1NC

A: OBSERVATION: BORDERS SHOULD BE REJECTED, IN NEED FOR A UTOPIAN SOCIETY.

ANALYSIS: BORDERS CAUSE UPHEAVINGS IN THE NATION STATES. ELIMINATING THE NEED FOR
BORDERS ESTABLISHES A UTOPIAN SOCIETY OF EQUALITY AND FREEDOM.

WE OPPRESS NOT THROUGH

THE IMPACT OF THE NEGATIVE, BUT RATHER THROUGH THE IMPACT OF OUR SOCIO-ECONOMIC CLIMATE.

THE NEGATIVE SEES THE AFFIRMATIVE CASE AS FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED, BECAUSE THEY THERFORE THE NEGATIVE TEAM CLASHES WITH THE

ENDORSE THIS WORLD VIEW OF OPPRESSSION.

AFFIRMATIVE ON THE BASIS OF THIS STATED ASSUMPTION.

B: OPPRESSION IS OCCURING, ONLY UTOPIAN SOCIETY WILL SOLVE.

WE SHOULD ADOPT THE UTOPIAN DEMAND FOR A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS OUR POINT IS NOT TO
LITERALLY BRING THIS INTO EXISTENCE BUT TO USE THIS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT TO ORIENT A RADICAL POLITICS AGAINST NATION-STATE VIOLENCE

WHYTE ET AL. 6 (Jessica, PhD candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash U., Australia, Carlos Fernandez, Doctor in Sociology and works as a
precarious researcher @ Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Spain, Meredith Gill, PhD candidate in the Program in Comparative Stu dies in Discourse and Society @ U. of Minnesota, Imre Szeman, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies and an Adjunct Member of the Institute for American Studies @ Humboldt U. in Berlin , Erasing the Line, or, the Politics of the Border ephemera 6(4) pg. 466) In light of our journey from our home countries to Moscow and back from Beijing, as well as the collective trip taken by all those involved in the Capturing the Moving Mind project across the Russian/Mongolian and Mongolian/Chinese border,

we wish to articulate a similar demand with a similar aim: unfettered mobility for individuals and

collectives, the dissolution of all borders that separate, isolate, contain, limit, enable violent forms of extraction and injustice, and impede political imaginings and futures. In an era dominated by the discourse of mobility, the organization of movement and space through an older technology that of border line, an entity as abstract and full of metaphysical subtleties as any other in the lexicon of human thought remains essential to the smooth operations of capital. Without the border, there would be no differential zones of labour, no spaces to realize surplus capital through the dumping of overproduction, no way of patrolling surly populations that might want to resist proletarianization, no release valve for speculative access. The demand for free movement challenges not only the logics of contemporary economics, but also the operations of the political, which have long been premised on the
establishment of

zones of inclusion and exclusion, control over the legal status of citizen-subjects, practices of

demographic accounting and management, and the mobilization of bodies for use in territorial expansion and war. No borders! Or just as well: free movement! What insights does such a demand produce with respect to the key forms through which power and social control are exerted today? And
what kind of political possibilities do these insights generate in turn? It is clear enough that

the possibility of unfettered movement a world without border

controls, identity papers, fictions of national belonging, death and destruction over abstract geographies would necessitate a social order radically different from every one hitherto imagined. The physical remnants of what we
call

history are marked by the long human drama of the production and patrol of borders: cathedrals, castles, city walls

and gates, districts, patrol towers, checkpoints even the physical geography of rivers, bodies of water, and mountain ranges, transformed by their role as dividing markers. The streetscapes of modernity, pathways for the dreamy wanderings
of the fla neur,

are also designed with the aim of enabling the quick and efficient deployment of men and military

equipment, both to manage unruly internationalists at home (communists, postcolonials, and the like) and to face the

incursion of foreign armies across the sacred line dividing one nation-state from another. So we would also need
new vernacular architectures, new cities, new modes of labouring, new economies, begin with.

new cultures a great many new things, and this just to

One way forward might be to try to put everything on the table all at once and so participate in the kind of testing the power of the demand No borders! by looking at a few key ways borders demarcate

utopian constructions that Jameson suggests emerge whenever political energies are blocked. We propose a more
politically efficacious way forward, mobility and immobility today: in relation to the operations of contemporary capital; the control over migration and nation-state sovereignty; the patrolling of cultural borderlines; and the collapse of the labour and leisure into a time of perpetual production.

RETHINKING GEOPOLITICAL STRUCTURES IS THE ONLY WAY TO INTERROGATE THE CURRENT SYSTEM
QUESTIONING THESE POLITICAL ASSUMPTIONS PREVENTS WAR AND ACCEPTANCE OF CONFLICT.

TUATHAIL & DALBY 98 (

ethinking Geopolitics, Gearoid O uathail

Simon Dalby, 998, pg 89-9

Gearoid O Tuathail is Associate Professor of Geography at Virginia Tech, USA and

Simon Dalby is Associate Professor of Geography at Carleton University, Canada.) //GY A full analysis of sovereignty and geopolitics would necessitate an additional inquiry into constructions of political culture.

Discussions of political culture are for the

most part devoid of critical, or at least theoretical, treatments of sovereignty that allow for a complex account of the socially constructed relationship between state, sovereignty, and society. The state, in comparative political science, appears to have fixed
those geographical and discursive boundaries that guarantee the division of the domestic from the international Bierstekers and Webers definition assists in rethinking this absence of sovereignty and its effects in comparative analyses. Missing, with regard to comparative analyses of the modern nation- state, are inquiries into the importance of territory in the scripting of narratives of national political cultures. This chapter will architect a starting point from which to begin questioning the epistemological function of territory in the production of a normative conception of the modern state O Tuathail (1994: 534) specifies one of the primary tasks of critical geopolitics as calling into ques tion the delimitation of the relationship between geography and politics to essential identities and domains

This production of essentialized identities and spaces through the conjoining of geography and politics

produces narratives of geopolitical and national identity that inform the strategies by which maps of global politics are produced [at] governmental sites in the everyday activities of geopoliticians (ibid.: 535). Those narratives of
nation and identity found within political culture can be understood as geopolitical in so far as they posit and inscribe the bound domestic spaces crucial to geopolitical discourses. Richard Ashley has described

the importance of these narratives in that International

politics and the prospect of war are invoked [in modern statecraft] primarily in opposition to a construct of domestic society, conceived as a [self-]identical social whole that is the very embodiment of a reasonable humanity, a civilization, a nation, a coherent modern community of sovereign men (Ashley 1989: 303). Hence, political culture
becomes the very set of activities against which the international is defined. It is the condition of the sovereign domestic sphere that is observed and replicated through each comparison. Moreover, the ongoing practices of geopoliticians, international media, activists, and academic scholarship all participate in the knowl edgeable practices of statecraft that functions to produce the effects of modern domestic societies social identities consisting of populations subordinate to a rational [political] center (ibid : 3 4)

Taking seriously the conceptualization of society

and culture found in comparative political culture allows for the interrogation of a site of the continuous production of sovereignty.
This
o do otherwise would be to accept Almonds and Verbas occulted geographies as real representations of the places they claim to compare.

assessment of comparative political culture will critically analyze generalizable summaries of national political
(O

cultures that arrest questioning and suggest essentialist explanations of political organization and behavior

uathail 994: 539) It will be especially attentive to the historical emergence, bounding, conquest, and administration of social spaces, recognizing as incomplete those conceptualizations of national culture that accord to moral claims, traditional institutions, or deep interpretations the status of a fixed and homogeneous essence . . . or an ultimate origin of international political life (Ashley 987: 411).

The ambiguous status of territory within these explanations calls attention to the place of geopolitics in the

imagining of political culture Incorporating critiques of comparative political culture into critical geopolitics necessarily denies the disciplinary mandate of political science to relegate the study of the international to the field of international relations and that of the domestic sphere to comparative politics. In challenging these disciplinary boundaries and demonstrating the dependence of political analysis upon a geocultural knowledge it becomes possible to reconsider central assumptions of political culture and the very foundations of its comparisons.

THE THREATS OF TERROR ON THE BORDER ARE MERELY THE FLIP SIDE OF THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL
MISSION TO ELIMINATE ALL NON-AMERICAN EVIL FROM THE GLOBE BACKLASH AND FAILS.

IT INEVITABLY CREATES VIOLENT

DISCUSSIONS LIKE THIS ONE IN UNIVERSITY SPACES ARE CRITICAL TO FIGHT

he New Violent Cartography Security Dialogue 38, p 3 05-

BACK AGAINST IMPERIAL EXPANSION

SHAPIRO 7 (Michael J , Department of Political Science, University of HawaiI,

306)

As Virilio (2002: 8) points out in an analysis he undertook during the first Gulf War, the militarized state looks inward as well as outward, manifesting a panicked anticipation of internal war In the case of the post -9/ is effacing the inside/outside boundary of the war. Achille Mbembe (2
perceptions for some time, despite a rejection of their fingerprint data by their counterparts in Madrid.

war

on terror, the same preemption involved in assaults on states has been turned inward A state of siege mentality
3: 3 ) puts it succinctly: he state of siege is itself a military institution In contrast with the firefights deployed on distanced terrains, the weapons used internally are surveillance technologies and extra- juridical modes of detention. For example, as an instance of hysterical perception, an FBI fingerprinting laboratory identified a lawyer in Oregon as one whose fingerprints were found among the detritus of the train bombings in Madrid in 2004. Furthermore, FBI agents pressed their

he technologies deployed in the war on terror have operated on two fronts, the distant and the home
example,

For

the drone, which was weaponized for use on a distant battlefield, is being employed in its spare,

observational version in USMexico border areas to help prevent illegal entry of immigrants. According to a report in
the New York Times, on 25 June 2004, unmanned planes known as drones, which use thermal and night-vision equipment, were used in the US southwest to catch illegal immigrants attempting to cross into the USA from Mexico.

The drones form part of the domestic front in

the USAs war on terror; specifically, they are part of the Department of Homeland Securitys operational control of the border in Arizona (Myers, 2004). However, while one agency involved in the war on terror is diverting its technology to help exclude Hispanic bodies, another is actively recruiting them for duty on the external war fronts. As shown in Michael Moores documentary Fahrenheit 9/
of southwestern border patrol agencies within the Homeland Security network, much of the recruiting is aimed at those Hispanics that live on the margins of the national economy. An item about recruitment in the Denver area tells much of the story: In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Armys top prio rities. From 2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent. The increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years (Alvarez, 2006). Where are the recruiters searching? The story continues: Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Armys special missions: to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers , military recruiters are most in evidence in poorer and disproportionately ethnic neighborhoods and venues for example, the parking lots of discount department stores. Ironically, given the participation

But the militarys domestic initiatives go beyond collecting bodies It is also m ilitarizing other agencies, assembling them within what I have called the tertiary spatialization of terrorism
As the author of he Pentagons New 4: 95) Map points out, a whole lot more than just the Defense Department is actively pursuing the war on terror (Barnett, 2

One aspect

of that broadened participation is evident in a recent collaboration between three kinds of institutions: Hollywood film-making, the military, and the university, all of whom share participation in the University of South ern Californias
Institute for Creative Technologies.

he collaboration exemplifies the tertiary spatialization of terrorism inasmuch as it is

located in the sector of the institutional ecologies of militarization that involve relations among military, entertainment, and university agencies. Leaving aside the historical development of the film industry (which, like the Internet, has borrowed much of its tech- nology from innovations in the militarys information technologies), USCs involvement can be located in a long history of the universitys role in national policy The modern university began, at least in part, as an ideological agency of the state. It was intellectually shaped as a cultural institution whose task was to aid and abet the production of the nation-state, a coherent, homogenous cultural nation contained by the state. Bill Readings describes a paradigmatic example, the University of Berlin, for which Alexander
von Humboldt was primarily responsible: Humboldts project for the foundatio n of the University of Berlin is decisive for the centering of the University around the idea of culture, which ties the University to the nation-state

And, he adds, the project is developed at the

moment of the emergence of the German nation-state. In addition to being assigned the dual ask of research and teaching, the university is also involved in the production and inculcation of national knowledge (Readings,
1995: 12).

D: RECENT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES PROVES THAT WHAT IS CURRENTLY THOUGHT, MAY

CHANGE. OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO PREFER NOT TO DO DEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE

THIS REFUSAL INTERRUPTS THE ENDLESS CYCLE OF ACTING SO THAT NOTHING CHANGES AND OPENS
UP SPACE CONTRA IDEOLOGY FOR NEW FORMS OF ASSISTANCE.

IEK 10 (Slavoj, Prof. of European Graduate School, Intl. Director of the Birkbeck Inst. for Humanities, U. of London, and Senior Researcher @ Inst. of Sociology, U. of Ljubljiana, Living in the End
Times, pgs. 399-402)
Indeed, was not Khrushchev's later fate (he was deposed in 1964) proof of Oscar Wilde's quip that, if one tells the truth, one will sooner or later be caught out? Sartre's analysis nonetheless falls short on one crucial point: Khrushchev's report (J/2 have a traumatic impact, even if he "was speaking in the name ofthe system: the machine was sound, but its chiefoperator was not; this saboteur had relieved the world of his presence, and everything was going to run smoothly again. "48 His intervention set in motion a process which ultimately brought down the system-a lesson worth remembering today.

Our answer to the "What is to be done?" question raised above is thus simple: why impose a choice in the first place? A Leninist "concrete analysis of concrete circumstances" will make clear what the proper way to act in a given constellation might be sometimes, pragmatic measures addressed to particular
problems are appropriate; sometimes, as in a radical crisis, a transformation of the fundamental structure of society will be the only way to solve its particular problems; sometimes,

in a

situation where plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose, it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. We should always bear in mind the lesson first clearly elaborated by La Boetie in his treatise on la servitude volontaire: power (the
subordination of many to one)

is not an objective state of things which persists even if' we ignore it, it is something

that persists only with the participation of its subjects, only if it is actively assisted by them. What one should avoid here is the predicament of the Beautiful Soul described by Hegel: the subject who continually bemoans and protests his fate, all the while overlooking how he actively participates in the very state of things he deplores. We do not fear and obey
power because it is in itself so powerful; on the contrary, power appears powerful because we treat it as such. This obscene collaboration with the oppressor is the topic of Ismail Kadare's The Pawe ofDreanu, a story of the Tabir Sarrail, the "palace of dreams" in the capital of an unnamed nineteenth-century Balkan empire (modeled on Turkey). In this gigantic building, thousands of palace bureaucrats assiduously sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of citizens systematically and continuously gathered from all parts of the empire. Their immense work of interpretation is Kafkaesque: intense yet a meaningless fake. The ultimate goal of their activity is to identifY the Master-Dream that will provide clues to the destiny ofthe empire and ofits sultan. This is why, although Tabir Sarrail is supposed to be a place of mystery exempt from daily power struggles, what goes on there is inevitably caught up in such conflicts-which dream is to be selected (or perhaps even invented) as the Master-Dream becomes the subject of dark intrigues, The reasons for these struggles are nicely spelled out by Kadare: "In my opinion," Kurt went on, "it is the only organization in the State where the darker side of its subjects' consciousness enters into direct contact with the State itself." He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words. "The masses don't rule, of course," he continued, "but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the State's affairs, including its crimes. And that mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail." "Do you mean to say," asked the cousin, "that

the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?" "Yes," said Kurt. The question to be raised concerns power (domination) and the unconscious: how does power work, why do its subjects obey it? subjects obey not only because of physical coercion (or the threat ofit) and This objet a is given form in the (unconscious) fantasies

hen, more firmly: ln a way, yes "49 In order properly to interpret these lines there is no need for any obscurantist thesis positing a "dark irrational link (or secret solidarity) between "the crowd and its rulers."

This brings us to the (misleadingly named) "erotics of power":

ideological mystification, but because they have a libidinal investment in power. The ultimate "cause" of power is the objet a, the objectcause of desire, the surplus-enjoyment by means of which power "bribes" those it holds in its sway.

of the subjects of power, and the function of Kadare's "Tabir Sarrail" is precisely to interpret those fantasies, to learn what kind of (libidinal) objects they are for their subjects. These obscure "feedback mechanisms" between the subjects of power and its holders regulate
the subjects' subordination, such that if they are disturbed the power structure may lose its libidinal grip and dissolve. The Palace of Dreanu is, of course, itself an impossible fantasy: the fantasy of a power capable of directly managing its own fantasmatic support. And it is here that what we have called "Bartleby politics" enters: rather than actively resisting power, the Bartleby gesture of

"preferring not to" suspends the subject's libidinal investment in it the subject stops dreaming about power. To
put it in mockingly Stalinist terms, not of reality, but

emancipatory struggle begins with the ruthless work of self-censorship and auto-critique

of one's own dreams. The best way to grasp the core of the obsessive attitude is through the notion of false

activity: you think you are active, but your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive. Do we not encounter something akin to this false atctivity in the typical strategy of the obsessive neurotic, who becomes frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening (in a tense group situation, the obsessive talks continually, cracks jokes,
etc., in order to ward off that awkward moment of silence in which the underlying tension would become unbearable)?

he Bartleby act is

violent precisely insofar as it entails refusing this obsessive activity in it, not only do violence and non-violence overlap (nonviolence appears as the highest violence),

so too do act and inactivity (here the most radical act is to do nothing). The "divine" dimension lies in this theology is again emerging as a point of reference for radical politics, it is so not by way of as a token of our radical freedom in having no big

very overlapping of violcnce and non-violence. If

supplying a divine "big Other" who would guarantee the final success of our endeavors, but, on the contrary,

Other to rely on. It was already Dostoevsky who showed how God gives us both freedom and responsibiliiy he is not a benevolent master steering us to safety, but the one who reminds
us that we are totally left to our own devices. This paradox lies at the very core of the Protestant notion of Predestination: Predestination does not mean that since everything is determined in advance we are not really free; rather,

it involves an even more radical freedom than the ordinary one, the freedom to retroactively

determine (that is, change) one's Destiny itself.50

E: Impact: The rejection of the negative Kritik leads to War, something that the elimination of borders, solves.

1. Implications for the Affirmative Analysis: If Utopianism is untrue, then it becomes unprovable that the Affirmative harms will persist, regardless of any inherency evidence presented. Likewise, it becomes unprovable that the plan will act to abate the harms, regardless of any solvency evidence presented. The ability of the Affirmative to win either of these stock issues is contingent on the truth or falsity of the hidden assumption of a utopian society 2. Implications for the Negative Analysis: If Utopianism is proven untrue, the Negative must win, because inherency and solvency evaporate. If, on the other hand, Utopianism is proven to be true, then causal arguments become viable, and the weight of Negative case and disadvantage arguments will be applied against the Affirmatives net solved harms. F. Decision rule: The status of determinism becomes a voting issue in the round. 1. This is an absolute issue. At the end of the round, Utopian Societies will need to be evaluated as either true or false, based on the preponderance of evidence introduced. There is no leeway for a weighed impact; an absolute, yes-or-no answer is required. 2. This is an a priori issue. Because the validity of inherency and solvency rests on the issue of Utopianism, the judge will need to evaluate Utopianism first, before stock issues and substantive arguments are examined. 3. This becomes a voting issue for the Affirmative. To win, the Affirmative must have valid inherency and solvency at the end of the round. That can only be accomplished by defeating our objection to Utopianisms. Therefore the objection itself can be thought of

as a threshold position the Affirmative must pass before they are allowed to proceed further.