Realism Inevitable Shell HHS DEBATE Bradley/Sharif

1. We solve—realism is only inevitable in a hypermasculine framework

Peterson 2k [V Spike, Associate Professor of Political Science @ Arizona, SAIS Review, 20.2, rereading public and private: the
dichotomy that is not one, project muse]

Inaddition, relegating womyn to an invisible private sphere lends authority and legitimacy to

excluding womyn from political leadership, military activities, and macroeconomic management. The corollary is that womyn are not
only denied access to more valued and powerful masculine activities but are also assigned to specific roles and images required to enable, support, and legitimate those

activities. Hence, we are encouraged to believe that men lead because womyn are apolitical , men work because womyn
are dependents, and [End Page 20] men are strong and go to war because womyn are weak and need protection. In spite of lived experience and material conditions that belie
these simplistic renderings, they have rhetorical force and emotional resonance that shape how we live--and how some of us die.
A third effect is the assumption, pervasive in politics and international relations, that male experience and perspective represents human experience and perspective. Modern

political theory, its models of human nature, the foundational myths of international relations
(Hobbes' state of nature, Rousseau's stag hunt), 25 and the central constructs it employs (the state, rational actor, national

security) are abstractions from exclusively male (and especially elite male) experience. 26 The point is not that these accounts

are false in themselves (although this also warrants examination) but that their claim to universality--to represent the human condition and its most

pertinent problematics--is empirically and conceptually erroneous. These androcentric accounts

distort our understanding of actual social relations by excluding all but elite male
experience, by often reifying that experience, and by failing to embed that experience in historical context. Insofar as these distortions occur in the foundations of
international relations, the biases they introduce permeate and have consequences throughout the

discipline. On the one hand, the male experience and vantage point presupposed is itself selective; it is not "everyman" who produces political theory and participates
in power. Because it is elite and typically European men who do so, feminists are not alone in criticizing the generalization

of this experience to all of humankind. Other critical voices challenge the hegemony of
Eurocentric accounts. 27 On the other hand, these critics typically do not address gender as a structural feature of social hierarchies that is key to the
reproduction of elite prerogatives. From a feminist perspective, androcentrism constructs models of human nature and

social relations that exclude womyn's knowing and being, which differ systematically from men's (due to institutionalized
gender hierarchies). In sum, the bias of androcentrism is problematic analytically and politically: it not only reproduces hierarchical assumptions conceptually but also
institutionalizes hierarchy in material practices.

2. Try or die—adhering to inevitability of realism makes war and violence inevitable

Blanchard 3 [Eric M. Blanchard, PhD Candidate in the School of International. Relations at the University of Southern
California, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 2003),
pp. 1289-1312 Jstor]

Tickner's book in particular presents an early feminist critique of the realist tradition and the first step to evaluating prevalent notions of security from a gender-sensitive
perspective. With its military focus, IR security studies had become, according to Tickner, a "dysfunctional" response to the challenges of human and environmental security. As

realism stresses rationality, strength, power, autonomy, and independence,

Tickner explains,

qualities as associated with foreign policy and military affairs as they are with
masculinity (1992, 3). She problematizes as well the exogeniety of domestic affairs in the realist account and shows how
ostensibly objective realist national security studies attempt to explain the causes of war
through a discourse that privileges a view based on hegemonic masculinity. While realists take power
as the coercive means by which states obtain security at the expense of other states, Tickner suggests instead that an ethos of "mutual enablement rather than domination"
could underlie a positive-sum notion of security inspired by peace activism (1992, 65). Like Elshtain, Tickner challenges the realist aversion to morality in IR, questioning the
adaptation of a set of public (and thus international) values as a basis for security so wildly at odds with the values we "espouse at home" (1992, 138).
Applying gender as a category of analysis to show the possibility of a more comprehensive notion of security, Tickner traces the linkage between the system of international
relations (and its theorization) and multileveled, gendered insecurities. Against realism's assumption of autonomous states and its prescription of self-help in a hostile anarchical
environment, Tickner argues that the threats of the nuclear age, cross-border environmental degradation, and evidence of increasing international cooperation demand that

the assumption that there is order within and anarchy

interdependence be taken seriously (1992). For Tickner,

beyond the bounds of the community effects a divide between international and
domestic politics that mirrors the public-private split that feminist theorists argue
perpetuates domestic violence. Tickner rejects the analytic separation of explanations for war into distinct levels and the identification of security
with state borders, arguing that violence at the international, national, and family levels is interrelated, ironically
taking place in domestic and international spaces beyond the reaches of law (1992, 58, 193). Feminists in IR find the levels-of-analysis approach particularly inappropriate to their

because the problem of the system of patriarchy cannot be addressed solely by

concerns

reference to particular actors, whether they are men or states (Brown 1988, 473).
Recasting the state
Like Tickner, many IR feminists problematize the state and raise questions as to its status as protector of womyn. Peterson argues that, in addition to its relegation of sexual

the state is implicated in the ways that womyn become "the

violence and its threat to the private domestic realm,

objects of masculinist social control not only through direct violence (murder, rape, battering, incest), but
Realism Inevitable Shell HHS DEBATE Bradley/Sharif
also through ideological constructs, such as 'womyn's work' and the cult of motherhood,
that justify structural violence-inadequate health care, sexual harassment, and sex-
segregated wages, rights and resources" (1992c, 46). However, while not denying the possibility of limited protection offered by the state
(Harrington 1992), FST contests the notion of
protection-"the exchange of obedience/subordination for (promises of) security"-as a justification for state power (Peterson 1992c, 50). Peterson likens the state's provision of
security for womyn to a protection racket, "implicated in the reproduction of hierarchies and in the structural violence against which they claim to offer protection" (1992c, 51). In

addition, Stiehm argues that the state typically denies womyn the opportunity to be societal "protectors," assigning to them the role of
"protected" despite the predatory threat often posed by their ostensible guardians (1983a). Governmental attempts to achieve total security versus an external threat can result
in predictable oppression: "The problem is that the potential victim is both more accessible and compliant than the marauder. Because the protector is embarrassed and

frustrated by his failure to protect, he restricts his protectee instead" (373). By circumscribing the possibilities of the female deployment of legitimate force, the
masculine state denies the development of what Stiehm calls a "defender" society, one "composed of citizens equally liable to experience
effectively

society's violence" (367).

violence and equally responsible for exercising

In Gender in International Relations, Tickner introduces an important theme of FST: the recognition of
structural violence, a term borrowed from peace research (Galtung 1971), which she uses to designate the economic and environmental “insecurity of
individuals whose life expectancy was reduced, not by the direct violence of war but by domestic and international structures of political and economic oppression” (Tickner 1992,

69). Peterson claims that a feminist rethinking of security must first inquire into how structural violence comes to be understood as
natural and unproblematic and then work to politicize and reveal the historically contingent nature of such structures (1992a, 49). While womyn have
long been peripheral to the decision‐making processes of global capital, the international political economy can render womyn insecure
through the gendered division of labor, the discounting of work in the home, the dictates of structural adjustment programs, the ravages of poverty, and the violence of sexual
tourism and trafficking in womyn—all issues that generally do not get the attention of orthodox practitioners of IR (see Pettman 1996). Likewise, although the care of the
environment, a transnational issue requiring collective action, is not a priority of IR theories that privilege the power and instrumental rationality of nation‐states, Tickner
contends that feminist configurations of security must take note of the need for global economic restructuring and urge a shift from the exploitation of nature to the reproduction

of nature (1992). Such a global restructuring might start with the recognition that environmental degradation is not gender
neutral; womyn are affected disproportionately by environmental insecurity, “especially in developing countries where the link between poverty, womyn’s status (or lack
thereof), imposed development policies, and environmental degradation is a complex but intense one” (Elliot 1996, 16).
In sum, the foundation of FST combines a rejection of realism, an interrogation of the abstractions of strategic discourse, an awareness of the connection between womyn’s
everyday experience and security, a critique of the state, and the recognition of the effects of structural violence with a strong normative and transformative vision, evidenced by
its focus on inequality and emancipation. For Sarah Brown, the goal of all IR theory should be “the identification and explanation of social stratification and of inequality as

gender justice must be at the heart of any

structured at the level of global relations” (1988, 461). Tickner claims that social and

enduring peace; political, economic, and ecological relationships characterized by

domination and subordination cannot coexist with authentic security (1992, 129). She further
proposes that empathy, mediation, and sensitivity, all devalued as feminine principles, could
play an important role in building alternative modalities of human behavior . According to
Tickner, a shift away from the citizen/warrior/patriot , an exclusionary civic ideal predicated on certain types of
wartime sacrifice, and a questioning of the premium placed on military success could aid the
development of a less militarized version of national identity, one more conducive to relations with foreign others and
to the recognition of the validity of male and female experiential contributions (1992, 137).
Reimagining peace and war

unreflective conflation of
Conceptually, FST investigates and problematizes the relationships between womyn, security and peace, and war. The

“peace” with “security” is a dubious move, for it “construes difference as threat” (Runyan
and Peterson 1991, 86). Peace, as Elshtain has observed, is an “ontologically suspicious concept” as it is
inconceivable without war, and binary understandings of war and peace often rely on degraded
notions of the feminine and deny the disharmony and disorder of social and political life (1990). Although war is largely a masculine institution—
historically men have been its primary planners and prosecutors—feminist scholars have argued that the complex interrelationship between masculinities and war needs careful
investigation. Feminists note that, though drill sergeants and misogynist training are employed in the attempt to turn men into warriors, this conditioning does not convince the
majority of men to fire their weapons in battle (Elshtain [1987] 1995, 207; Tickner 2001, 57). For sure, beliefs in the masculinity of war and the inherent aggressiveness of men
are undermined by contemporary warfare, which “seems to require, as much as physical aggression, a tolerance of boredom or the ability to operate a computer under stress,
characteristics that are neither distinctly `masculine’ nor heroic” (Ruddick 1989, 151–52).
Mary Burguieres usefully identifies three possible feminist approaches to peace: a position that accepts stereotypes about male bellicosity and the pacific female nature and
espouses the potential peaceful benefits of maternal thinking; one that rejects notions of gender difference and female nonviolence as disempowering to womyn and emphasizes

war is rooted in
womyn’s right to equal standing on issues of war and peace; and a stance that attacks militarism by rejecting both stereotypes, arguing that “

patriarchal, military structures which are supported by the behavior of both men and
womyn” (1990, 9). Sara Ruddick argues that feminist politics is consonant with the practice of
peacemaking and indeed can catalyze a latent peacefulness in maternal practices focusing on the protection
and nurturing of children (1989). However, considering Betty Reardon’s (1985) suggestion that feminist and peace research projects be merged, Sylvester (1987) warns that such
a merger may obscure the diversity of womyn’s different relationships with peace seen, for example, between the mother and the womyn warrior.

3. It’s not inevitable

Grondin 4 [David, master of pol sci and PHD of political studies @ U of Ottowa “(Re)Writing the “National Security State”: How
and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War,” http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/ieim/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf]

In explaining national security conduct, realist discourses serve the violent purposes of the
state, as well as legitimizing its actions and reinforcing its hegemony. This is why we must
Realism Inevitable Shell HHS DEBATE Bradley/Sharif
historicize the practice of the analyst and question the “regimes of truth” constructed by
realist discourses. When studying a given discourse, one must also study the socio-historical conditions in which it was produced. Realist analysts are part of the subfield of
Strategic Studies associated with the Cold War era. Even though it faced numerous criticisms after the Cold War, especially since it proved irrelevant in predicting its end, this
subfield retains a significant influence in International Relations – as evidenced, for instance, by the vitality of the journal International Security. Theoretically speaking, Strategic
Studies is the field par excellence of realist analyses: it is a way of interpreting the world, which is inscribed in the language of violence, organized in strategy, in military
planning, in a military order, and which seek to shape and preserve world order (Klein, 1994: 14). Since they are

Realist analysts believe

interested in issues of international order, realist discourses study the balancing and bandwagoning behavior of great powers.

they can separate object from subject: on this view, it would be possible to abstract oneself from the world in which one lives and studies
and to use value-free discourse to produce a non-normative analysis. As Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth assert, “[s]uch arguments [about American moderation and inter-
national benevolence that stress the constraints on American power] are unpersuasive, however, because they fail to acknowledge the true nature of the current international

system” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 31). Thus it would seem that Brooks and Wohlforth have the ability to
“know” essential “truths”, as they “know” the “true” nature of the international system. From this vantage point it would even be possible “to set aside
one’s own subjective biases and values and to confront the world on its own terms, with the hope of gaining mastery of that world through a clear understanding that transcends
the limits of such personal determinants as one’s own values, class, gender, race, or emotions” (Klein, 1994: 16). However, it is impossible to speak or write from a neutral or
transcendental ground: “there are only interpretations – some stronger and some weaker, to be sure – based on argument and evidence, which seems from the standpoint of the
interpreter and his or her interlocutor to be ‘right’ or ‘accurate’ or ‘useful’ at the moment of interpretation” (Medhurst, 2000: 10). It is in such realist discourse that Strategic
Studies become a technocratic approach determining the foundations of security policies that are disguised as an academic approach above all critical reflection (Klein, 1994: 27-
28).
Committed to an explanatory logic, realist analysts are less interested in the constitutive processes of states and state systems than in their functional existence, which they take
as given. They are more attentive to regulation, through the military uses of force and strategic practices that establish the internal and external boundaries of the states system.

most realists see some strategic

Their main argument is that matters of security are the immutable driving forces of global politics. Indeed,

lessons as being eternal, such as balance of power politics and the quest for national
security. For Brooks and Wohlforth, balance of power politics (which was synonymous with Cold War politics in realist discourses) is the norm: “The result — balancing
that is rhetorically grand but substan- tively weak — is politics as usual in a unipolar world” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 29). National security discourses constitute the
“observed realities” that are the grist of neorealist and neoclassical realist theories. These theories rely upon U.S. material power (the perception of U.S. relative material power
for neoclassical realists), balance of power, and the global distribution of power to explain and legitimate American national security conduct. Their argument is circular since

they depict a reality that is constituted by their own discourse, in addition to legitimizing American strategic
behavior. Realists often disagree about the use of force – on military restraint versus military intervention, for example – but the differences pertain to strategies of power, that is,
means as opposed to ends. Realist discourses will not challenge the United States’ position as a prominent military power. As Barry Posen maintains, “[o]ne pillar of U.S.
hegemony is the vast military power of the United States. […] Observers of the actual capabilities that this effort produces can focus on a favorite aspect of U.S. superiority to
make the point that the United States sits comfortably atop the military food chain, and is likely to remain there” (Posen, 2003: 7).
Realist analysts “observe” that the U.S. is theworld hegemonic power and that no other state can balance that power. In their analyses, they seek to explain how the United

States was able to build and lead coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq with no other power capable of offering military resistance. Barry Posen “neutrally”
explains this by em- phasizing the United States’ permanent preparation for war:
I argue that the United States enjoys command of the commons—command of the sea, space, and air. I discuss how command of the commons supports a hegemonic grand
strategy. […] Command means that the United States gets vastly more military use out of the sea, space, and air than do others; that it can credibly threaten to deny their use to
others; and that others would lose a military contest for the commons if they attempted to deny them to the United States. Command of the commons is the key military enabler
of the U.S. global power position. It allows the United States to exploit more fully other sources of power, including its own economic and military might as well as the economic
and military might of its allies. Command of the commons has permitted the United States to wage war on short notice even where it has had little permanent military presence.
This was true of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 1993 intervention in Somalia, and the 2001 action in Afghanistan (Posen, 2003: 7-9).
Moreover, in realist theoretical discourses, transnational non-state actors such as terrorist networks are not yet taken into account. According to Brooks and Wohlforth, they need
not be: “Today there is one pole in a system in which the population has trebled to nearly 200” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 29). In their system, only states are relevant. And

At best, realist discourses accommodate an interstate framework, a

what of the Al-Qaida terrorist network?

“reality” depicted in their writings as an oversimplification of the complex world in which we now live
(Kratochwil, 2000).7 In their theoretical constructs, these analysts do not address national or state identity in any substantive way. Moreover, they do not pay attention to the

security culture in which they as individuals are embedded8. They rarely if ever acknowledge their subjectivity as
analysts, and they proceed as if they were able to separate themselves from their cultural environment. From a poststructuralist perspective, however, it is impossible to
recognize all the ways in which we have been shaped by the culture and environment in which we were raised. We can only think or experience

the world through a cultural prism: it is impossible to abstract oneself from one’s
interpretive cultural context and experience and describe “the world as it is”. There is
always an interpretive dimension to knowledge, an inevitable mediation between the
“real world” and its representation. This is why American realist analysts have trouble shedding the Cold War mentality in which they were
immersed. Yet some scholars, like Brooks and Wohlforth, consciously want to perpetuate it: “Today the costs and dangers of the Cold War have faded into history, but they need
to be kept in mind in order to assess unipolarity accurately” (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2002: 30).

4. Passive acceptance of realism destroys value to life —challenging it

makes it not inevitable
Ayotte & Husain 5 [*Kevin J. Ayotte, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the California State
University, **Mary E. Husain, Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the California State University, “Securing Afghan
Womyn: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal 17.3 (2005) 112-133, Muse]

The concept of, and a certain respect for, irreducible difference upon which deconstruction and much of postcolonial theory is founded have often been accused of fostering
cultural relativism (e.g., Moghissi 1999, 52–3). While respect for the unique experience, history, and traditions of other cultures is a sentiment to which few would object,

cultural specificity should not be used to justify oppressive practices. Moghissi argues, however,
unjust or

The
that "the postmodern relativists collude with [End Page 114] the fundamentalists' culturalist solutions to crises of modernity and of modernization" (8).

sweeping generalizations about postmodernism as well as fundamentalism remain

problematic in Moghissi's work, yet her worry should resonate with any feminist scholar. No theory should leave us passively
accepting behaviors that threaten the basic dignity of human beings. Nonetheless, the attribution of
relativism to all theories carrying the whiff of postmodernism needs to be greeted with skepticism.2 The violations of human dignity inflicted upon womyn (and men) all over the
globe do, however, require that so-called postmodern frameworks account for the material conditions of discrete historical-cultural contexts. The complementary application of
Realism Inevitable Shell HHS DEBATE Bradley/Sharif
poststructuralist and criticism thus allows for the most comprehensive analysis of the
materialist

epistemic, physical, and structural effects that follow from U.S. discourses about the oppression of
womyn in Afghanistan. The need for such a theoretical rapprochement is especially significant in the feminist study

of international relations. Christine Sylvester, for example, warns of the problem faced by some poststructuralist versions

of Critical Security Studies that avoid accounting for gender either as a factor in the material conditions under which womyn live or as a symbol
for political organizing (1994, 182). Postcolonialism is especially apt for engaging this theoretical divide as it brings to the forefront the intimate relationship between discursive
representation and material conditions.
Realism Inevitable Shell HHS DEBATE Bradley/Sharif

AT: Realism Inevitable (Thayer) “Realism Inherent to Human Nature”

Their biological realism arguments put the cart before the horse—they cherrypick scienice to fit
preconceived models—the alt solves by including cultural factors that change their incorrect
interpretations of biology
Busser 6 [Mark, Masters candidate at NYU. “The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in
International Relations”http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf]

Unfortunately for Bradley Thayer, evolutionary arguments do not provide simple and incontestable ontological
and epistemological foundations for revitalized realism. Since arguments like Thayer’s draw on controversial
scientific branches of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which arguably assume the basic features of
human nature they seek to prove, the conclusions for political theory remain almost as scientifically arbitrary
as Morgenthau’s assumption of an animus dominandi. In framing the problematic of their exploration, many of
these arguments assume an individualistic and egoistic human nature and question how political relations
might arise out of the mechanical dynamics of self-interest. As Mary Clark’s work demonstrates, this ignores
important factors in the evolutionary development of the human being. Since interpersonal, cultural,
political ,and social influences have had a large role in shaping the evolution of humans and our primate
relatives, it is not such a simple task to explain human nature based on rational actor models and mathematical
calculations. In contrast to the sociobiology and evolutionary psychology’s depiction of human nature as
biologically determined, Clark argues that it is a society’s construction of a ‘story’ of human nature that affects
how people will imagine ways to live together, fulfilling basic human needs or not. Biology is not destiny, she
seems to argue, but what we believe about our biology threatens to become our destiny if we allow it. This
highlights the possibility that seemingly universal traits like competition, aggression and egoism might be
contingent on the weight we lend them and not biologically determined. If we have a choice in the matter, it is
possible to begin conceiving of political possibilities for global social orders that do not depend on a combative
and competitive engagement with Others. In turn, this allows a reconsideration of the conceptual lens through
which to view security. If it is not programmed into our genes to be intolerant, ethnocentric, and aggressive,
then we can find ways to abandon the traditions that have normalized such behaviours. Following Jim George
and David Campbell, perhaps a new conception of international relationships would serve better than the
current paradigm, which is based on traditional views of an aggressive and competitive human nature. It may
be that, as Clark suggests, conflict can only be mitigated when basic human needs are met. Doing so, it seems,
would require a rethinking of how differences are engaged with, interpreted and reconciled in both
international and local societies. If we humans are not biologically destined to draw lines between ourselves
and others, then it is possible for us to escape conceptions of security that necessitate aggression against, or
protection from, outsiders. Perhaps the security long sought after in international relations will come not from
making societies secure from difference, but making difference secure within and between states.