supreme global imperium. Nevertheless, even in a limited geographical area, where a
peripheral hegemony has succeeded to impose its dominance, there have been disputes; either in the form of social revolts against the
ruling administration, or in the form of national claims by ethnic groups for their independence or self-determination. Consequently,
the elimination of the war phenomenon is not the main precondition for D.P.T to function
properly. Certainly war can be a source of destruction for any state, regardless of its size or capacity for power. However, war is a
human invention and a direct result of the structure of the international system. Therefore, it is clear that when a Great Power aspires
to establish the D.P.T, then its fundamental objective cannot be the elimination of the war phenomenon but, rather, the decisive
invalidation of the International System as a mechanism for international relations. The
pivotal objective of the D.P.T.
is not to establish liberal democracy as the ultimate element that connects states so that they
do not wage war on one another. Such an objective is utopian and cannot eradicate the
central role of national interest in the political designs of every state. If this was the case, in order for the war
phenomenon t be eliminated, national interests would have to cease to exist as well.
Consequently, the international system would cease to exist as well, since a nation-state without the will and ability to safeguard its
national interests becomes like the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship that can never make port. It no longer resembles the Westphalia
paradigm of the modern era. The International System would be abolished, then the hegemonic power would be able to elevate its
power from the sub-systemic to the global level, since the systemic limitations would no longer exist. Therefore, we can now fully
support the view that Democratic
Peace is a qualitative political method that seeks to eradicate the
states ontological existence and replaces it with a new homogenized global structure.
Today, D.P.T is considered to be a descendant of international cosmopolitanism, which some scholars link with so-called progressive
ideological beliefs [50]. The aforementioned illusion, that humanity will be better off without the cultural and political diversity of the
westphalian system, is based on a crucial misconception that war, as a phenomenon, will cease to exist if the anarchic and antagonistic
nature of the international system is abolished. Nevertheless, if
we overcome the dubious utopianism of the
D.P.T and focus on the selected methodology concerning its implementation, we will
understand that D.P.T is the main source of militarism in the 21st century. Not only because
it is almost impossible to modify a states international behaviour by making considerable
changes to domestic policies but also because democracies are war-prone [51].

<INSERT HEG BAD IMPACT>

 Democracy Bad Heg Bad Link Ext

Democratic peace theory hegemonic militarism

Litsas Asst Prof in International Relations Theory at University of Macedonia 2012 Spyridon
Democratic Peace Theory and Militarism: The Unrelated Connectivity Civitas Gentium 2.1
http://cg.turkmas.uoa.gr/~tcgweb/ojs/index.php/cg/article/view/31/45
Although D.P.T is deeply influenced by Kants Perpetual Peace, it does not constitute its continuance. It is a well-
orchestrated attempt to cover the United States hegemonic objectives behind the veil of a
benevolent cause that promises a liberal Valhalla to humanity. However, for a state to enter
this promised land where peaceful co-existence and social prosperity regulate human
conduct, it requires a long stay in Purgatory. After all, Valhalla exists only in mythology while Purgatory is a
miserable reality demonstrated by such cases as Afghanistan and Iraq.
As we have seen, the origins of war are purely systemic; therefore no governing system can
influence them. The United States hegemonic objectives of transforming the international arena
into a homogeneous and collective upwardly mobile system constitute the main source of
militarism in the 21st century.
D.P.T is not capable of materialising its promises. Minimizing the frequency of war can only be accomplished
if states provide for their survival by increasing their capacity for hard power, enhancing their alliances and generally reinforcing their
active presence within the international arena. By increasing the number of powerful states in the international System, the likelihood
of war is reduced because one state can counterbalance the expansionistic tendencies of another. Within this context war is a less
feasible scenario [63].
War will continue to play a significant role in the international system since it constitutes an indispensable tool for states to achieve
their political objectives. For the establishment of a safer International System the eradication of war is not a realistic option.
Nevertheless, the herculean task in front of us is the establishment of an international balance of power that would decrease its rate of
occurrence. This can be achieved, not through the implementation of the D.P.T., but through the construction of an enduring
international system in which states invest in their empowerment so that they are able to provide for their survival. The ontological
existence of states can serve as a counter-balancing mechanism to hegemonic aspirations. Global
homogeneity can only
provoke fundamental animosities and the prospects of war of all against all. If we continue with
the current state of affairs, we will guarantee the establishment of militarism in the 21st century.
AT: TERRORISM ADVANTAGE
 Terrorism Adv 1NC
Their calculations are not objective there is no mechanism to predict or
prepare for terrorism reject all of their claims to knowledge
Kessler Sociology at Beilefeld & Daase Poli Sci at U of Munich 2008 Oliver & Christopher
Alternatives p EBSCOhost
The objective is to develop means and methods to deal with uncertainty and reduce it to risk.46 Uncertainty is subsequently redefined
in terms of contingency: One may not know what the next state of the world exactly is going to be but one can have a good guess and
possibly find some insurance. To calculate risks does not mean that they can be measured objectively.
Not all uncertainties are of quantitative nature and thus understandable within the common
definition of rationality.47 In particular, the evaluation of risks may vary according to the political
interests or cultural contexts If this is acknowledged, the traditional concept of deterministic causality
loses its validity. Uncertain political results and uncertain strategies do not follow predetermined laws, but, if anything,
probabilistic laws. Thus, what political scientists can achieve at best is probabilistic knowledgethat is,
knowledge about necessary and sufficient reasons and causes that may not be able to predict
single events but that do identify the conditions under which the realization of specific events is
more or less likely.
If this is accepted, the question of how big the threat of international terrorism currently is can no
longer be answered by pointing to the next terrorist act that will surely happen at some point in
the future. For the fact that the current calm is just the calm before the next storm is as true as it is
trivial. However, exactly such trivial insights that the next terrorist "attack" will happen determine
current security policy discourses. There are two reasons for this. First, there are two equally inadequate standard models
to examine the risk of terrorism.49 The one inquires into the motivational structure of terrorist groups and individual terrorists and
tries to extrapolate future attacks from past terrorist activities. The other attempts to calculate the risk by multiplying expected losses
by their probability of occurrence. The former is preferred by terrorism experts and regional specialists, the latter by decision makers
and security analysts.
The problem of the first method, however, is that it cannot account for new developments and spontaneous changes in terrorist
practices. There is always a first time when new strategies are used or new targets are selected. Even using planes as cruise missiles in
order to destroy skyscrapers was an innovation not clearly foreseen by specialists, because such behavior was nearly unimaginable at
the time. Extrapolation methods to determine terrorism risks are thus inherently conservative and tend to underestimate the danger.
The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses. If
the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus
on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest
degree of improbability becomes irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity.^o The mathematical calculation of the
risk of terrorism thus tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences
beyond the actual risk assessment for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If one factor of
the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for
antiterrorist efforts, and risk management as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under the historical condition of bipolarity, the
"ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on
higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is
possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and capabilities, is largely absent.
The second form of security policy that emerges when the deterrence model collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It
represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with logical probability theory, the logic of
does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as
catastrophe
constitutive for the logic itself; uncertainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophies. In
particular, catastrophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major implications for the
world polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To
conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate security
policy. Since catastrophes happen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political
action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of
terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond
"rationality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the responsibility to provide securityas
long as they at least try to pre- empt an attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as catastrophe in various
commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented.
This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could
serve as an anchor for measuring dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For
example, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success
of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no
"common" currency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma
fails to capture the basic uncertainties.

A problem-solution framework to terrorism is academically irresponsible

stagnation and state-violence
Jarvis Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University
2009 Lee The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies Security Dialogue 40.5 sage
publishing
Given the above preference for a specific and narrow essentialist framework, it is perhaps
unsurprising that terrorism studies has oriented towards policy-relevant research. In
seeking not only to define and explain, but also to prevent or resolve, its object of
knowledge, this structuring of the discipline necessarily mobilizes a very limited conception
of academic responsibility. In Coxs (1996: 88) famous terminology, as noted by Gunning (2007), terrorism
studies has overwhelmingly functioned as a problem-solving pursuit that:
takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the
institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action. The general
aim of problem solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by
dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble.
As Coxs remarks suggest, the problem-solving approach to the study of terrorism is normatively
problematic in reducing academic responsibility to a technical exercise of risk governance
or management. At best, such a reduction militates against any notion of critical enquiry
aimed at contesting or destabilizing the status quo: of saying the unsayable in Booths (2008: 68)
terminology. At worst, it simply reifies a tired and unstable inside/outside dichotomy that legitimizes
the states continued monopoly on violence. Either way, the continued structuring of the
mainstream literature around the above debates fails to offer any meaningful participatory
role for engaged, active scholarship.
In sum, although characterized by considerable diversity, the terrorism studies literature suffers from key
analytical and normative limitations. Analytically, the preference for a narrow essentialist
framework not only neglects the processes of terrorisms construction, it also reduces the
space available for discussing the (il)legitimacy of particular violences. Normatively, the
preference for producing policy-relevant, problem-solving research works to detach
academic responsibility from any notion of critical enquiry. These limitations, I argue, open considerable
space for the emergence of a critical terrorism studies agenda.

The threat of terrorism creates an Outsider Enemy which justifies a permanent

state of emergency preemptive strikes
Zizek 2005 Slavoj, In These Times, August 11, http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm
Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic
rules and legal constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however,
the nature of this link between power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing
power structures no longer relied on their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible
threat in order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather, the threat was externalized, displaced
onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible (and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-
present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structure's permanent state of
emergency. Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy,
Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up to today's "war on terror." The threats posed
by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike. Precisely because the
threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before
it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible
protective measures of defense-which, of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and
human rights (e.g., the London police's recent execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de
Menezes).
 AT: Terrorism Adv Problem Solution Ext
Their understanding of terrorism is essentialist ignoring state terrorism and
enframing every act as illegitimate
Jarvis Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University
2009 Lee The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies Security Dialogue 40.5 sage
publishing
Although there may exist strategic, even normative, grounds for conceptualizing terrorism as a
coherent object of knowledge, this essentialist orthodoxy is unfortunate for two reasons. First, by
attributing terrorism an objective existence, mainstream terrorism studies offers very
limited space for reflecting on the historical and social processes through which this
identity, behaviour or threat has been constituted. With the interpretive, symbolic and
discursive contexts of its creation to say nothing of the power relations traversing these contexts presumed
largely irrelevant for understanding this phenomenon, terrorism remains consistently and
artificially detached from the processes of its construction. In this sense, we could do far worse than
remember Foucaults (1981: 67) famous cautionary note when encountering claims to speak the truth about
terrorism: We must not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face which we
would have only to decipher.
Foucaults meta-theoretical caution will not, of course, convince everyone that further critical reflection in this field is needed. By
turning to the very specific, and narrow, essence attributed to terrorism within the mainstream debates, however, it may be possible to
garner further support for such a programme. As the above discussion suggests, existing
studies remain
overwhelmingly structured by a conception of their object as an unconventional form of
illegitimate violence. With relatively few exceptions, the majority of scholars working here are content to tie their
understanding of terrorism both to activities of particular non-state actors and to the targeting of particular victims: non-combatants or
(more emotively) innocent civilians. With
reflections on the nature and causes of terrorism already
framed around this double condemnation, then, discussions relating to the legitimacy of
terrorism, or, indeed, the possibility of state terrorism, become systematically excluded
from this field of enquiry before they emerge. As outlined below, it is an attempt to contest these exclusionary
practices that largely motivates the first, broadening, face of critical terrorism studies.

Even liberal attempts to reform the war on terror rely on a problem-solution

mindset
Jarvis Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University
2009 Lee The Spaces and Faces of Critical Terrorism Studies Security Dialogue 40.5 sage
publishing
In the absence of a more appropriate signifier, the final set of approaches to this question may be termed liberal. These
approaches differ, importantly, from each of the above in mobilizing a seemingly far deeper conception
of causality. Rather than understanding terrorism as a technical problem to be countered,
eliminated or managed, they typically view this behaviour as a symptom of underlying
dynamics. In this sense, recommendations include increasing diplomatic efforts to resolve local sources
of conflict (Haleem, 2004; Stevenson, 2006) and demands for the extension of democracy and human
rights norms (Cotton, 2003: 167168). Although not necessarily eschewing targeted military intervention or the seeking of
better intelligence, these approaches clearly offer a longer-term approach to resolving terrorist violence. As Nossel (2004: 131)
suggests: Unlike conservatives, who rely on military power as the main tool of statecraft, liberal internationalists see trade,
diplomacy, foreign aid, and the spread of American values as equally important.
If these liberal approaches offer a coherent alternative to the militarizing and criminalizing
perspectives, a shared concern with the efficacy of counterterrorist strategy transcends the
distinctions between the approaches. Despite the differing models of causality underpinning these contributions, a
discernible problem-solving orientation permeates them all. It is this common ambition towards policy-
relevant research, I argue, that opens considerable space for the emergence of a critical terrorism studies agenda.
 Terrorism Adv AQAP 1NC
The obsession with Al-Qaeda is based on a misappropriation of language in
reality they pose a smaller risk then the West poses to itself
McQuillan, 2k9 (Martin, MA, PhD, Glasgow, Deconstruction After 9/11, Routledge, pg. 5-6)
Conversely, and for a long time (although I think now this particular image has been demystified) the boldness of the attacks, arriving
(seem- ingly) out of a clear blue sky, allowed for the equal magnification of their perpetrators as giants on the world stage, rather than
the rump of a failed death cult lashing out at its own one-time sponsor and ally. Here again the idiomatic enters into the
universal through a powerful metonymic projection. `Al Qaeda' can be translated from the Arabic
as camp' or `base' and more often than not this is taken by a literal-minded Western media to refer
to the training camps for Jihad, the existence which provided the pretext for the swift retribution
handed out in Afghanistan, treating an entire nation for the actions of its own aberrant synecdoche. However,
perhaps the most appropriate way of translating 'Al Qaeda' is as it is used in the Arab idiom,
meaning `database', an index of names or grouped identities. It is a base without foundation, a
base of relations only, which as relations have an exchange value but no presence as such. Just as
this techno-thanto-teleological sect emerged as a figure of global conspiracy, so any genuine organisational connectivity was dispersed
by the comprehensive and overwhelming response of the American military. If Al Qaeda, and its metonym Bin Laden,
live on (and will outlive its adversaries in the Bush regime) it is .as the projection of a monstrous
ideological inversion, whereby this local detail of the end of the Cold War comes to represent (by
confusion and design) a wider conflict between the followers of the book and between the West and its
others. No doubt there is a real Al Qaeda and that they are capable of the most appalling acts of
indiscriminate violence (one of the effects of the deliberate opacity of `the war on terror' has been to remove the capacity for
certainty and to encourage a residual doubt with respect to the risk posed by such people). However, given the limited
scale of the 'Al Qaeda' problem and the extent of its operation since 9/11, it is only by an
extraordinary Munchausen projection which exploits the image of a genuine terror and real death,
that it can be claimed that this group (on its own, if it is one and if it is co-ordinated) represents an equal threat
to Western values and hegemony as the mutually assured destruction of -the Cold War or the
lethal potential of the blitzkrieg.' In this respect, Al Qaeda is the least of the West's enemies, and yet for the logocentric
West names and the naming of parts are important. The appellation of 'Al Qaeda' carries a terrifying metonymic
power, conferred onto the disparate groups that take up this sobriquet in Iraq and other theatres,
like the `Dread Pirate Roberts' who terrorised the seven seas for several generations as the name
was handed down to a successor on the wealthy retirement of each Dread Pirate Roberts.
 Terrorism Adv Nuclear 1NC
Nuclear terrorist threats are exaggerated
Gertz and Lake 10 (Bill and Eli, Washington Times, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/14/obama-says-
terrorist-nuclear-risk-is-growing/?page=1, dw:4-14-2010, da: 7-6-2011, lido)
But Henry Sokolski, a member of the congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass ,
Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, said that there is no specific intelligence on ongoing terrorist
procurement of nuclear material. We were given briefings and when we tried to find specific intelligence on the threat of
any known terrorist efforts to get a bomb, the answer was we did not have any. Mr. Obama told reporters that there was a range of
views on the danger but that all the conferees agreed on the urgency and seriousness of the threat. Mr. Sokolski said the idea that
we know that this is eminent has got to be somehow informed conjecture and apprehension, [but] it is
not driven by any specific intelligence per se. We have reasons to believe this and to be worried, but we dont have
specific intelligence about terrorist efforts to get the bomb, he said. So we have to do general efforts to guard against his possibility,
like securing the material everywhere. A senior U.S. intelligence official also dismissed the administrations assertion that the threat
of nuclear terrorism is growing. The threat has been there, the official said. But there is no new intelligence. The
official said the administration appears to be inflating the danger in ways similar to what critics of the Bush administration charged
with regard to Iraq: hyping intelligence to support its policies. The official said one likely motivation for the
administrations new emphasis on preventing nuclear terrorism is to further the presidents goal of
eliminating nuclear weapons. While the U.S. nuclear arsenal would be useful in retaliating against a
sovereign state, it would be less so against a terrorist group. But if the latter is the worlds major nuclear
threat, the official explained, then the U.S. giving up its weapons seems less risky.
 Terrorism Adv Nuclear Ext

Terrorists wont get nukes

Gertz and Lake 10 (Bill and Eli, Washington Times, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/14/obama-says-
terrorist-nuclear-risk-is-growing/?page=1, dw:4-14-2010, da: 7-6-2011, lido)
However, Brian Jenkins, author of the book Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? and a Rand Corp. adviser, said that al
Qaeda in the past has been duped by supposed nuclear suppliers who initiated scams that suggest a
naivete and lack of technical capability on the part of the organization , he said. We have evidence of terrorist
ambitions to obtain nuclear weapons or nuclear material but we have no evidence of terrorist capabilities to do
either, he said. In late 2001, after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, some materials were
discovered in al Qaeda bases such as crude diagrams of the basic components of a nuclear bomb. Mr. Jenkins, however, said
that U.S. technical specialists concluded from the designs that al Qaeda did not have the ability to
produce a nuclear weapon. In 2002, members of al Qaedas affiliate in Saudi Arabia attempted to purchase Russian nuclear
devices through al Qaedas leadership in Iran, though the transactions did not move forward. In his 2007 memoir, At the Center
of the Storm, Mr. Tenet wrote that from the end of 2002 to the spring of 2003, we received a stream of
reliable reporting that the senior al-Qaeda leadership in Saudi Arabia was negotiating for the purchase of
three Russian nuclear devices. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and author of a book on nuclear terrorism, said he
agrees with the president that the threat is growing, based on North Koreas nuclear proliferation to Syria and instability in nuclear-
armed Pakistan.

Terrorists would not be able to steal a bomb security, no place to buy

Milhollin 2 (Gary, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, commentary magazine,
http://www.wisconsinproject.org/pubs/articles/2002/terror-bomb.htm, dw:Aug 2001, da: 7-9-2011, lido)
If making nuclear-bomb fuel is a no-go, why not just steal it, or buy it on the black market? Consider
plutonium. There are hundreds of reactors in the world, and they crank out tons of the stuff every year. Surely a dedicated
band of terrorists could get their hands on some. This too is not so simple. Plutonium is only created
inside reactor fuel rods, and the rods, after being irradiated, become so hot that they melt unless kept
under water. They are also radioactive, which is why they have to travel submerged from the reactor to
storage ponds, with the water acting as both coolant and radiation shield. And in most power reactors,
the rods are welded together into long assemblies that can be lifted only by crane. True, after the rods
cool down they can be stored dry, but their radioactivity is still lethal. To prevent spent fuel rods from killing the
people who come near them, they are transported in giant radiation-shielding casks that are not supposed to break open even in
head-on collisions. The casks are also guarded. If terrorists managed to hijack one from a country that had reactors
they would still have to take it to a plant in another country that could extract the plutonium from the
rods. They would be hunted at every step of the way.

Nuclear terrorism wont cause extinctionthe U.S. would easily recover

Frost 5 (Robin, teaches political science at Simon Fraser University, British Colombia, Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11, Adelphi
Papers, December)
An existential threat. When applied to nuclear terrorism, the phrase existential threat
implies that a state such as the United States could be destroyed by terrorists
wielding nuclear weapons. Yet to destroy the United States or any other large
industrial state, in the sense of inflicting such damage to its government, economy, population and infrastructure that it could
no longer function as a coherent political and economic entity, would require a large number of well-placed
nuclear weapons with yields in the tens or hundreds of kilotons. It is unlikely that
terrorists could successfully obtain, emplace and detonate a single nuclear weapon,
while no plausible radiological device or devices could do any significant damage on
a national level.
 Terrorism Adv Bio-Terror 1NC
The rhetoric of bioterror as a threat to life enables the states acquisition of
biopolitical control, and justifies wholesale slaughter in the name of survival.
Thacker 2007- Associate Professor, School of Literature, Communication, & Culture, Georgia
Institute of Technology (Eugene, Nomos, nosos and bios in the body politic,
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/25/32)
For Foucault, biopolitics involves three main processes, working in concert. The first is a
redeployment of medical knowledge concerning the biology of populations. Here the notion of population
becomes the bearer of all medical and social specificity. Biopolitics 'tends to treat the "population" as a mass of
living and coexisting beings who present particular biological and pathological traits and who
thus come under specific knowledge and technologies' (Foucault, 1997: 71). But this process of accounting for the
population as simultaneously political and medical implies a certain quantitative sophistication. Thus, in addition to a medical view of
the population, there is a second element, which is the development of a set of numerical, statistical,
and informatic means of defining and thus managing the population. This is the biology of large numbers,
which has its beginnings, for instance, in the regular use of mortality tables kept by parishes in 17th century England (Porter, 1997:
236-38). Its aim is 'to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living
human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race' (Foucault, 1997: 73). Finally , a last
element is required for biopolitics to function, and that is an infrastructure for performing this
ongoing statistics of the population. This is where what Foucault calls governmentality, or the art of governing, comes
into play, in which 'the movement that brings about the emergence of population as a datum' provides the conditions for 'an objective
of governmental techniques' (Foucault 2000: 219). The concerns of population characteristics in light of political economy -- the
mercantilist view that the health of the population equals the wealth of the population -- is but one example of governmental
management of biopolitical concerns. But it is in this last element that Foucault's points about biopolitics
have the most resonance for our current context of bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease.
In his Collge lectures, Foucault says more about the governmentality specific to biopolitics. He asks, 'How can a power
such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its
chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings?' (2003: 254). In other words, what is the relation between older forms of
sovereignty and the emerging, modern biopolitical practices of public health policy, hospital reform, the professionalization of
medicine, and the methods of statistics and demographics? Foucault offers one response, which is that 'the
acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under
State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State
control of the biological' (2003: 239-40). But how is the exceptional character of sovereign power instantiated in such
decentralized systems, in which the bureaucratic management of numbers and bodies takes hold? There must be some set of principles
for allowing, in exceptional circumstances, the introduction of sovereign power. In other words, there must be some set of
conditions that can be identified as a threat, such that a corresponding state of emergency can be
claimed, in which the formerly decentralized apparatus of biopolitics suddenly constricts into the
exception of sovereignty. 'It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of
power, as it is exercised in modern States' (2003: 254). But I would argue that Foucault means
'racism' here in a specific, medical and biological sense. Racism in this sense is a biologically-
inflected political relation in which war is rendered as fundamentally biological: 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 existence in question is no
longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population.
(1978: 137) In a curious turn of phrase, Foucault later calls this a 'democratization of sovereignty,'
a condition in which the sovereign state of emergency emerges through a widespread and
generalized threat to the population (2003: 37). In such conditions, both a medical-biological view of the population, and
a statistical-informatic means of accounting for the population, converge in the identification of potential threats and possible
measures of security. In a sense, it is war that acts as the hinge between population and information, but a war that always puts at stake
the biological existence of the population (and thus nation). The body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body politic, is
always what is fundamentally at stake in the body politic.
 Terrorism Adv Bio-Terror Ext

Biological and chemical terrorism have too many barriers

Sievers 1 (Rod, staff, http://news.siuc.edu/news/October01/100901r1152.html, dw: 10-9-2001, da: 7-9-2011, lido)
Talley admits that biohazards such as anthrax can do quite a bit of damage. But he notes that they are hard to produce in large
quantities. "Other materials, such as Sarin gas, are more deadly, Talley said, "but again, it is very difficult to
acquire these materials. And anyone handling this stuff would have to know what he's doing in order to minimize the risks to
themselves. "There's something to be concerned about regarding all the different ways that a terrorist might
use biohazards in an attack. But since each method and each type of chemical or biological involves so
many factors, it would be pretty difficult to carry off a successful, large-scale attack."
 Terrorism Adv Chemical Weapons 1NC
Theres no impact to chemical weaponsdilution, weather, reverse
contamination and historical examples prove
Rothstein, Auer AND Sigel 4 (Linda, editor, Catherine, managing editor, and Jonas, assistant editor of the Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists, BAS, November/December, http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=nd04rothstein)
In "The Dew of Death," Joel Vilensky and Pandy Sinish recounted the strange story of lewisite, an arsenic-based chemical weapon
developed by the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. By the end of the war, the United States was producing 10 tons a
many of the problems
day of the stuff, yet it was never used in battle, where it would probably have flopped. Lewisite shares
that have
prevented most chemical weapons from entering the world's armies' battlefield
arsenals: Most chemicals are very hard to disseminate in sufficiently undiluted form, and might
not work in weather that is too hot, too cold, too windy, or too wet. The dilution
problem would also make it very difficult to carry out an attack involving the
poisoning of a major city's water supply. Nearly every article about terrorist uses of chemical or biological
weapons begins by recalling Aum Shinrikyo's use of sarin gas in 1995 in the Tokyo subway. Employing five separate packages of
poison, cult members managed to kill 12 commuters, although another 1,000 had to seek hospital treatment. The attack was shocking,
yet fell short of the cult's ambitions. (Shoko Asahara, the leader of the group, aspired either to be Japan's prime minister or to kill as
many of his countrymen as possible.) Saddam Hussein's forces used poison gas at Halabja in the open air. Halabja, a Kurdish city in
northern Iraq, is perhaps the best known of the several dozen towns and villages Saddam Hussein is thought to have gassed in 1987
and 1988. Some 5,000 of its population of 70,000 died as a result of being bombarded with what might have been a combination of
mustard gas, nerve agent, and possibly cyanide. The attack was a monstrous crime, but the
Iraqi military succeeded
by having complete control over the place, the time, and the choice of a day with
ideal weather--and because it faced no danger of experiencing any resistance. Saddam's
men were able to spread the poisons systematically (delivery might have been by a combination of dispersal from low-flying planes
and attack with chemical shells). The
Halabja massacre was not a demonstration of the unique
power of chemical weapons, but of the fact that the population was defenseless. Iraq,
and probably Iran, also used poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Even as thousands of young people were slaughtered in
a war that ended in stalemate, the war's less-controlled, battlefield use of chemical weapons is customarily assessed as having lent
neither side an advantage. Today, few of the world's militaries would even consider using
chemical weapons--they can contaminate the battleground and come back on the attackers if the wind takes an unexpected
turn. The major militaries--including those of the United States, Britain, Russia, and Germany--have dumped old munitions (not
always carefully) or have spent, or need to spend, billions of dollars to neutralize decaying munitions that could threaten civilians who
live near storage sites. Some tiny amount of worry should probably be devoted to leaking chemical munitions.
 Terrorism Adv Chemical Weapons Ext
No impact to chemical terrorism
Mueller 4 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, Regulation,
Fall)
POOR RESULTS For their part, biological and chemical weapons have not proven to be great
killers. Although the basic science about them has been well known for a century at least, both kinds of weapons
are notoriously difficult to create, control, and focus (and even more so for nuclear weapons). To this
point in history, biological weapons have killed almost no one. And the notion that large
numbers of people would perish if a small number of chemical weapons were to be
set off is highly questionable. Although they can be hugely lethal when released in gas chambers, their
effectiveness as weapons has been unimpressive. In World War I, for example, chemical
weapons caused less than one percent of the total combat deaths; on average, it took a ton of gas to produce
one fatality. In the conclusion to the official British history of the war, chemical weapons are relegated to a footnote that asserts
that gas made war uncomfortable...to no purpose. A 1993 analysis by the Office of Technology
Assessment finds that a terrorist would have to deliver a full ton of Sarin nerve gas
perfectly and under absolutely ideal conditions over a heavily populated area to
cause between 3,000 and 8,000 deaths something that would require the near-
simultaneous detonation of dozens, even hundreds, of weapons. Under slightly less
ideal circumstances if there were a moderate wind or if the sun were out, for example
the death rate would be only one-tenth as great. The 1995 chemical attack launched in Tokyo by the well-
funded Aum Shinrikyo (attempted only after several efforts to use biological weaponry had failed completely) managed to kill only 12
people.
AT: WAR ON TERROR ADVANTAGE
 WoT Bad Doesnt Work 1NC
The war on terrorism cannot be proven effective theres insufficient data
Washington Post 9/11/2013 Twelve years after 9/11, we still have no idea how to fight
terrorism http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/11/twelve-years-after-
911-we-still-have-no-idea-how-to-fight-terrorism-2/
Counterterrorism may be the most significant area of government policy where we still
have no idea what the hell were doing.
Everywhere else, policymakers are at least trying to know what theyre doing. Development researchers and education wonks have
become obsessive about running randomized controlled trials to evaluate interventions. Indeed, the popularity of charter schools is due
in part to the fact that their frequent use of lottery-based admission makes them good ways to randomly test different school designs.
Criminologists have run experiments on a variety of police tactics, probation designs, anti-gang initiatives, approaches to domestic
violence, and more. And While theres still plenty we dont know about what health measures work, the Affordable Care Act is
devoting millions to building up more evidence, and big-deal health policy experiments like the Oregon Medical Study receive the
attention they deserve.
But terrorism? We have no idea. The Afghanistan war has cost $657.5 billion so far, we spend
$17.2 billion in classified funds a year fighting terrorism through the intelligence
community, and the Department of Homeland Security spent another $47.4 billion last year.
And we have very little idea whether any of it is preventing terrorist attacks.
Some of this is just that its harder to collect good evidence than it is in other policy areas.
You cant randomly select some airports to have security screenings and some to not and measure how many hijacking occur at the
ones with or without them or, at least, you cant do that and conform to anything remotely resembling research ethics. But
merely because true experiments are often impossible doesnt mean that you cant evaluate
policy interventions using other means.
And people have tried those experiments. Its just that nothing seems to have any significant effect
one way or another. The Campbell Collaboration, an organization that publishes peer-reviewed systematic reviews of the
evidence on various policy topics, first released its review of the literature on counterterrorism, written by criminologists Cynthia Lum
(George Mason), Leslie Kennedy and Alison Sherley (both at Rutgers), in 2006 (its been updated since).
The first problem the review identifies is that barely
any of the terrorism literature even tries to answer
questions about effective counterterrorism. Of the over 20,000 reports regarding terrorism that we located, the
authors write, only about 1.5 percent of this massive literature even remotely discussed the idea that an evaluation had been
conducted of counter-terrorism strategies.
They found 354 studies that did, however. Further culling left them 80 studies that could be reasonably said to evaluate the
effectiveness of counterterrorism measures. Of these, only 21 of those 80 studies appeared to at least attempt to connect an outcome
or effect with a program through a minimally rigorous scientific test. Of those 21, only 10 met the Campbell reviews methodological
standards. Three of those were medical studies dealing with the effects of bioterrorism, leaving seven for the review to consider.
Its worth dwelling on that number. In
2009, eight years after 9/11, and after decades of work on
terrorist groups ranging from the IRA to ETA in Spain to Palestinian groups to the Tamil Tigers, only seven studies,
or 0.035 percent of all terrorism studies, evaluated the effectiveness of counterterrorism
measures. By comparison, a Campbell Systematic Review of anti-bullying programs in schools found 622 reports concerned
with interventions to prevent school bullying, of which 89 were rigorous enough to include. Stopping bullying is vitally important
and I dont mean to trivialize that cause, but its more than a little concerning that we
have almost 13 times as many
studies on how to stop bullying as we do on how to stop terrorism.
Anyway, back to the seven measly studies. For one thing, they are mostly done by the same handful of people. Three were coauthored
by Walter Enders (at the University of Alabama) and Todd Sandler (at University of Texas Dallas), two by Enders and Sandler alone
and the other one with Jon Cauley (at the University of Hawaii Hilo). Cauley did another study with Eric Iksoon Im (also at Hilo).
So over half of the studies included were coauthored by one of Enders, Sandler, or Cauley. Theyre all excellent researchers, and one
should not discount their work because of their higher output, but generally we want a range of studies from a range of sources when
building a literature like this.
The seven studies include among them 86 findings about the effectiveness of
counterterrorism programs, and those findings are startling. Lum, Kennedy and Sherley report that the average
effect of the programs examined was negative. That is, the intervention was found to increase
terrorist incidents rather than reduce them. The results varied by the type of intervention, but not in a way that
should give us any comfort about our strategy:
 WoT Bad Doesnt Work - Ext
War on terrorism decentralized al-Qaeda makes the WoT less effective
Bergen director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation et al Sept
2013 Peter Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment Bipartisan Policy Center (et al - Bruce
Hoffman Director Center for Security Studies @ Georgetown Michael Hurley president of Team
3i LLC & Erroll Southers associate director of research transition at the Department of Homeland
Securitys National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events @ USC)
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-
A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf
Since 2002, al-Qaeda has embraced a strategy that transformed it into a decentralized,
networked, transnational movement, rather than the single monolithic entity it was on the
eve of 9/11. This strategy was undoubtedly the result of necessity; U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks largely obliterated al-Qaeda as an organization. But it has allowed al-Qaeda to persist, and
it now poses a threat that is more amorphous and difficult to pinpoint than it was in the
early 2000s.1,2

War on terrorism doesnt work al-Quedas growth proves its ineffective

Hoffman Director Center for Security Studies @ Georgetown 9/09/2013 Bruce CQ
Transcripts lexis
I think what we found enormously worrisome is that the growth of al-Qaedaism (ph) and the
expansion of the movement. Al-Qaeda has a presence in more countries today that it did on
9/11, and has a presence that's basically doubled from the 2008 figure to some 16 key
theaters of operation, and that, I think, is fundamentally worrisome.
Secondly, and hand-in-glove with that, the al-Qaeda brand, unfortunately, seems stronger than it's ever been
in recent years. In part, that's in large measure a reaction to events such as the overthrow of the
Morsi government in Egypt, which has added more fuel to al-Qaeda's fire in saying "you
cannot trust the Democratic process; we will always -- Islamists will always be stabbed in
the back."
But also, I think it's a reflection of al-Qaeda's own strategy, and somewhat the success of that
strategy, in expanding further afield to new places -- to the Sahel, to West Africa, to complement its existing
presence in North Africa and East Africa.
We also see how groups
like al-Qaeda in Iraq that, similarly, where the victim or the targets of
successive inroads made against its leadership -- the three initial leaders of the movement
were all killed in U.S. operations, whether it was airstrikes or drone strikes; yet at the same time, al-Qaeda in
Iraq is stronger today than it's ever been, perhaps since 2008, which I think is another warning sign.

War on terrorism will fail Syria

Hoffman Director Center for Security Studies @ Georgetown 9/09/2013 Bruce CQ
Transcripts lexis
For me, the game changers are basically, first and foremost, Syria. And I would argue, as we do in the report,
that al-Qaeda's hitched its fortunes to Syria. Syria, unlike Afghanistan, for example, is not some
landlocked backwater, but rather is in the heart of the Arab world.
Secondly, it's of tremendous religious importance to al-Qaeda, mentioned in the Quran, so it has an enormous religious significance. It
also has a significance that in the world before the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Sevres, which bin Laden, on many
occasions, invade against; in other words, the carve up of the Middle East, that western powers, victorious western powers achieved
after World War I; Syria was, of course, part of the same territory where Islam's third holiest shrines are, in Jerusalem. So, it's sacred
for that reason, as well.
For centuries, Sunni Islam has struggled against what was called in medieval times the Nusayris, and today we know as the Alawites.
Ibn Taymiyyah, the author of the religious and moral precepts of jihad 14th century text that has been used as a clarion or battle call
for contemporary jihadis, wrote very much about the importance of waging war against the Nusayris, against the Alawites; so, there's
certainly an historical and emotional religious connection to the struggle today.
And then, want us to say, too, as we mention in the report, that Assad
is almost the perfect villain for groups like al-
Qaeda. And this brings me to another, I think, worrisome trend or development that we're seeing in the al-Qaeda movement. It used
to be, in the old days, that, in essence, al-Qaeda was about killing, and mostly about killing Muslims, not of stated (ph) enemies of
crusaders, Zionists, apostates and so on.
But today, especially in Syria, we see arms of al-Qaeda, especially Jabhat al-Nusra, engaging in
precisely the social welfare activities that are designed to win friends -- providing food, running
bakeries; I mean, all the kinds of things that the mainstream core al- Qaeda could never do, or never did effectively, yet they are
doing and also, not incidentally, running a fairly effective information operations and propaganda
campaign in Syria.
And that I find enormously troubling, as we mentioned in the report, because it seems al-Qaeda's
learnt the lessons of its failure in Iraq, and that means that they're -- that they're, rather --
rather dangerous.
 WoT Bad Doesnt Work AT: Less Instances
Boston bombings and Afghanistan withdrawal make terrorist attacks more
likely
Hoffman Director Center for Security Studies @ Georgetown 9/09/2013 Bruce CQ
Transcripts lexis
the reaction to the Boston
Two final points on the domestic -- domestic issue; what concerned us, especially in assessing
Marathon bombing, is that, yes, it was tremendously successful; the immediate response,
especially by emergency personnel, first responders, the police, fire department, ambulance
crews and so on was really spectacular.
But at the same time, though, our reaction may, I think, have -- have laid the groundwork, or may
have sent the wrong message, I should say. Because, after all, two idiots, in essence -- to amateur terrorists
were able to paralyze the entirety of the Boston metropolitan area -- to close down Logan Airport, the
close down mass transit.
And unfortunately, I think, one has to realize that the message that may convey to terrorists
throughout the world is, in fact, that terrorism does pay in terms of attracting attention to the
perpetrators and to their cause, in terms of having a disproportionate, both psychological,
but also financial, effect on a target audience. The lesson is clear that terrorism may yet succeed.
I worry, in fact, that our adversaries may, in fact, be -- be hanging back in the run up to our
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, and that we may not yet be out of the woods and the
transition in evolution we're seeing now may continue.
And then the final point is that the Tsarnaevs were amateurs -- none of the investigations has revealed any meaningful
connection to other terrorists or to training elsewhere, yet they built a remarkably effective bomb. And, unlike a
lot of the clowns and kooks and dreamers and incompetents that preceded them, their bombs unfortunately exploded.
 WoT Bad Doesnt Work AT: Retaliation
If even failed attempts retaliation then retaliation is inevitable
Bergen director of the National Security Program at the New America Foundation et al Sept
2013 Peter Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment Bipartisan Policy Center (et al - Bruce
Hoffman Director Center for Security Studies @ Georgetown Michael Hurley president of Team
3i LLC & Erroll Southers associate director of research transition at the Department of Homeland
Securitys National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events @ USC)
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Jihadist%20Terrorism-
A%20Threat%20Assesment_0.pdf
However, the fact that al-Qaeda and allied organizations have continued to attempt significant
attacks in the United States, such as the 2009 plot to stage simultaneous suicide attacks on the
New York City subway and the 2010 attempt by an individual linked to the Pakistani Taliban, a close alQaeda ally,
to bomb Times Square, suggests that regardless of how weakened the core organization is, it
remains determined to marshal what few resources it has, or to enlist its associates in its
stead, to continue to try to attack the United States.
 WoT Bad Ressentiment 1NC
War on terrorism ressentiment & preemptive war
Zizek in 2005 (Slavoj, In These Times, August 11, http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm)
Classic power functioned as a threat that operated precisely by never actualizing itself, by always remaining a
threatening gesture. Such functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction
had to remain a threat. With the "war on terror", the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization,
not of the threat itself, but, of the measures against the threat. The nuclear strike had to remain the
threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of preemptive
strikes against potential terrorists. We are thus passing from the logic of MAD (Mutually Assured
Destruction) to a logic in which ONE SOLE MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed to
enact its paranoia. The power that presents itself as always being under threat, living in mortal
danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power-the very model of
the Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy. And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who,
more than a century ago, in Daybreak, provided the best analysis of the false moral premises of today's
"war on terror":
No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for
conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that
approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for
the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of
self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for
conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a
hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim
without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's
bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as
bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I
have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act.
We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.
 WoT Bad Butler 1NC
The affirmative only attempts to make the war on terror more effective this
denies the bodies they sacrifice in the name of fighting terrorism
Butler Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley 2004
Judith Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page 5-7
Our own acts of violence do not receive graphic coverage in the press, and so they remain acts that
are justified in the name of self-defense, but by a noble cause, namely, the rooting out of
terrorism. At one point during the war against Afghanistan, it was reported that the Northern Alliance may have slaughtered a
village: Was this to be investigated and, if confirmed, prosecuted as a war crime? When a bleeding child or dead body
on Afghan soil emerges in the press coverage, it is not relayed as part of the horror of war, but
only in the service of a criticism of the militarys capacity to aim its bombs right. We castigate
ourselves for not aiming better, as if the end goal is to aim right. We do not, however, take the sign
of destroyed life and decimated peoples as something for which we are responsible, or indeed
understand how that decimation works to confirm the United States as performing atrocities. Our
own acts are not considered terrorist. And there is no history of acts that is relevant to the self-understanding we form in
the light of these terrible events. There is no relevant prehistory to the events of September 11, since to
begin to tell the story a different way, to ask how things came to this, is already to complicate the question
of agency which, no doubt, leads to the fear of moral equivocation. In order to condemn these acts as
inexcusable, absolutely wrong, in order to sustain the affective structure in which we are, on the one hand,
victimized and, on the other, engaged in a righteous cause of rooting out terror, we have to begin
the story with the experience of violence we suffered.
We have to shore up the first-person point of view, and preclude from the telling accounts that
might involve a decentering of the narrative I within the international political domain. This
decentering is experienced as part of the wound that we have suffered, though, so we cannot
inhabit that position. This decentering is precisely what we seek to rectify through a recentering. A narrative form
emerges to compensate for the enormous narcissistic wound opened up by the public display of
our physical vulnerability. Our response, accordingly, is not to enter into international coalitions where we understand
ourselves to be working with institutionally established routes of consensus-building. We relegate the United Nations to a second-
order deliberative body, and insist instead on American unilateralism. And subsequently we ask, Who is with us? Who is against us?
As a result, we respond to the exposure of vulnerability with an assertion of US leadership, showing once again the contempt we
have for international coalitions that are not built and led by us. Such coalitions do not conflict with US supremacy, but confirms it,
stoke it, insist upon it, with long-term implications for the future shape and possibility of global cooperation.

This ideology infinite war

Butler Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley 2004
Judith Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page 28-29
Mourning, fear, anxiety, rage. In the United States, we have been surrounded with violence, having perpetrated
it and perpetrating it still, having suffered it, living in fear of it, planning more of it; if not an open
future of infinite war in the name of a "war on terrorism." Violence is surely a touch of the
worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most
terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which life itself can be
expunged by the willful action of another. To the extent that we commit violence we are acting on another, putting the other at risk,
causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a
vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we
cannot preempt. This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions especially those
in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited.
Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political
solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an institutionalized fantasy of
mastery) can fuel the instruments of war. We cannot however, will away this vulnerability. We must
attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying
with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, 'a situation in which we can be vanquished or
lose others. Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and
devastating exposure to this condition?
 War on Terror Bad Butler ext
War on terrorism ungrievable life extermination
Butler Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley 2004
Judith Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page 33-35
If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to
injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of
remaining animate and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because
they are always already lost or, rather, never were, and they must be killed since they seem to
live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent
inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the Other means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that
imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there
are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.
How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that
they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense
delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in culture. It is another thing to say thatdiscourse itself effects violence through
omission. If 200,000 Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath,7 do we
have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might
find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?
There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be.
If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life
worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition. Although we might argue that it would be impractical to
write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as

the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life
becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes
noteworthy. As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is

not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if
not the unburiable.
It is not simply, then, that there is a discourse of dehumanization that produces these effects, but
rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is not
just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not in explicit
discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not
publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the martial norm holding sway once
again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the
extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.

Refusing the paradigm of the war on terror is key to non-violent solutions to

global problems
Butler Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley 2004
Judith Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page xii-xiii
That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and
grief. What is less certain, however, is whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead
straightaway to military violence and retribution. There are other passages. If we are interested in
arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what,
politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.
One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know
and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can
will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will
rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing
vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence then others. But in that
order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and
vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the
mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and
in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all
costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First
World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that
violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as
the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would
suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that
radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger
global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final
control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value.
 WoT Bad Militarism
The war on terror relies on redemptive violence militarism
Dalby CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change and Professor of Geography and
Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University 2011 Simon Peace and Geopolitics:
Imaging Peaceful Geographies Paper for presentation to the University of Newcastle symposium
on Peace in Geography and Politics http://http-
server.carleton.ca/~sdalby/papers/PEACEFUL_GEOGRAPHIES.pdf
In the Anglosphere in particular, although elsewhere too, the war on terror facilitated the militarization of many
things and the incorporation of many political questions into the language and practices of
security. This has spilled over into numerous matters of popular culture and in the process generated a rapidly growing
literature within geography concerning popular geopolitics and the securitization of everyday life (Ingram and Dodds
2009) as well as revisiting the complicated matters of citizenship, territory and military violence (Cowen and Gilbert 2008). While
cultural critique of the militarist assumptions informing contemporary citizenship and the formulation of endangered identities are part
of the geographers task these days, what matters is how these themes are integrated into practices of peace, and peacemaking. How
they are is a matter for empirical examination in particular places.
Ridiculing the simplistic invocations of identity, the violent tropes of xenophobia, and the
representations of supposedly threatening others, as much of the popular geopolitics literature does these days
(Dittmer 2010) is useful insofar as it undercuts the logics used in mobilizing for war or the use of
political violence, but the difficulty in this literature lies in the undoubted dangers of being seduced by the simple pleasures of
movie criticism and in the process losing track of the political purpose of critique. Popular geopolitics this maybe but the links to
critical geopolitics are tenuous at best without the key linkages with the larger matters of securitization and the implicit geographies of
violence. Challenging
the tropes of war and the rush to impose political solutions can be
usefully done by making the connections between cultural activities and the formulation of
dangerous places in need of virtuous violence. In so far as popular culture provides the political vocabulary to
argue back against calls to securitize all manner of supposed threats this matters both as geographical scholarship and practical
politics.
The discussions of popular geopolitics may have much to offer if the analyses are extended
to popular representations of resistance to militarization. The movie Avatar works to challenge
the identities of those caught up in the expropriation of resources from the peripheral areas of global commerce, but falls
back on tropes of redemptive violence in the final denouement. It is precisely this return to violence that
makes such efforts at resistance a reinvention of war. Undercutting this tendency is key to
peacemaking, and has to be a matter for geographers trying to understand the complex
relations between peace and place, and how these can be reinforced by practical actions, whether it is to
insist on the possibilities of international agreements and international law as the arbiter of many things, or to engage in the practical
matters of accompaniment and bearing witness to the violence used by the rich an powerful to maintain their privileges.

Militarism environmental destruction and extinction

Sanders professor of History of Ideas and English at Pitzer College 2009 Barry Online Excerpt
from The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism
http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/book-excerpt-from-the-green-zone-the-
environmental-costs-of-militarism/
In a nation like ours, where military might trumps diplomatic finesse, the supreme irony may be that the planet, and not human beings,
will provide the most stringent corrective to political overreaching. The
earth can no longer absorb the
punishment of war, especially on a scale and with a ferocity that only the wealthiest, most
powerful country in the worldno, in historyknows how to deliver. While the United States military
directed its Operation Iraqi Freedom solely against the Iraqis, no onenot a single citizen in any part of the globehas escaped its
fallout. Whenwe declare war on a foreign nation, we now also declare war on the Earth, on
the soil and plants and animals, the water and wind and people, in the most far-reaching
and deeply infecting ways. A bomb dropped on Iraq explodes around the world. We have no way of containing the fallout.
Technology fails miserably here. War insinuates itself, like an aberrant gene and, left unchecked, has the capacity for destroying the
Earths complex and sometimes fragile system.
So we can act like honorable and conscientious citizens, conserving all the energy we can.
We can feel good about all those glossy magazine ads from Shell and Exxon Mobil telling us how their
companies now treasure the environment, producing their fuels in the cleanest ways possible. We can fall for
Detroits latest news, too, convincing us of a revolutionary breakthrough in fuel efficiency: 300 horsepower cars that get still 30 or 32
miles per gallon on the highway. But thats just insanity wearing a green disguise. None of those
advertised boasts and claims really matter. They still cling to fossil fuels and further our campaign to kill off
everything on the planet with our addictive need. But, even if those claims did make a slight difference, even
if we could slow down global warming, ultimately it would not matter. For, in the
background, lurking and ever-present, a giant vampire silently sucks out of the Earth all
the oil it possibly can, and no one stops it. And so heres the awful truth: even if every person, every
automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be
headed head first and at full speed toward total disaster for one major reason. The
militarythat voracious vampireproduces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire
globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most immanent danger of extinction.
As we contemplate America in the opening years of the twenty-first century, then, let us reconsider George Washingtons farewell
warning that overgrown military establishmentsunder any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded
as particularly hostile to republican liberty. Today, our own military
has grown beyond an institution hostile
to liberty and has wrapped its arms of death around life itself. And, from all the available evidence, it will
not let go. Unlike most animals, the military has no surrender mechanism. Unless we all summon the
strength to confront the militaryno easy taskit will continue to work its evil.
 WoT Bad Militarism Link Ext
War on terrorism militarism
Kohn Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Peace, War, and Defense at the UNC-
Chapel Hill 2009 Richard The Danger of Militarization in an Endless "War" on Terrorism The
Journal of Military History 73.1 project muse
The problem is not simply whether the war on terrorism threatens to militarize the United States. Over the last seventy yearsdecades
of depression, World War, Cold War, and international primacythe United States has already experienced a degree of militarization
heretofore unknown in American history.12 The larger question is whether the
war on terrorism will blur
militarization into militarism, in which American institutions, practices, values, thinking,
and behaviors assume the ideals and ethos of the military in response to the challenge -
whether the very character of the American people changes, with the emphasis on freedom and individualism
displaced by obedience, discipline, hierarchy, collectivism, authoritarianism, pessimism,
and cynicism. In such a case, whether slowly over time or quickly in response to a dramatic event or series of events, the very
nature of American societybeyond government and other institutionscould change into one its founders and succeeding
generations would not only recognize but abhor.

War on terrorism militarism

Kohn Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Peace, War, and Defense at the UNC-
Chapel Hill 2009 Richard The Danger of Militarization in an Endless "War" on Terrorism The
Journal of Military History 73.1 project muse
A Global War on Terrorism that may last a generation or more promises to continue and even intensify
militarization. Such a war even poses the possibility of militarismthe domination of war values and
frameworks in American thinking, public policy, institutions, and society to the point of
dominating rather than influencing or simply shaping American foreign relations and
domestic life.
 WoT Bad Militarism Impact Ext
MILITARISM Extend Sanders ev continued reliance on militaristic foreign
policies guarantees extinction via destruction of the environment this
outweighs any alternative cause to environmental destruction even if they
win they deter conflict the build up to war accesses our impact
Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy, 1996 Chris, Hypatia 11.4, proquest
In Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment, William Thomas, a U.S. Navy veteran, illustrates the extent to which
the peacetime practices of military institutions damage natural environments and communities. Thomas argues that even "peace"
entails a dramatic and widespread war on nature, or as Joni Seager puts it, "The environmental costs of
militarized peace bear suspicious resemblance to the costs of war" (Thomas 1995, xi).
All told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense destruction caused by combat, military institutions probably
present the most dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet. The military is the largest
generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute, and military analyst Jillian
Skeel claims that, "Global military activity may be the largest worldwide polluter and consumer of
precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally powered aircraft carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a
day. In less than an hour's flight, a single jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a North American motorist bums
in two years. One F-16 jet engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-
intensive aluminum (Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used by humans is consumed by the global military
(Thomas 1995, 16). The United States Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxins annually, more than the world's top
five chemical companies combined. The military is the biggest single source of environmental pollution in
the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to
military installations (Thomas 1995, 17).
The feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its
destruction in warfare is easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect
the extent to which military ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transnational
capitalism and other forms of human oppression and exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear
bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps and uranium mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of
all United States defense contracts (Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go
on for volumes about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the disruption of wildlife, habitats,
communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices.
 AT: Relativism
The call to end violence is not relativism its ethics
Butler Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley 2004
Judith Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page xiii-xiv
I argue that it is not a vagary of moral relativism to try to understand what might have led to the
attacks on the United States. Further, one can and ought to abhor the attacks on ethical grounds
(and enumerate other grounds), feel a full measure of grief for those losses, but let neither the moral
outrage nor public mourning become the occasion of the muting of critical discourse and public
debate on the meaning of historical events. One might still want to know what brought about these events, want to know
how best to address those conditions so that the seeds are not sown for further events of this kind,
find sites of intervention, help to plan strategies thoughtfully that will not beckon more violence
in the future. One can even experience abhorrence, mourning, anxiety, and fear, and have all of
these emotional dispositions lead to a reflection on how others have suffered arbitrary violence at
the hands of the US, but also endeavor to produce another public culture and another public
policy in which suffering unexpected violence and loss and reactive aggression are not accepted
as the norm of political life.

The relativism argument stop-gap in thinking the impact is the 1NC

Butler Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley 2004
Judith Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page 10
If we believe that to think radically about the formation of the current situation is to exculpate
those who committed the acts of violence, we shall freeze our thinking in the name of a
questionable morality. But if we paralyze our thinking in this way, we shall fail morality in a different
way. We shall fail to take collective responsibility for a thorough understanding of the history that
brings us to this juncture. We shall thereby deprive ourselves of the very critical and historical
resources we need to imagine and practice another future, one that will move beyond the current
cycle of revenge.
AT: IRAN ADVANTAGE
 Iran Adv FL 1NC
The argument that the US is necessary to mediate Iran is a tool of war mongers
US is committing war crimes and fragrant violations of the UN charter not a
legit leader
Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,
2006
(Edward, ZNet Magazine, March 15,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=9910)
The first principle in manufacturing propaganda for the U.S. war party is to take it as a given that
the United States has the legal and moral right to take the lead in making a case that the
international community must act-here to stop Iran's nuclear program. Consider that the United
States is in the midst of an occupation in Iraq in which it is daily committing war crimes, all of
which follow on a major act of aggression that violated the UN Charter. A lesser power doing this
would be declared an international outlaw, and would not be considered a proper leader to guide
the international community in the pursuit of villainy. In fact, containing the outlaw would be
deemed of primary importance. Furthermore, the United States showed its contempt for the rule
of law and for any UN legal procedures in the runup to the Iraq war, when it fabricated a crisis-
Iraqi violation of international rules and an Iraqi threat to U.S. national security-and on that basis
simply ran roughshod over UN processes and international law.

The fear of Iran is based in a paradigm of enemy construction reject their

truth claims
Zarif, Former Representative of Iran to the UN & PhD in Intl Law and Policy U of Denver,
2007
(Mohammad Javad, Journal of International Affairs, 3/22, page lexis)
In spite of Iran's record, a massive campaign has been underway to portray Iran as a proliferator
of nuclear weapons and a threat to regional stability. The recent flurry of diplomatic activities and
divisive public statements--primarily by the United States and the UnitedKingdom--to frighten the countries
of the region and to create an anti-Iran coalition has become the centerpiece of a strategy to
rescue the failed policies of the United States in the region. (22) According to the Wall Street Journal,
"The threat of Iran's rise has become for the U.S. a sort of diplomatic glue ... to patch together an
alliance aimed at helping heal not only Iraq, but also Lebanon and the Palestinian conflict ... [U.S.
allies] are ... apprehensive about lining up too publicly alongside the U.S. in a Cold War-style, anti-Iran bloc." (23)
The enemy paradigm is so pervasive that the U.S. administration opted for an escalation against
Iran contrary to the advice of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. The surge in blaming Iran for
the insecurity and sectarian violence in Iraq is designed to justify the escalation, while such
claims cannot be explained by facts on the ground or by any calculation of Iranian interest in Iraq.
In fact, U.S. vision has been so blurred by the prevalence of the paradigm, that American
policymakers alienate and threaten Iran, while seeking help from those who have magnified--and
instigated for their own motives--the sectarian divide in Iraq long before sectarian clashes started.
(24) This policy clearly illustrates that no lessons have been learnt from the devastation caused by many decades of the
implementation of that policy in the Persian Gulf region.
This paradigm of enemy construction is a larger internal link to instability and
conflict in the region
Zarif, Former Representative of Iran to the UN & PhD in Intl Law and Policy U of Denver,
2007
(Mohammad Javad, Journal of International Affairs, 3/22, page lexis)
Central Asia and the Persian Gulf region have been engulfed in turmoil and instability with global
ramifications for the last several decades. The region has been the scene of super-power rivalry
and competition as well as major-power understanding and cooperation. The Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan lead to one of the bloodiest Cold War confrontations, while during the same period, the Iran-Iraq war
created a unique opportunity for both superpowers and most other powers to support the same side.
This region has also been the scene of the most amazing and drastic shifts in United States alliances. Before they turned
against their benefactors, Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda began as major assets for--if not creations of--the United
States in the war against communism and later in the campaign against Iran. (1)
The turmoil in this region has shown that major-power rivalry has not been the sole source of the
region's miseries, because significant episodes of major-power cooperation did not bring about positive change.
The source of trouble is not extremism either, as it has been a symptom and not the cause; not to
mention the fact that today's extremists were once close allies of their current antagonists. The problem lies in the
prevailing paradigm, founded on the need for an enemy--real, perceived, imaginary or artificially
manufactured--as a convenient tool for governance and global interactions. The resulting double
standards, short-sighted policies, political and military domination and imposition continue to
nurture conflict, insecurity, arms races, dictatorship and extremism. (2)
 Iran Adv Epistemology Ext
Iranian nuclear crisis is constructed our Zarif evidence is phenomenal on this
question the current political climate is tied to a long history of enemy
creation and construction once it is decided that Iran will be the target of our
aggression the media quickly falls into place and creates a knowledge base that
is founded on a false premise and a ridiculous misreading of history dont
trust the affirmatives argument or evidence it is biased and created under a
very political agenda of creating a dangerous enemy in order to justify violence
against the Islamic other
Zarif, Former Representative of Iran to the UN & PhD in Intl Law and Policy U of Denver,
2007
(Mohammad Javad, Journal of International Affairs, 3/22, page lexis)
The manufacturing of the "Iran Nuclear Crisis" has similarly shown that old habits die hard, and
the same tendencies that caused the misery of the last four years continue to prevail in major
power circles in Washington and London. The same cabal has orchestrated a massive campaign to
portray Iran's peaceful nuclear program as a threat, and in order to give that a semblance of
international legitimacy, has resorted to substantial economic and political pressure to compel
members of the Security Council to adopt two unwarranted resolutions within five months. (25)
The campaign has involved attempts to doctor the evidence in order to create a national and
global scare. According to a November 2006 article by Seymour Hersh, "The CIA found no conclusive
evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian
operations that Iran has declared." He also added that "the White House was hostile to [the CIA
finding]" and may be trying "to prevent the CIA assessment from being incorporated into a
forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities" because this finding
complicates "the administration's planning for a military attack against Iran." (26)

AND - Information is manipulated in order to justify further adventurism in Iran

dont trust even their most qualified evidence
Zarif, Former Representative of Iran to the UN & PhD in Intl Law and Policy U of Denver,
2007
(Mohammad Javad, Journal of International Affairs, 3/22, page lexis)
What is available in the public domain corroborates Hersh's assertions about activities currently
underway to manipulate intelligence. Intelligence officials conceded in February 2006 that there
was no evidence that Iran was actually trying to build a nuclear weapon. (29) The last National
Intelligence Estimate also projected that even if Iran wanted to build nuclear weapons, it would not be able to do so
before 2015. (30) In response, neoconservatives produced and widely circulated a House Intelligence
Committee staff report on Iran's nuclear program, which sought to present a more alarming
picture that could provide a pretext for greater adventurism. (31) That report was so dangerously
misleading that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found it necessary to officially dispute
its central claims against Iran. The Agency called parts of the report "outrageous and dishonest,"
containing distortions of IAEA findings and "incorrect and misleading assertions." (32)
This epistemological stance is not neutral it is an attempt to build support for
international violence
Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,
2006
(Edward, ZNet Magazine, March 15,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=9910)
Back at the time of a major Bush-1 "drug war" in 1989, Hodding Carter pointed out that with increasing attention to the
newly declared "crisis" by the administration and media, the public's estimate of the importance of the drug problem
rose spectacularly. "Today's big news is the drug war. The president says so, so television says so, newspapers and
magazines say so, and the public says so." Today's big news is the possibility that Iran, the Little Satan,
might some day acquire a nuclear weapon: the administration says so, the media say so, and now
three times as many people regard Iran as the U.S.'s greatest menace than four months ago and 47
percent of the public agrees that Iran should be bombed if needed to prevent its acquiring any
nuclear weapon capability.
The system works this mobilization process like a well-oiled propaganda machine--which it is--
and it can apparently sell almost anything in the way of justifying external violence to a large
fraction of the populace, at least in the short run. The attack on Iraq was a remarkable achievement in this
respect, given that it was built on a series of lies about Iraq weapons, links, and threats that were extremely dubious at
best, a number clearly false and even quite silly (the mushroom cloud and threat to U.S. national security); and given
that the actions taken were in blatant violation of the UN Charter. To put this over required tacit collusion between the
administration and mainstream media, with the latter serving as de facto propaganda arms of the war-makers.
 Iran Adv Enemy Construction Ext
ENEMY CONSTRUCTION IS A LARGER INTERNAL LINK TO THEIR IMPACT extend
Zarif Iranian enemy construction overdetermines the potential for stability in
the regime international actors will continue to create instability by freaking
everyone out more evidence
Zizek in 2005 Slavoj, In These Times, August 11, http://www.lacan.com/zizekiranian.htm
Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic
rules and legal constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however,
the nature of this link between power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing
power structures no longer relied on their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible
threat in order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather, the threat was externalized, displaced
onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible (and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-
present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structure's permanent state of
emergency. Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy,
Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up to today's "war on terror." The threats posed
by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike. Precisely because the
threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before
it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible
protective measures of defense-which, of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and
human rights (e.g., the London police's recent execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de
Menezes).

History proves our argument enemy construction Iran/Iraq war

Zarif, Former Representative of Iran to the UN & PhD in Intl Law and Policy U of Denver,
2007
(Mohammad Javad, Journal of International Affairs, 3/22, page lexis)
Iran has suffered tremendously from the enemy paradigm. In this context, it became the victim of a
war, launched by Saddam Hussein on 22 September 1980, which was miserably dealt with by the international
community. (3) The Iranian people experienced war and destruction on the battlefields and in their
homes, thanks to Saddam's doctrine of total war. Massive diplomatic, financial and military
support for the aggressor from every corner of the world added insult to injury, When Saddam
invaded Iran and swiftly advanced to occupy 30,000 square kilometers of Iranian territory, it took seven days for the
UN Security Council to adopt a resolution, presumably based on the widely held belief that the war would bring down
the newly established revolutionary government within a week. (4) Even after seven days, the Security Council did not
make the routine call for a cease-fire and withdrawal, nor consider Saddam's invasion of Iran a threat against
international peace and security. (5) In the course of the war, the United States joined the Soviet Union
and France in providing Iraq with military hardware and intelligence, and even the material for
chemical and biological weapons along with German and other Western companies. (6) The Security
Council was prevented for several years, and in spite of mounting evidence and UN reports, from dealing with the use
of chemical weapons by Iraq against Iranian civilians and soldiers.

The aff is partaking in the same method of threat inflation that justified
invasion of Iraq -
Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,
2006 (Edward, ZNet Magazine, March 15,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=9910)
A third principle is inflating the menace that would follow from Iran's possession of nuclear
weapons. This of course parallels closely the earlier inflation of the Iraq threat, where the Bush
administration propagandists were not laughed off the stage for talking about mushroom clouds off New York and
other dire threats. Then and now the media have not pointed out that Saddam Hussein had only used chemical weapons
in the 1980's against Iran (and Iraqi Kurds) at a time when he was serving U.S. interests--and therefore with tacit U.S.
approval--but that he didn't use them at all in the Persian Gulf War when the United States was the opponent and could
retaliate in kind and with greater force. By the same token, as the United States and Israel have enormous
retaliatory capability, the Iranians could never use nuclear weapons as an offensive tool without
committing national suicide. But nuclear weapons would serve as a default weapon if Iran were
attacked; that is, it would contribute to self-defense. This line of argument is carefully avoided in
the mainstream propaganda flow.

Enemy construction turns the aff arms race in the Middle East and serial
policy failure
Zarif Former Representative of Iran to the UN & PhD in Intl Law and Policy U of Denver,
2007(Mohammad Javad, Journal of International Affairs, 3/22, page lexis)
Sanctions and pressure against Iran may satisfy some domestic constituencies or settle some old
scores. (93) But it is the overwhelming view of informed observers that they will not achieve their stated objectives.
They more likely will unravel the non-proliferation regime, exacerbate tension, perpetuate the
enemy paradigm and lead to unwanted--even accidental--escalations. Recent reports indicate that a
proliferation-sensitive race may have already become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the region,
even though this race is against an imaginary threat.
We have all been through this before. The Persian Gulf region and the world at large have paid dearly for similar
policies in the past. There are real crises that need to be resolved, before embarking on manufacturing new ones.
Ending the quagmire in Iraq is a formidable challenge that requires not only collective effort but also a reassessment
and reversal of policies and approaches that have brought so much misery to all concerned .
The interests of Iran and the United States, as well as security and stability in the Persian Gulf region, have long been
hostage to an outdated paradigm sustained by mutual mistrust and heavy historical baggage, and nurtured with fact or
fiction generated by those benefiting from confrontation and war .
Iran has a national security interest in restoring regional stability and preserving and strengthening disarmament and
non-proliferation. But, preventing the manufactured "Iran threat" from becoming the next global
nightmare requires a drastic change in the U.S. approach--an approach that until now has impeded
a genuine search for alternatives.
AT: WARMING ADVANTAGE
 Apocalyptic Rhetoric 1NC
Apocalyptic rhetoric should be abandoned as a political strategy it
incorrectly levels questions of probability and actual magnitude of events
Gross new media strategist & Gilles domestic abuse advocate 2012 Matthew Barrett & Mel
The Atlantic 4/23
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/how-apocalyptic-thinking-prevents-us-from-
taking-political-action/255758/
Flip through the cable channels for long enough, and you'll inevitably find the apocalypse. On
Discovery or National Geographic or History you'll find shows like MegaDisasters, Doomsday Preppers, or The Last Days on Earth
chronicling, in an hour of programming, dozens of ways the world might end: a gamma ray burst from a
nearby star peeling away the Earth's ozone layer like an onion; a mega-volcano erupting
and plunging our planet into a new ice age; the magnetic poles reversing. Turn to a news
channel, and the headlines appear equally apocalyptic, declaring that the "UN Warns of Rapid Decay
in Environment" or that "Humanity's Very Survival" is at risk. On another station, you'll find people
arguing that the true apocalyptic threat to our way of life is not the impending collapse of
ecosystems and biodiversity but the collapse of the dollar as the world's global currency.
Change the channel again, and you'll see still others insisting that malarial mosquitoes, drunk on
West Nile virus, are the looming specter of apocalypse darkening our nation's horizon.
How to make sense of it all? After all, not every scenario can be an apocalyptic threat to our
way of life -- can it? For many, the tendency is to dismiss all the potential crises we are
facing as overblown: perhaps cap and trade is just a smoke screen designed to earn Al Gore billions from his clean-energy
investments; perhaps terrorism is just an excuse to increase the power and reach of the government. For others, the panoply
of potential disasters becomes overwhelming, leading to a distorted and paranoid vision of
reality and the threats facing our world -- as seen on shows like Doomsday Preppers. Will an epidemic
wipe out humanity, or could a meteor destroy all life on earth? By the time you're done
watching Armageddon Week on the History Channel, even a rapid reversal of the world's
magnetic poles might seem terrifyingly likely and imminent.
The last time apocalyptic anxiety spilled into the mainstream to the extent that it altered the course of history -- during the
Reformation -- it relied on a revolutionary new communications technology: the printing press. In a similar way, could the current
surge in apocalyptic anxiety be attributed in part to our own revolution in communications technology?
The media, of course, have long mastered the formula of packaging remote possibilities as
urgent threats, as sociologist Barry Glassner pointed out in his bestseller The Culture of Fear. We're all familiar with
the formula: "It's worse than you think," the anchor intones before delivering an alarming report on date-rape drugs, stalking
pedophiles, flesh-eating bacteria, the Ebola virus (ne avian flu cum swine flu). You name it (or rename it): if a threat has
even a remote chance of materializing, it is treated as an imminent inevitability by television
news. It's not just that if it bleeds, it leads. If it might bleed, it still leads. Such sensationalist speculation attracts
eyeballs and sells advertising, because fear sells -- and it can sell everything from pharmaceuticals to handguns to duct tape
to insurance policies. "People react to fear, not love," Richard Nixon once said. "They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true."
Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media's tendency toward
overwrought speculation has been increasingly married to the rhetoric of apocalypse.
Today, nearly any event can be explained through apocalyptic language, from birds falling out of the
sky (the Birdocalypse?) to a major nor'easter (Snowmageddon!) to a double-dip recession (Barackalypse! Obamageddon!).
Armageddon is here at last -- and your local news team is live on the scene! We've seen the
equivalent of grade inflation (A for Apocalypse!) for every social, political, or ecological challenge
before us, an escalating game of one-upmanship to gain the public's attention. Why worry
about global warming and rising sea levels when the collapse of the housing bubble has
already put your mortgage underwater? Why worry that increasing droughts will threaten
the supply of drinking water in America's major cities when a far greater threat lies in the
possibility of an Arab terrorist poisoning that drinking supply, resulting in millions of
casualties?
Yet not all of the crises or potential threats before us are equal, nor are they equally
probable -- a fact that gets glossed over when the media equate the remote threat of a
possible event, like epidemics, with real trends like global warming.
Over the last decade, the 24-hour news cycle and the proliferation of media channels has created ever-more apocalyptic content that is
readily available to us, from images of the Twin Towers falling in 2001 to images of the Japanese tsunami in 2011. So, too, have cable
channels like Discovery and History married advances in computer-generated imagery with emerging scientific understanding of our
planet and universe to give visual validity to the rare and catastrophic events that have occurred in the past or that may take place in
the distant future. Using
dramatic, animated images and the language of apocalypse to peddle such varied
scenarios, however, has the effect of leveling the apocalyptic playing field, leaving the viewer
with the impression that terrorism, bird flu, global warming, and asteroids are all equally
probable. But not all of these apocalyptic scenarios are equally likely, and they're certainly
not equally likely to occur within our lifetimes -- or in our neighborhoods. For example, after
millions of Americans witnessed the attacks of 9/11 on television, our collective fear of
terrorism was much higher than its actual probability; in 2001, terrorists killed one-twelfth
as many Americans as did the flu and one-fifteenth as many Americans as did car accidents.
Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the odds of an American being killed by a
terrorist were about 1 in 88,000 -- compared to a 1 in 10,010 chance of dying from falling off
a ladder. The fears of an outbreak of SARS, avian flu, or swine flu also never lived up to their media hype.
This over-reliance on the apocalyptic narrative causes us to fear the wrong things and to
mistakenly equate potential future events with current and observable trends. How to discern the
difference between so many apocalyptic options? If we ask ourselves three basic questions about the many threats portrayed
apocalyptically in the media, we are able to separate the apocalyptic wheat from the chaff. Which scenarios are probable? Which are
preventable? And what is the likely impact of the worst-case model of any given threat?
In answering these questions, it becomes clear that much of what the media portrays as apocalyptic is not. The
apocalyptic scenarios involving global disaster -- from meteor impacts to supervolcanic
eruptions -- are extraordinarily rare. An asteroid could hit the Earth and lead to the
extinction of all mammals, including us, but the geologic record tells us that such massive strikes are
unlikely, and logic tells us that there is little we can do to prevent one. Nor are terrorist
attacks or an outbreak of avian flu likely to destroy humanity; their impact is relatively
small and usually localized, because we can be prepared for such threats and can contain and mitigate their effects. The
apocalyptic storyline tells us that most of these events are probable, largely unpreventable,
and destined to be catastrophic. But none of this is true -- their probability is either low or
can be made lower through preventive means, or their impact is containable.
The danger of the media's conflation of apocalyptic scenarios is that it leads us to believe
that our existential threats come exclusively from events that are beyond our control and
that await us in the future -- and that a moment of universal recognition of such threats will be obvious to everyone when
they arrive. No one, after all, would ever confuse a meteor barreling toward Earth as anything other than apocalyptic. Yet tangled
up in such Hollywood scenarios and sci-fi nightmares are actual threats like global warming
that aren't arriving in an instant of universal recognition; instead, they are arriving amid
much denial and continued partisan debate.
Apocalyptic Rhetoric ext
Apocalyptic rhetoric failed political solutions to catastrophe
Gross new media strategist & Gilles domestic abuse advocate 2012 Matthew Barrett & Mel
The Atlantic 4/23
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/how-apocalyptic-thinking-prevents-us-from-
taking-political-action/255758/
Talking about climate change or peak oil through the rhetoric of apocalypse may make for
good television and attention-grabbing editorials, but such apocalyptic framing hasn't
mobilized the world into action. Most of us are familiar with the platitude "When the only tool you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail." In a similar way, our over-reliance on the apocalyptic storyline stands
between us and our ability to properly assess the problems before us. Some see the looming crises of
global warming and resource and energy depletion and conclude that inaction will bring about the end of civilization: only through a
radical shift toward clean energy and conservation, those on the Left argue, can we continue the way of life that we have known.
Those on the Right dismiss the apocalyptic threats altogether, because the proposed solutions to peak oil, global warming, and
overpopulation conflict with core conservative beliefs about deregulation and the free-market economy, or with a religious worldview
that believes humanity is not powerful enough to alter something as large as our climate. Still others dismiss the catalog of doom and
gloom as mere apocalypticism itself. Surely, we convince ourselves, all the dire warnings about the effects of global warming aren't
that different from the world-ending expectations of the Rapturists?
The result is that the energy we could expend addressing the problems before us is instead
consumed by our efforts to either dismiss the threat of apocalypse or to prove it real.
Ultimately, the question becomes not what to do about the threats before us but whether you
believe in the threats before us.
By allowing the challenges of the 21st century to be hijacked by the apocalyptic storyline,
we find ourselves awaiting a moment of clarity when the problems we must confront will
become apparent to all -- or when those challenges will magically disappear, like other failed
prophecies about the end of the world. Yet the real challenges we must face are not future events that we
imagine or dismiss through apocalyptic scenarios of collapse -- they are existing trends. The
evidence suggests that much of what we fear in the future -- the collapse of the economy, the arrival of peak
oil and global warming and resource wars -- has already begun. We can wait forever, while the world unravels before our
very eyes, for an apocalypse that won't come.
The apocalyptic storyline becomes a form of daydreaming escape: the threat of global
warming becomes a fantasy to one day live off the grid, or buy a farm, or grow our own food; economic
collapse becomes like a prison break from the drudgery of meaningless and increasingly
underpaid work in a soul-crushing cubicle; peak oil promises the chance to finally form a
community with the neighbors to whom you've never spoken. Yet despite the fantasia peddled by
Hollywood and numerous writers, a world battered by natural disasters and global warming, facing declining
natural resources and civic unrest, without adequate water or energy or food, with gross inequalities between the
rich and the poor, is not a setting for a picaresque adventure, nor is it the ideal place to start living in
accord with your dreams.
The deeper we entangle the challenges of the 21st century with apocalyptic fantasy, the
more likely we are to paralyze ourselves with inaction -- or with the wrong course of action.
We react to the idea of the apocalypse -- rather than to the underlying issues activating the
apocalyptic storyline to begin with -- by either denying its reality ("global warming isn't real") or by despairing at its
inevitability ("why bother recycling when the whole world is burning up?"). We react to apocalyptic threats by
either partying (assuaging our apocalyptic anxiety through increased consumerism, reasoning that if it all may be gone
tomorrow, we might as well enjoy it today), praying (in hopes that divine intervention or mere time will allow us to avoid
confronting the challenges before us), or preparing (packing "bugout" packs for a quick escape or stocking up on gold, guns,
and canned food, as though the transformative moment we anticipate will be but a brief interlude, a bad winter storm that might trap
us indoors for a few days or weeks but that will eventually melt away).
None of these responses avert, nor even mitigate, the very threats that have elicited our
apocalyptic anxiety in the first place. Buying an electric car doesn't solve the problem of a
culture dependent on endless growth in a finite world; building a bunker to defend against the
zombie hordes doesn't solve the growing inequities between the rich and poor; praying for deliverance
from the trials of history doesn't change that we must live in the times in which we were born. Indeed, neither partying, nor preparing,
nor praying achieves what should be the natural goal when we perceive a threat on the horizon: we should not seek to ignore it, or
simply brace for it, but to avert it.

Framing warming in apocalyptic terms fails it cedes too much to climate

deniers and creates a disincentive for change
Gross new media strategist & Gilles domestic abuse advocate 2012 Matthew Barrett & Mel
The Atlantic 4/23
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/how-apocalyptic-thinking-prevents-us-from-
taking-political-action/255758/
For example, annual climate-related disasters such as droughts, storms, and floods rose
dramatically during the last decade, increasing an average 75 percent compared to the 1990s -- just as many
climate models predicted they would if global warming were left unchecked. Yet this rise in
natural disasters hasn't produced a moment of universal recognition of the dangers of
climate change; instead, belief in climate change is actually on the decline as we adjust to the "new
normal" of ever-weirder weather or convince ourselves that our perception of this increased frequency is a magnifying trick of more
readily available cable and Internet coverage.
To understand why fewer people believe in climate change even as evidence mounts, we
must look beyond the industry-funded movement to deny the reality and effects of climate
change. Perhaps equally important -- if not quite equally culpable -- has been the extent to which both the
proponents and opponents of human-made climate change have led us down a cul-de-sac of
conversation by exploiting the apocalyptic metaphor to make their case.
Whether by design or by accident, the initial warnings of environmentalists -- of oceans rising to engulf our most
beloved metropolises, of amber waves of grain scorched into a desert landscape -- activated the apocalyptic impulse.
The focus on disastrous repercussions for our behavior at some point in the future echoed the warnings of the Israelite priests to
wayward Jews in Babylon or, later, to those who submitted too willingly to Alexander's process of Hellenization. It was a familiar
story: change, and change radically, or face hell on earth. Perhaps there was no other way to sound the alarm about the devastating
threat presented by global climate change, but that
echo of apocalyptic warning was quickly seized upon
by the naysayers to dismiss the evidence out of hand.
We've heard this story before, the deniers insisted, and throughout history those who have declared the end of the world was near have
always been proven wrong. As early as 1989, the industry front man Patrick Michaels, a climatologist and global warming skeptic,
was warning in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post of this new brand of "apocalyptic environmentalism," which represented "the
most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." That the solutions to global warming (a less carbon-intensive economy, a
more localized trade system, a greater respect for nature's power) parallel so perfectly the dream of environmentalists, and that the
causes of global warming (an unrestrained industrial capitalism reliant on the continued and accelerating consumption of fossil fuels)
parallel the economic dream of conservatives, has simply exacerbated the fact that global warming has now become just another front
in the culture wars. By seizing upon and mocking the apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric of those
sounding the alarm, the industry front groups succeeded in framing the debate about global
warming into a question about what one believes. Thus, entangled with the myth of
apocalypse -- and its attendant hold on our own sense of belief and self-identity -- the debate
about anthropogenic climate change has reached an impasse. You believe in the Rapture; I believe in
global warming -- and so the conversation stops. But global climate change is not an apocalyptic event that
will take place in the future; it is a human-caused trend that is occurring now. And as we
expend more time either fearfully imagining or vehemently denying whether that trend will
bring about a future apocalypse, scientists tell us that the trend is accelerating.
 AT: Climate Justice
Climate justice is insufficient and used as an excuse for western imperialism
Morito Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Centre for Global and Social Analysis at
Athabasca University 2010 Bruce Ethics of Climate Change: Adopting an Empirical Approach
to Moral Concern Research in Human Ecology 17.2
http://ww.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her172/Morito.pdf
However, a plethora of other, sometimes related, issues have also arisen, which suggest that a
justice focus may not be
entirely adequate to capture the range of morally relevant concerns. When we consider certain
climate change forces, e.g., widespread increases in violent storms, hurricanes,
desertification, floods, etc., one of the more feared adaptive responses in which people will
engage is re-location. Dyer (2009, pp. 14, 15) shows how the U.S. military is thinking about how it will plan for this
eventuality and its related threat to international security. Now, we tend to think of relocation, or out-
migration of populations, as a bad and unjust consequence, not only because of the
financial costs that will be incurred, but because peoples loss of a sense of belonging to a
particular place can create personal identity and security crises (moral, social and political costs). An
increasing demand for re-location and vocational training, as an adaptive response to
climate change (once sea-level rising becomes a significant factor), could undermine peoples sense of local
or even national identity. Eroding identities can have an impact on peoples allegiances, can
exacerbate social dysfunction and aggravate stress disorders. At the same time, however, there are
possible benefits to consider. It is possible that some people (possibly those whom we identify as falling victim to unjust
consequences), whose social and cultural worlds are undermined by the effects of climate change, may turn out unexpectedly to
value the results. Those whose worlds were once strongly communal and reliant on a moral economy4 of oppressive religious
regimes may find a shift to new locales and a subsequent undermining of a traditional social order freeing. Or, on the other hand,
those whose individualist and capitalist worlds are undermined may find that having to cooperate and share with their neighbors
brings a welcome sense of communal identity and the benefits of a robust moral economy. The normative consequences of climate
change, then, might turn out to be positive to some and possibly many stakeholders.
My point is not to give equal weight to the benefits and harms of climate change. It is to indicate that, since
the net effects
on social and personal life of climate change are not monolithic, some people may turn out
to be beneficiaries and some perceived just actions now may result in unjust or bad
consequences later and vice versa, the normative consequences of climate change are not
free of ambiguity. Not only are harms-benefits and justice-injustice projections unclear,
ambiguities in the concept of justice are becoming apparent in the way we describe various
stakeholder situations and prescribe responses. Ikeme (2003) argues that notions of justice used to
formulate Western foreign policies fit a conceptual pattern, which helps open the way for an
imposition of Western or Northern systems onto Southern and developing nations. This
critique follows a similar fairly longstanding critique by the likes of Vandana Shiva (1989), Wolfgang Sachs (1993) and Leah Gibbs
(2006). Byexploiting the language of development and the idea of being responsible for
bringing the developing world a more just distribution of wealth and opportunity,
developed countries have, in effect, undermined local economies, agrarian ecosystems and
social systems. The principle of distributive justice, to these critics, is used to re-shape social
systems and economies to accord with imperialist interests of northern corporations and
institutions, producing the opposite of what was claimed would be the result of aid. Whatever
concept of justice is being used by developed nations in debate with their critics, it is unclear whether they are using the same
concept; or, if they are using the same concept, the value assigned to it can differ quite significantly. Climate
change
threatens to complicate debates over justice, by compelling the whole world to respond,
thereby bringing its entire range of perspectives and voices together with their value
systems and world views to the foreground for attention.
AT: DIPLOMACY ADVANTAGE
 AT: Diplomacy Adv 1NC
The concept of diplomacy has become over-determined by the over-arching
control of legal institutions the urge for diplomacy is built on the necessity of
violent institutions to intervene and exert violence against the other
Rozo, MA in philosophy and Cultural Analysis, 2004 Diego, Forgiving the Unforgivable: On
Violence, Power, and the Possibility of Justice p 24
The importance of these examples goes beyond that of showing hypothetical spheres of human life where nonviolent resolution of
conflicts is possible. In both of these spheres -conference and diplomacy- immediate solving of affairs was
possible, although each time it becomes more difficult to find direct terms of agreement, due to
the interference of legality in them. Law thrives on the formalization of these techniques; the
know-how that has been produced by their mere practice is now formalized in the form of codes.
So, diplomacy has decayed into mere formalities, and in the case of language, of understanding, lying, which
was until recently not legally sanctioned, has become prohibited under the legal figure of fraud. The formalization of these
techniques, in principle remote from the scope of laws applicability, respond to the latters need for regulating
all conflict between individuals or between institutions or even among nations. The law
understands that if something goes wrong with the exercise of such techniques, an outburst of
unregulated violence can menace the stability of the legal system. This explains the necessity for
law to intervene in all sorts of human affairs by presenting its indirect means of solution as a
natural means of agreement. Every possible conflict must be resolved under the guidance of
laws all-embracing methods, because they are the natural and at the same time legal way for exerting the violence
inherent to every solution of conflicts.

This orientation makes ethics impossible and violence inevitable externalizing

ethics onto institutions is the worst form of violence because it exonerates
individuals of responsibility for their relationship with the other which allows
institutional violence across the board
Rozo, MA in philosophy and Cultural Analysis, 2004 Diego, Forgiving the Unforgivable: On
Violence, Power, and the Possibility of Justice p 19-21
Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where suffering is exchanged for more, but legal
suffering, because these relations are no longer regulated by the culture of the heart [Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin
describes it, the legal system tries to erect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully
pursued by violence, legal ends that can be realized only by legal power. (CV 238) The individual is not
to take law in his own hands; no conflict should be susceptible of being solved without the direct
intervention of law, lest its authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as
indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The consequence of this infiltration of law throughout
the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the
individual becomes. Legal and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the possibility of
forgiveness is monopolized by the state under the right of mercy. Hence the responsibility of the person toward the
others is now delegated on the authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents
of (legal) vengeance exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others, breaking
the moral proximity that makes every ethics possible.20 Thus I am no longer obliged to an other
that by his/her very presence would demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of every occasion),
because law, by seeking to regulate affairs between individuals, makes this other anonymous,
virtual: his otherness is equaled to that of every possible other. The Other becomes faceless, making it all too
easy for me to ignore his demands of justice, and even to exert on him violence just for the sake of
legality. The logic of evil, then, becomes not a means but an end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of
the states survival. Hence, the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of my unconditional
responsibility towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarian institutions of
a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self- preserving vengeance. The undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent
meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that the worst could be exerted in the name of law. Even the very notion of
crimes against humanity, which seeks to protect the life of the population, can be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other
states or by its own population.22 From now on, my responsibility towards the Other is taken from me, at the
price of my own existence being constantly threatened by the imminent and fatal possibility of
being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate offence. In this picture, the modern state protects my
existence while bringing on the terror of state violence the law infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts.
 Link - Diplomacy Ext
DIPLOMACY the concept of diplomacy has become over-determined by the
technique of law extend the Rozo 4 evidence negotiations and interactions
with other countries in the international arena has become nothing more then
an extension of formulaic ideologies which insists on intervention in order to
assure that legal violence remains an assumed necessary part of our existence
EXTERNALIZATION extend Rozo 4 ceding our ethical politics to institutions
exonerates individuals from their responsibility for ethical action externalizing
ethics in this matter makes all violence inevitable because the state becomes
not only the dictator of ethics but also its enforcement the affirmative
makes legal violence necessary which turns the 1AC
LANGUAGE GAMES - Looking to language to mediate conflict results in the
ultimate form of violence symbolization and conflict spawn from the
negotiations of the plan
Zizek 6 (Slavoj, Dimmed Tide is Loosed, The Symptom Volume 7, spring,
http://www.lacan.com/zizantinomies.htm)
What exploded in violence was a complex cobweb of symbols, images and attitudes (Western
imperialism, godless materialism and hedonism, the suffering of Palestinians, etc.etc.) that became attached to Danish
caricatures, which is why the hatred expanded from caricatures to Denmark as a country, to Scandinavian countries, to Europe, to the
West it was as if all these humiliations and frustrations got condensed in the caricatures. And, again, one should bear in mind that
this condensation is a fact of language, of constructing and imposing a certain symbolic
field.
This simple and all too obvious fact should compel us to render problematic the idea (propagated
lately by Habermas, but also not strange to a certain Lacan) of language, symbolic order, as the medium of
reconciliation/mediation, of peaceful co-existence, as opposed to the violence of immediate raw
confrontation: in language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we debate, we exchange words, and such an
exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum of recognition of the other. The idea is thus that, insofar as
language gets infected by violence, this occurs under the influence of contingent empirical
pathological circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication. What
if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity to violence precisely because they speak? [7]
As already Hegel was well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolization of a thing, which
equals its mortification; this violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the
designated thing, reducing it to a unary feature; it dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its
parts and properties as autonomous; it inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external
to it.

Their reading of transformative communication imposes a violent Master

signifier which overdetermines their ability to produce social change
Zizek 6 (Slavoj, Dimmed Tide is Loosed, The Symptom Volume 7, spring,
http://www.lacan.com/zizantinomies.htm)
Lacan condensed this aspect of language in his notion of the Master-Signifier which quilts and thus holds together a
symbolic field. That is to say, for Lacan (at least for his theory of four discourses elaborated in late 1960s), human
communication in its most basic, constitutive, dimension does not involve a space of egalitarian
intersubjectivity, it is not balanced, it does not put the participants in symmetric mutually
responsible positions where they all have to follow the same rules and justify their claims with reasons. On the contrary, what
Lacan indicates with his notion of the discourse of the Master as the first, inaugural, constitutive, form of discourse, is that every
concrete, really existing, space of discourse is ultimately grounded in a violent imposition of a
Master-Signifier which is stricto sensu irrational: it cannot be further grounded in reasons, it is the point at which one can
only say that the buck stops here, a point at which, in order to stop the endless regress, somebody has to say It is so because I say it
is so!.
 Link Diplomacy Language DA - 2NR
Extend the Zizek evidence it makes multiple arguments which serve as offense
against the aff
LANGUAGE IS VIOLENCE the argument that opening a space for
communication can be transformative is ignorant to the reality of the
constructs of language the affirmative cannot prevent the condensation of
symbolization that happens within language the very act of language is what
makes humanity the most violent creature on earth this argument turns THE
ENTIRE AFFIRMATIVE their attempt to open lines of communication can only
replicate the violence of the status quo
MASTER SIGNIFIER language negotiations and communication cannot mediate
conflict the affirmatives argument is based on the false construct that
language is neutral territory when in fact the opposite is true language is
predetermined and violent because it imposes a master signifier onto every
communicative activity this is terminal defense against their aff because it
proves that they cannot overcome the violence they criticize its also offense
because it proves they only further entrench US ideology as the master in
international politics
 Impact Ethics Ext
MULTIPLE IMPACTS EXTEND ROZO 4 -
ETHICS The affirmative makes ethics impossible externalization of ethical
responsibility for violence onto institutions make individual responsibility and
ethical relationships impossible ethics outweigh any of their consequential
arguments because it provides the conditions for non-violence and lack of
ethics serves as the justification for violent strategies of extermination
VIOLENCE When institutions become the nexis of ethics they also have the
radical power to enforce ethical codes historically this power has led to
massive amounts of state violence which outweighs and turns the 1AC their
impacts of otherization and violence are a consequence of strategies like the
plan