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Security Kritik

Contents
Security Kritik.............................................................................................................................................1
1NC............................................................................................................................................................. 4
2NC............................................................................................................................................................. 9
Links......................................................................................................................................................10
Economy............................................................................................................................................11
Environment......................................................................................................................................12
Generic..............................................................................................................................................14
Hegemony.........................................................................................................................................17
Humanitarianism...............................................................................................................................18
Terrorism...........................................................................................................................................20
War....................................................................................................................................................22
Warming............................................................................................................................................23
Impacts..................................................................................................................................................24
Violence.............................................................................................................................................25
Environment......................................................................................................................................26
Extinction..........................................................................................................................................30
Root Cause........................................................................................................................................31
Policy Paralysis.................................................................................................................................32
VTL...................................................................................................................................................33
Alt..........................................................................................................................................................34
Alt Security Discussions.................................................................................................................35
Alt Solves Ecology.........................................................................................................................36
Alt Solves - Politics...........................................................................................................................38
Alt Sovles - Education.......................................................................................................................40
Perm..................................................................................................................................................42
Reps Debate...........................................................................................................................................45
Reps Shape Reality............................................................................................................................46
Reps First...........................................................................................................................................48
Reps matter........................................................................................................................................49
Realism..................................................................................................................................................51
Realism Bad.......................................................................................................................................52
Realism Is False.................................................................................................................................54

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AT: Realism Inevitable......................................................................................................................57
K Tricks.................................................................................................................................................58
Case is a Lie.......................................................................................................................................59
Prediction Impossible........................................................................................................................62
Prior Question....................................................................................................................................63
Serial Policy Failure (Environment)..................................................................................................64
FW.........................................................................................................................................................65
FW K First......................................................................................................................................66
FW Discourse Key..........................................................................................................................68
Epistemology First.............................................................................................................................70
A2 Section.............................................................................................................................................73
Cede The Political..............................................................................................................................74
Extinction First..................................................................................................................................75
Threats Real.......................................................................................................................................77
Util.....................................................................................................................................................78
AFF...........................................................................................................................................................79
Always VTL..........................................................................................................................................80
Epistemology Defense...........................................................................................................................81
Epistemological Focus Bad...............................................................................................................82
Empiricism Good...............................................................................................................................83
Predictions Good...............................................................................................................................84
Realism Good........................................................................................................................................85
Impact Framing.....................................................................................................................................87
Extinction First..................................................................................................................................88
Impact Turns..........................................................................................................................................89
A2: Ethics..............................................................................................................................................90
Perm Key to Confront Threats............................................................................................................91
Perm Includes Realism.......................................................................................................................92
Boggs.....................................................................................................................................................93
Alt Turns................................................................................................................................................94
Discourse/representations......................................................................................................................96
Impact D war..................................................................................................................................97
Impact D Structural Violence..........................................................................................................98
Environmental Threats Real..................................................................................................................99
Biosecurity Solves...............................................................................................................................100

1NC
The 1AC creates a never ending chain of threats, creating a sense of inevitable
securitization of internal relations. We must attempt to reject forms of security
rhetoric
Grondin 04
(David, Assistant Professor, Member of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Ph.D., Political Science
(International Relations and American Studies), Universit du Qubec Montral, Montral, 2008. M.A.,
International Relations, University of Toronto, Toronto, 2001. B.A., American History, Universit du Qubec
Montral, Montral, 2000. Rethinking the political from a Poststructualist Stance
http://www.ieim.uqam.ca/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf) //ACT

Neorealist and neoclassical realism offer themselves up as a narrative of the world institutional
order. Critical approaches must therefore seek to countermemorialize those whose lives and
voices have been variously silenced in the process of strategic practices (Klein, 1994: 28). The
problem, as revealed in the debate between gatekeepers of the subfield of Strategic Studies
(Walt, 1991), is that those analyses that contravene the dominant discourse are deemed
insignificant by virtue of their differing ontological and epistemological foundations.
Approaches that deconstruct theoretical practices in order to disclose what is hidden in the use
of concepts such as national security have something valuable to say. Their more reflexive
and critically-inclined view illustrates how terms used in realist discourses, such as state,
anarchy, world order, revolution in military affairs, and security dilemmas, are produced by a
specific historical, geographical and socio-political context as well as historical forces and social
relations of power (Klein, 1994: 22). Since realist analysts do not question their ontology and yet
purport to provide a neutral and objective analysis of a given world order based on military
power and interactions between the most important political units, namely states, realist
discourses constitute a political act in defense of the state. Indeed, [] it is important to recognize that to employ a
textualizing approach to social policy involving conflict and war is not to attempt to reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of language.
Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations governing policy thinking. And it is important to recognize that policy thinking is not unsituated (Shapiro,
1989a: 71). Policy

thinking is practical thinking since it imposes an analytic order on the real

world, a world that only exists in the analysts own narratives. In this light, Barry Posens
political role in legitimizing American hegemonic power and national security conduct seems
obvious: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War 11U.S. command of the commons provides an impressive foundation for selective
engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy. [] Command of the commons gives the United States a tremendous capability to harm others.
Marrying that capability to a conservative policy of selective engagement helps make U.S. military power appear less threatening and more tolerable. Command
of the commons creates additional collective goods for U.S. allies. These collective goods help connect U.S. military power to seemingly prosaic welfare
concerns. U.S. military power underwrites world trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial remote sensing, which all depend on peace and order
in the commons (Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points out that [d]anger

is not an objective
condition. It (sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a
threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all depends on how `ctures in the state and society
that produces it. Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has the authority
to write legitimate security discourses and conduct the policies that legitimize them. The realist
analysts and state leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the same
individuals who hold the power to securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that
frames national identity and freezes it.9 Like many concepts, realism is essentially contested. In a critical reinterpretation of realism,
James Der Derian offers a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism represented in IR: he reveals many other versions of realism that are never
mentioned in International Relations texts (Der Derian, 1995: 367). I am aware that there are many realist discourses in International Relations, but they all
share a set of assumptions, such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the main actor in international relations, states pursue power defined as a
national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism

is one way of representing reality, not the reflection of

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reality. While my aim here is not to rehearse Der Derians genealogy of realism, I do want to spell out the problems with a
positivist theory of realism and a correspondence philosophy of language. Such a philosophy
accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral description corresponds to reality. This is
precisely the problem of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American realist
theoretical discourses. And since for poststructuralists language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as constructed in these discourses
is called for. 10 These scholars cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and then use realism as the best language to reflect a self-same
phenomenon (Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist discourses in International
Relations are not useful. Rather, I want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism serve political purposes, used as they are in many think tanks
and foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders. This is the relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as used in International
Relations): it brings to light its locatedness in a hermeneutic circle in which it is unwittingly trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil
argues, [] the rejection of a correspondence theory of truth does not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism and/or to endless
deconstruction in which anything goes but it leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate competing theoretical creations (Kratochwil,
2000 : 52). Given that political

language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas formed

independently of structures of signification that sustain political action and thought, American
realist discourses belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions cannot be taken as
mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in which national
leaders and security speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a
notion of national identity as synonymous with national security . U.S. national security conduct should thus be
understood through the prism of the theoretical discourses of American political leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist discourses depict
American political leaders acting in defense of national security, and political leaders act in the name of national security. In the end, what distinguishes realist
discourses is that they depict the United States as having behaved like a national security state since World War II, while legitimating the idea that the United
States should continue to do so. Political scientists and historians are engaged in making (poesis), not merely recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17).

Precisely in this sense, rhetoric is not the description of national security conduct; it constitutes
it. It is difficult to trace the exact origins of the concept of national security. It seems however that its currency in policymaking circles corresponds to the
American experience of the Second World War and of the early years of what came to be known as the Cold War. In this light, it is fair to say that the
meaning of the American national security state is bound up with the Cold War context. If one is engaged in deciphering the meaning of the Cold War prism for
American leaders, what matters is not uncovering the reality of the Cold War as such, but how, it conferred meaning and led people to act upon it as reality.

The Cold War can thus be seen as a rhetorical construction, in which its rhetorical dimensions
gave meaning to its material manifestations, such as the national security state apparatus. This is
not to say that the Cold War never existed per se, nor does it make [it] any less real or less significant for being rhetorical (Medhurst, 2000: 6). As Lynn Boyd
Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr. stress, political

rhetoric creates political reality, structures belief systems,

and provides the fundamental bases for decisions (Hinds and Windt, cited in Medhurst, 2000: 6). In this sense, the Cold War
ceases to be a historical period which meaning can be written permanently and becomes instead a struggle that is not context-specific and not geared towards
one specific enemy. It

is an orientation towards difference in which those acting on behalf of an

assumed but never fixed identity are tempted by the lure of otherness to interpret all dangers as
fundamental threats which require the mobilization of a population (Campbell, 2000: 227). Indeed, if the
meaning of the Cold War is not context-specific, the concept of national security cannot be disconnected from what is known as the Cold War, since its very
meaning(s) emerged within it (Rosenberg, 1993 : 277).11 If the American national security state is a given for realist analysts, 12 it is important to ask whether
we can conceive the United States during the Cold War as anything other than a national security state.13 To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is any such
essentialized entity as a national security state. 14 When I refer to the American national security state, I mean the representation of the American state in the
early years of the Cold War,the spirit of which is embodied in the National Security Act of 1947 (Der Derian, 1992:76). The term national security state
designates both an institutionalization of a new governmental architecture designed to prepare the United States politically and militarily to face any foreign
threat and the ideology the discourse that gave rise to as well as symbolized it. In other words, to

understand the idea of a national

security state, one needs to grasp the discursive power of national security in shaping the reality
of the Cold War in both language and institutions (Rosenberg, 1993 : 281). A national security state feeds
on threats as it channels all its efforts into meeting current and future military or security
threats. The creation of the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council at the onset of the Cold War gave
impetus to a state mentality geared to permanent preparedness for war. The construction of threats is thus essential to its
well-being, making intelligence agencies privileged tools in accomplishing this task. As American
historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the national security state during the Truman administration, the national
security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic representation that defined Americas national identity by reference to the unAmerican other, usually the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power (Hogan, 1998: 17). Such a binary system made it difficult for any
domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have amounted to an act of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18). 15 While Hogan distinguishes advocates
from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for granted that there is a given and fixed American political culture that differs from the
new national security ideology. It posits an American way, produced by its cultural, political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that
differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial, pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan sees
the national security state as a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a
garrison state: Although government would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other

7
transformations would add up to the crushing regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The

outcome instead would be an

American national security state that was shaped as much by the countrys democratic political
culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this
essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The United States does not need to be a national security state. If it was and is still constructed as such
by many realist discourses, it is because these

discourses serve some political purpose . Moreover, in keeping with my

poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which to say is to do,
that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity of language, culture becomes a
relational site where identity politics happens rather than being a substantive phenomenon . In this
sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the conditions of possibility for social

The
Cold War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the
American national security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual complex,
being, [] the way in which culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in whose name they speak (Campbell, 1998: 221).

which were observers of, and active participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were instrumental in defining and
disseminating a Cold War culture (Rubin, 2001: 15). This

national security culture was a complex space where

various representations and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the
boundaries and dominate the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The
same Cold War security culture has been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist
analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once again
reproduces the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor inconsequential.
From a poststructuralist vantage point, the identification process of the state and the nation is always a negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence,
and marginalization. Thus, a

deconstruction of practices that constitute and consolidate state identity is

necessary: the writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that
constitute it. The state and the discourses that (re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and
impose a fictitious national unity on society; it is from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous
discourses of inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in
which the state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence a power socially constructed ,
following Max Webers work on the ethic of responsibility to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the unified Self, the national society (the
nation). 16 It is through this very practice of normative statecraft, 17 which produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David
Campbell adds that it is by constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very conditions of existence are generated 18.

Securitization creates all possibility for violence

Friis 2000
(Karaten, UN Sector at Norweigan Intitute of International Affairs, Peace and Conflict Studies, From Liminars to Others:
Securitization Through Myths, http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=2) //ACT
The problem with societal securitization is one of representation. It is rarely clear in advance who it is that speaks for a community.
There is no system of representation as in a state. Since literately anyone can stand up as representatives, there is room for entrepreneurs. It
is not surprising if we experience a struggle between different representatives and also their different representations of the society. What
they do share,

however, is a conviction that they are best at providing (a new) order. If they can do this
convincingly, they gain legitimacy. What must be done is to make the uncertain certain and make the
unknown an object of knowledge. To present a discernable Other is a way of doing this. The Other is represented as an Other
-- as an unified single actor with a similar unquestionable set of core values (i.e. the capital O). They are objectified, made into an object
of knowledge, by re-presentation of their identity and values. In other words, the representation of the Other is depoliticized in the sense that
its inner qualities are treated as given and non-negotiable. In Jef Huysmans (1998:241) words, there

is both a need for a

mediation of chaos as well as of threat. A mediation of chaos is more basic than a mediation of threat, as it implies
making chaos into a meaningful order by a convincing representation of the Self a nd its surroundings.
It is a mediation of ontological security, which means ...a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity ... by fixing social relations into a
symbolic and institutional order (Huysmans 1998:242). As he and others (like Hansen 1998:240) have pointed out, the importance of a
threat construction for political identification, is often overstated. The mediation of chaos, of being the provider of order in general, is just
as important. This may imply naming an Other but not necessarily as a threat. Such

a dichotomization implies a necessity

to get rid of all the liminars (what Huysmans calls strangers). This is because they ...connote a challenge to

8
categorizing practices through the impossibility of being categorized, and does not threaten the community, ...but the possibility
of ordering itself (Huysmans 1998:241). They are a challenge to the entrepreneur by their very existence. They confuse the dichotomy of
Self and Other and thereby the entrepreneurs mediation of chaos. As mentioned, a liminar can for instance be people of mixed ethnical
ancestry but also representations of competing world-pictures. As Eide (1998:76) notes: Over and over again we see that the liberals
within a group undergoing a mobilisation process for group conflict are the first ones to go. The liminars threaten the ontological order of
the entrepreneur by challenging his representation of Self and Other and his mediation of chaos, which ultimately undermines the
legitimacy of his policy. The liminars

may be securitized by some sort of disciplination, from suppression

of cultural symbols to ethnic cleansing and expatriation. This is a threat to the ontological order of the entrepreneur,
stemming from inside and thus repoliticizing the inside/outside dichotomy. Therefore the liminar must disappear. It must be made into a
Self, as several minority groups throughout the world have experienced, or it must be forced out of the territory. A liminar may also become
an Other, as its connection to the Self is cut and their former common culture is renounced and made insignificant. In Anne Nortons
(1988:55) words, The presence of difference in the ambiguous other leads to its classification as wholly unlike and identifies it
unqualifiedly with the archetypal other, denying the resemblance to the self. Then the liminar is no longer an ontological danger (chaos),
but what Huysmans (1998:242) calls a mediation of daily security. This is not challenging the order or the system as such but has become
a visible, clear-cut Other. In places like Bosnia, this naming and replacement of an Other, has been regarded by the securitizing actors as the
solution to the ontological problem they have posed. Securitization

was not considered a political move, in the

sense that there were any choices. It was a necessity: Securitization was a solution based on a depoliticized ontology.10 This
way the world-picture of the securitizing actor is not only a representation but also made into reality. The mythical second-order language is
made into first-order language, and its innocent reality is forced upon the world. To the

entrepreneurs and other actors

involved it has become a natural necessity with a need to make order, even if it implies
making the world match the map. Maybe that is why war against liminars are so often total; it
attempts a total expatriation or a total solution (like the Holocaust) and not only a victory on the battlefield. If the
enemy is not even considered a legitimate Other, the door may be more open to a kind of violence that is way
beyond any war conventions, any jus in bello. This way, securitizing is legitimized: The entrepreneur has succeeded both in
launching his world-view and in prescribing the necessary measures taken against it. This is possible by using the myths, by speaking on
behalf of the natural and eternal, where truth is never questioned.

The alternative is to reject the 1ACs security rhetoric

Only a critical analysis of IR can create better education and policy making
Biswas 07
(Shampa, International Relations Theorist, Millennium Journal of International Studies Dec 1st 2007,
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/36/1/117.full.pdf+html) //ACT

One of the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush administration has been a significant
constriction of a democratic public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive
curtailment of intellectual and political dissent and a sharp delineation of national boundaries
along with concentration of state power. The academy in this context has become a particularly
embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts on academic freedom. At the most obvious level,
this has involved fairly well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher education that
have invoked the mantra of liberal bias and demanded legislative regulation and reform10, an onslaught supported by a
well-funded network of conservative think tanks, centres, institutes and concerned citizen groups within and outside the higher education
establishment11 and with considerable reach among sitting legislators, jurists and policy-makers as well as the media. But

what has
in part made possible the encroachment of such nationalist and statist agendas has been a
larger history of the corporatisation of the university and the accompanying
professionalisation that goes with it. Expressing concern with academic acquiescence in the
decline of public discourse in the United States, Herbert Reid has examined the ways in which
the university is beginning to operate as another transnational corporation12, and critiqued the
consolidation of a culture of professionalism where academic bureaucrats engage in
bureaucratic role-playing, minor academic turf battles mask the larger managerial power play
on campuses and the increasing influence of a relatively autonomous administrative elite and
the rise of insular expert cultures have led to academics relinquishing their claims to public

9
space and authority.13 While it is no surprise that the US academy should find itself too at that uneasy
confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the
predicament of many contemporary institutions around the world, there is much reason for
concern and an urgent need to rethink the role and place of intellectual labour in the
democratic process. This is especially true for scholars of the global writing in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said
has written extensively on the place of the academy as one of the few and increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and
argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured from the seductions of power.14 Defending the US academy as one of the last
remaining utopian spaces, the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale
exists anywhere else in the world today15, and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many academic
intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains that the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable
diversity, has defanged (intellectuals)16. The most serious threat to the intellectual vocation, he argues, is professionalism and mounts a
pointed attack on the proliferation of specializations and the cult of expertise with their focus on relatively narrow areas of knowledge,
technical formalism, impersonal theories and methodologies, and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by
power. 17 Said

mentions in this context the funding of academic programmes and research which
came out of the exigencies of the Cold War18, an area in which there was considerable traffic of
political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with institutions of
policy-making. Looking at various influential US academics as organic intellectuals involved in a dialectical relationship with
foreign policy-makers and examining the institutional relationships at and among numerous think tanks and universities that create
convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World both during and after the Cold
War made possible and justified through various forms of intellectual articulation.19 This

is not simply a matter of

scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual orientation. It is not
uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their scholarly conclusions in terms of
its relevance for global politics, where relevance is measured entirely in terms of policy
wisdom. Edward Saids searing indictment of US intellectuals policy-experts and Middle East experts - in the context of the first Gulf
War20 is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context preceding and following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The space for a
critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct of this war has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national debate
wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic for or against and costs and benefits analysis can simply not be raised.
In effect, what Said argues for, and IR

scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an understanding of

intellectual relevance that is larger and more worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical,
historical, ethical and perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering of recipes and
solutions , that is about politics (rather than techno-expertise) in the most fundamental and
important senses of the vocation.21 It is not surprising that the cult of expertise that is increasingly driving the study of
global politics has occurred in conjunction with a larger depoliticisation of many facets of global politics, which since the 1980s has
accompanied a more general prosperity-bred complacency about politics in the Anglo-European world, particularly in the US. There are
many examples of this. It is evident, for instance, in the understanding of globalisation as TINA market-driven rationality inevitable,
inexorable and ultimately, as Thomas Friedmans many writings boldly proclaim, apolitical.22 If development was always the anti-politics
machine that James Ferguson so brilliantly adumbrated more than a decade ago, it is now seen almost entirely as technocratic aid and/or
charitable humanitarianism delivered via professionalised bureaucracies, whether they are IGOs or INGOs.23 From the more expansive
environmental and feminist-inspired understandings of human security, understandings of global security are once again increasingly
being reduced to (military) strategy and global democratisation to technical recipes for regime change and good governance. There
should be little surprise in such a context that the war on terror has translated into a depoliticised response to a dehistoricised
understanding of the roots of terror. For

IR scholars, reclaiming politics is a task that will involve working

against the grain of expertise-oriented professionalism in a world that increasingly understands
its own workings in apolitical terms. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and
conduct of this war has been considerably diminished by the expertise-framed national debate
wherein certain kinds of ethical questions irreducible to formulaic for or against and costs
and benefits analysis can simply not be raised.

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2NC

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Links

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Economy
Economics expands security threats to marketsthe desire to achieve economic
security authorizes wars to protect world systems of capital.
Lipschutz 98
(Ronnie D, Professor, Department of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, "Negotiating the Boundaries of Difference and Security at
Millennium's End" ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz18.html)
Today, a similar set of circumstances, brought on by economic globalization, seems to be developing and imposing costs and risks on the
very people it is intended to benefit. In this context, talk of "economic

security" becomes, once again, a speech act that

seeks to legitimate a policy that promises very real insecurity for many . The market is a place full of risks,
and only those who are willing to take risks in the market are likely to reap great benefits; given the logic of the market, these same
individuals also risk bankruptcy and personal economic insecurity (an outcome only too evident in Orange County California's declaration
of bankruptcy and Mexico's economic travails). Indeed, as Beverly Crawford's chapter seems to suggest, in

a world of economic
globalism, in which states must collaborate to foster global capitalism, and the processes of production, consumption, and accumulation
become decoupled from individual states, it becomes more and more difficult to constitute an Other that might
be transformed into a threatening enemy, thereby legitimating the differential degrees of
personal and national security awarded by the market. We have seen some feeble efforts, based on notions of
economic competitiveness and technological innovation, and given illustration in Michael Crichton's xenophobic and misogynistic Rising
Sun , but these seem not to be very persuasive. A few argue that we (the United States) must become more like the Other (Japan) if we are
to be made secure. 16 How different this is from the world(s) of Morgenthau and Waltz! Business and capital are only too aware of this
paradox, whereas the world of states and military power seems blissfully oblivious to it. For capital, there are no enemies, only competitors;
indeed, the market, while competitive, is a realm of cooperation, not conflict, as is often assumed. 17 Markets are rule-governed institutions
and, to get along, you must go along. In the marketplace, nonexclusive identities are prized, not shunned, and multiple identities are
encouraged in the name of consumer taste and "autonomy." This world is, as Kenichi Ohmae puts it, truly "borderless." 18 Not only are
there no borders between countries, there are no borders between market and consumer, either. What can security possibly mean in such a
world? Not everyone is, of course, a participant in the market; indeed, there are billions of people and dozens of countries that are not. In

spite of warnings about instability as the "enemy," these people and "states" are neither
enemies nor threats to us in either an objective or intersubjective sense. Rather, the places in which many of them are found are
more akin to realms constituted or consumed by chaos. The inhabitants of these zone participate in neither statist politics nor global markets
as we understand them, not so much out of choice or desire as out of the logic of economic globalization driven by capitalism and the
industrial coalition. But these

zones of chaos are not just places "outside" of space or time; paradoxically, perhaps,
they are sites of political experimentation, from which are emerging "world systems" that, if
successful, could ultimately undermine the relative orderliness of the peaceful zones of the
industrial coalition.

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Environment
Environmental conflict is linked to security concerns
Detraz 11
[Nicole: International Relations, University of Memphis "Threats or Vulnerabilities?" August 2011,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/global_environmental_politics/v011/11.3.detraz.html, CL]

The environmental conflict discourse links the environment and environmental problems to
traditional security concerns, including a general concern for state security. Most authors who use an environmental
conflict discourse focus on the possibility that groups within society will engage in violent conflict over natural
resources. These conflicts can be the product of scarcity13, abundance14, or dependence15 on natural
resources and are typically understood to threaten the stability of the state. The primary challenge is to
identify those most immediately at risk of conflict and design policy interventions to avoid conflict and ensure
state stability. This is largely understood to be the responsibility of state institutions. Due to the sense of
urgency embedded in this discourse, policies are likely to be aimed at short-term adaptation
strategies as a means of avoiding violent conflict. The environmental security discourse is
concerned with the negative impacts of environmental degradation for human beings. While
environmental conflict is largely state-centric and can still directly be linked to military security, environmental security is much more
closely linked to notions of security at an individual level, or human security.16 It

is important to note, however, that the

concerns embedded in environmental security are more specific than the general concept of human
security, which can refer to anything that negatively impacts the safety and survival of humans. In
this discourse, the threat is located in negative consequences of environmental damage and those
who are vulnerable are all human beings.17 This concept of human vulnerability is widely used in general discussions
of global environmental change, and climate change in particular.18 According to Gaillard, much of the literature on vulnerability
focuses on "the susceptibility to suffer damage in a potentially dangerous event, either natural, economic or political." 19 In the
context of these debates, vulnerability

stresses the condition of humans being susceptible to individual

and collective harm because of environmental change.

Environment destruction rhetoric uses Cold War thinking and justifies violence and
structural violence
Franke 04
(Volker, McDaniel College of Swag, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological Politics and
Policy in the New Security Era Sage Publications, 2004, p.155-157, pdf) //ACT
The title of Jon Barnetts book The Meaning of Environmental Security suggests an effort to tackle one of the issuesenvironmental
degradationwhose importance had been masked by Cold War-era concerns over nuclear war and the spread of communism. But Barnetts
book does much more than that. It provides a piercing critique of the traditional security

discourse that convincingly

shows how conventional (Cold War) thinking obscures both the causes and consequences of
environmental degradation and its effects on human security. While environmental security has traditionally
focused on conflict over scarce resources and its prevention at the state level, Barnett provides readers with an alternative way to
conceptualize security based on environmental justice and peaceful methods for resolving social and political inequities. Although Barnetts
book is specifically about environmental security, its greatest benefit lies in the fact that its human-centered

approach to
conflict resolution can serve as a useful frame for addressing the security needs of people in
other areas in the twenty-first century. Barnetts attempt to place lived experiences of real people at the heart of his
reformulated conception of environmental security provides a constructive extension of many purely theoretical attempts to reframe security
after the Cold War. Barnett provides a succinct outline of both traditional and critical approaches to environmental security and very
effectively deconstructs how traditionalists have misidentified the security needs of the twentyfirst century. Environmental

insecurity has traditionally been defined either in terms of threats to national security that arise
directly from environmental degradation, or in terms of the human impacts on the security of
the environment itself (ecological security). Barnett discusses each of these understandings in detail and points to their

14
respective shortcomings. Those shortcomings lead him to advocate a third approach, namely to understand environmental security in terms
of the ways in which environmental degradation threatens the security of people. For Barnett, environmental

degradation and
insecurity are a product of the structural inequalities inherent in the
development/underdevelopment dynamic. Environmental insecurity, or the vulnerability of
people to the effects of environmental degradation (p. 17), is caused either by resource scarcities
or by the overloading of planetary sinks (i.e., the accumulation of wastes emitted from dispersed sources combined with
the biospheres decreased capacity to absorb these wastes). Defined this way, environmental insecurity becomes a social problem that is
magnified by globalization and modern consumption patterns. Barnett explains that this overconsumption and lack of redistribution
produces a double insecurity whereby longstanding vulnerabilities arising from underdevelopment and impoverishment are compounded by
an intensifying suite of risks associated with environmental degradation (p. 20). Using many concrete examples, Barnett convincingly
illustrates that while environmental

insecurity is a problem of adaptation for the developed

industrialized West, in the underdeveloped parts of the world it is a matter of life and death
(p. 21). Following his description of the security problems that await us in the twenty-first century, Barnett discusses traditional conceptions
of security as the constitutive principle of the modern nation-state as found in classical Realist theories of security. He

summarizes a
number of the commonly voiced criticisms against this conception, from conceptualizing
security solely in terms of military power to the poststructuralist critique that for all the
emphasis placed on the integrity of nation-state, there is a general absence of theorization about
the nation state itself (p. 29). Expectedly, this analysis leads to a discussion of the securitization of
others (i.e., the identification of others who threaten the cohesion of the nation-state, thereby legitimizing extreme measuressuch as
the use of force against outsiders, surveillance tactics, and control of political activity within the statetaken to ensure national survival). In
this context, Barnett carefully examines the

thesis that environmental degradation will lead to violent

conflict and concludes that it commonly serves to justify existing institutions and traditional
methods of conflict resolution. The thesis, Barnett argues, assumes that people in the South will resort to violence in times of
resource scarcity. Consequently, it legitimizes the ethnocentric juxtaposition of the barbaric, primeval other against the civilized self, thus
justifying attempts by the North to maintain order. One of the highlights of the book is certainly chapter 6.

15

Generic
The 1AC creates a never ending chain of threats, creating a sense of inevitable
securitization of internal relations. We must attempt to reject forms of security
rhetoric
Grondin 04
(David, Assistant Professor, Member of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Ph.D., Political Science
(International Relations and American Studies), Universit du Qubec Montral, Montral, 2008. M.A.,
International Relations, University of Toronto, Toronto, 2001. B.A., American History, Universit du Qubec
Montral, Montral, 2000. Rethinking the political from a Poststructualist Stance
http://www.ieim.uqam.ca/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf) //ACT

Neorealist and neoclassical realism offer themselves up as a narrative of the world institutional
order. Critical approaches must therefore seek to countermemorialize those whose lives and
voices have been variously silenced in the process of strategic practices (Klein, 1994: 28). The
problem, as revealed in the debate between gatekeepers of the subfield of Strategic Studies
(Walt, 1991), is that those analyses that contravene the dominant discourse are deemed
insignificant by virtue of their differing ontological and epistemological foundations.
Approaches that deconstruct theoretical practices in order to disclose what is hidden in the use
of concepts such as national security have something valuable to say. Their more reflexive
and critically-inclined view illustrates how terms used in realist discourses, such as state,
anarchy, world order, revolution in military affairs, and security dilemmas, are produced by a
specific historical, geographical and socio-political context as well as historical forces and social
relations of power (Klein, 1994: 22). Since realist analysts do not question their ontology and yet
purport to provide a neutral and objective analysis of a given world order based on military
power and interactions between the most important political units, namely states, realist
discourses constitute a political act in defense of the state. Indeed, [] it is important to recognize that to employ a
textualizing approach to social policy involving conflict and war is not to attempt to reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of language.
Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations governing policy thinking. And it is important to recognize that policy thinking is not unsituated (Shapiro,
1989a: 71). Policy

thinking is practical thinking since it imposes an analytic order on the real

world, a world that only exists in the analysts own narratives. In this light, Barry Posens
political role in legitimizing American hegemonic power and national security conduct seems
obvious: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War 11U.S. command of the commons provides an impressive foundation for selective
engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy. [] Command of the commons gives the United States a tremendous capability to harm others.
Marrying that capability to a conservative policy of selective engagement helps make U.S. military power appear less threatening and more tolerable. Command
of the commons creates additional collective goods for U.S. allies. These collective goods help connect U.S. military power to seemingly prosaic welfare
concerns. U.S. military power underwrites world trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial remote sensing, which all depend on peace and order
in the commons (Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points out that [d]anger

is not an objective
condition. It (sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a
threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all depends on how `ctures in the state and society
that produces it. Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has the authority
to write legitimate security discourses and conduct the policies that legitimize them. The realist
analysts and state leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the same
individuals who hold the power to securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that
frames national identity and freezes it.9 Like many concepts, realism is essentially contested. In a critical reinterpretation of realism,
James Der Derian offers a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism represented in IR: he reveals many other versions of realism that are never
mentioned in International Relations texts (Der Derian, 1995: 367). I am aware that there are many realist discourses in International Relations, but they all
share a set of assumptions, such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the main actor in international relations, states pursue power defined as a
national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism

is one way of representing reality, not the reflection of

reality. While my aim here is not to rehearse Der Derians genealogy of realism, I do want to spell out the problems with a

16
positivist theory of realism and a correspondence philosophy of language. Such a philosophy
accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral description corresponds to reality. This is
precisely the problem of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American realist
theoretical discourses. And since for poststructuralists language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as constructed in these discourses
is called for. 10 These scholars cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and then use realism as the best language to reflect a self-same
phenomenon (Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist discourses in International
Relations are not useful. Rather, I want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism serve political purposes, used as they are in many think tanks
and foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders. This is the relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as used in International
Relations): it brings to light its locatedness in a hermeneutic circle in which it is unwittingly trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil
argues, [] the rejection of a correspondence theory of truth does not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism and/or to endless
deconstruction in which anything goes but it leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate competing theoretical creations (Kratochwil,
2000 : 52). Given that political

language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas formed

independently of structures of signification that sustain political action and thought, American
realist discourses belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions cannot be taken as
mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in which national
leaders and security speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a
notion of national identity as synonymous with national security . U.S. national security conduct should thus be
understood through the prism of the theoretical discourses of American political leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist discourses depict
American political leaders acting in defense of national security, and political leaders act in the name of national security. In the end, what distinguishes realist
discourses is that they depict the United States as having behaved like a national security state since World War II, while legitimating the idea that the United
States should continue to do so. Political scientists and historians are engaged in making (poesis), not merely recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17).

Precisely in this sense, rhetoric is not the description of national security conduct; it constitutes
it. It is difficult to trace the exact origins of the concept of national security. It seems however that its currency in policymaking circles corresponds to the
American experience of the Second World War and of the early years of what came to be known as the Cold War. In this light, it is fair to say that the
meaning of the American national security state is bound up with the Cold War context. If one is engaged in deciphering the meaning of the Cold War prism for
American leaders, what matters is not uncovering the reality of the Cold War as such, but how, it conferred meaning and led people to act upon it as reality.

The Cold War can thus be seen as a rhetorical construction, in which its rhetorical dimensions
gave meaning to its material manifestations, such as the national security state apparatus. This is
not to say that the Cold War never existed per se, nor does it make [it] any less real or less significant for being rhetorical (Medhurst, 2000: 6). As Lynn Boyd
Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr. stress, political

rhetoric creates political reality, structures belief systems,

and provides the fundamental bases for decisions (Hinds and Windt, cited in Medhurst, 2000: 6). In this sense, the Cold War
ceases to be a historical period which meaning can be written permanently and becomes instead a struggle that is not context-specific and not geared towards
one specific enemy. It

is an orientation towards difference in which those acting on behalf of an

assumed but never fixed identity are tempted by the lure of otherness to interpret all dangers as
fundamental threats which require the mobilization of a population (Campbell, 2000: 227). Indeed, if the
meaning of the Cold War is not context-specific, the concept of national security cannot be disconnected from what is known as the Cold War, since its very
meaning(s) emerged within it (Rosenberg, 1993 : 277).11 If the American national security state is a given for realist analysts, 12 it is important to ask whether
we can conceive the United States during the Cold War as anything other than a national security state.13 To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is any such
essentialized entity as a national security state. 14 When I refer to the American national security state, I mean the representation of the American state in the
early years of the Cold War,the spirit of which is embodied in the National Security Act of 1947 (Der Derian, 1992:76). The term national security state
designates both an institutionalization of a new governmental architecture designed to prepare the United States politically and militarily to face any foreign
threat and the ideology the discourse that gave rise to as well as symbolized it. In other words, to

understand the idea of a national

security state, one needs to grasp the discursive power of national security in shaping the reality
of the Cold War in both language and institutions (Rosenberg, 1993 : 281). A national security state feeds
on threats as it channels all its efforts into meeting current and future military or security
threats. The creation of the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council at the onset of the Cold War gave
impetus to a state mentality geared to permanent preparedness for war. The construction of threats is thus essential to its
well-being, making intelligence agencies privileged tools in accomplishing this task. As American
historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the national security state during the Truman administration, the national
security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic representation that defined Americas national identity by reference to the unAmerican other, usually the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power (Hogan, 1998: 17). Such a binary system made it difficult for any
domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have amounted to an act of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18). 15 While Hogan distinguishes advocates
from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for granted that there is a given and fixed American political culture that differs from the
new national security ideology. It posits an American way, produced by its cultural, political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that
differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial, pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan sees
the national security state as a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a
garrison state: Although government would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other
transformations would add up to the crushing regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The

outcome instead would be an

17
American national security state that was shaped as much by the countrys democratic political
culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this
essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The United States does not need to be a national security state. If it was and is still constructed as such
by many realist discourses, it is because these

discourses serve some political purpose . Moreover, in keeping with my

a scheme in which to say is to do,
that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity of language, culture becomes a
relational site where identity politics happens rather than being a substantive phenomenon . In this
poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In

sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the conditions of possibility for social

The
Cold War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the
American national security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual complex,
being, [] the way in which culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in whose name they speak (Campbell, 1998: 221).

which were observers of, and active participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were instrumental in defining and
disseminating a Cold War culture (Rubin, 2001: 15). This

national security culture was a complex space where

various representations and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the
boundaries and dominate the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The
same Cold War security culture has been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist
analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once again
reproduces the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor inconsequential.
From a poststructuralist vantage point, the identification process of the state and the nation is always a negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence,
and marginalization. Thus, a

deconstruction of practices that constitute and consolidate state identity is

necessary: the writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that
constitute it. The state and the discourses that (re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and
impose a fictitious national unity on society; it is from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous
discourses of inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in
which the state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence a power socially constructed ,
following Max Webers work on the ethic of responsibility to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the unified Self, the national society (the
nation). 16 It is through this very practice of normative statecraft, 17 which produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David
Campbell adds that it is by constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very conditions of existence are generated 18.

18

Hegemony
Primacy discourse ascribes fear to potential challengersmilitarized responses and
war are inevitable with balance-of-power policies.
Campbell 98
(David, Campbell, professor International Politics at University of New Castle, "Writing Security; United States Foreign Policy
the Politics of Identity" p. 31-33)
Most important just as the source of danger has never been fixed, neither has the identity that it was said to threaten. The contours of this
identity have been the subject of constant (re)writing; no rewriting in the sense of changing the meaning, but rewriting in the sense of
inscribing something so that which is contingent and subject to flux is rendered more permanent. While one might have expected few if any

references to national values or purposes in confidential prepared for the inner sanctum of national security
policy (after all, don't they know who they are or what they represent?) the texts of foreign policy are replete with statements about the
fulfillment of the republic, the fundamental purpose of the nation, God given rights, moral codes, the principles of European civilization, the
fear of cultural and spiritual loss, and the responsibilities and duties thrust upon the gleaming example of America. In this sense, the texts
that guided national security policy did

more than simply offer strategic analysis of the "reality" they confronted:
they actively concerned themselves with the scripting of a particular American identity . Stamped "Top
Secret" and read by only the select and power few, the texts effaced the boundary between inside and outside with their quasi-Puritan
figurations. In employing this mode of representation, the foreign policy texts of the postwar period recalled the seventeenth-century literary
genre of the jeremiad, or political sermon, in which Puritan preachers combined searing critiques with appeals for spiritual renewal. Later to
establish the interpretive framework for national identity, these exhortations drew on a European tradition of preaching the omnipresence of
sin so as to instill the desire for order but they added a distinctly affirmative moment: The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of a
culture on an errand - which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process. Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old War
ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless
"progressivist" energies required for the success of the venture. The European jeremiad thrived on anxiety, of course. Like all
"Traditionalist" forms of ritual, it used fear and trembling to teach acceptance of fixed social norms. But the American jeremiad went much
further. It made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand after all,
implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide
the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Whereas the Puritan jeremiads were preached b y religious figures in public, the
national security planners entreated in private the urgency of the manifold dangers confronting the republic. But the refrains of their
political sermons have occupied a prominent place in postwar political discourse. On two separate occasions (first in 1950, and t hen in
196), private citizens with close ties to the foreign policy bureaucracy established a "Committee on the Present Danger" to alert a public
they perceived as lacking resolve and will to necessity of confronting the political and military threat of communism and the Society Union.
More recently, with Pentagon planners concerned about the "guerillas, assassins, terrorists, and subversives" said to be "nibbling away" at
the United States, proclamations that the fundamental values of the country are under threat have been no less insistent. As Oliver North
announced to the U.S. Congress: "It is very important for the American people to know that this is a dangerous world; that we live at risk
and that this nation is at risk in a dangerous world." And in a State Department report, the 1990s were foreshadowed as an era in which
divergent political critiques nonetheless would seek equally to overcome the "corruption" and "profligacy" induced by the "loss" of
"American purpose" in Vietnam the "moral renewal." To this end, the rendering of Operation Desert Shield-turn-Storm as an overwhelming
exhibition of America's rediscovered mission stands as testament. The cold war, then , was both a struggle that exceeded the military threat
of the Soviet Union and a struggle into which any number of potential candidates, regardless of their strategic capacity, were slotted as a
threat. In this sense, the collapse, overcoming, or surrender of one of the protagonists at this historical junction does not mean "it" is over.
The cold war's meaning will undoubtedly change, but if we recall that the phrase cold war was coined by a fourteenth century Spanish
writer to represent the persistent rivalry between Christians and Arabs, we come to recognize that the sort of struggle the phrase demotes is
a struggle over identity: a struggle that is no context-specific and thus not rooted in the existence of a particular kind of Soviet Union.
Besides, the United States-led war against Iraq should caution us to the fact that the Western (and particularly American) interpretive
dispositions that predominated in the post-World War II international environment - with

their zero-sum analyses of

international action, the sense of endangerment ascribed to all the activities of the other, the
fear of internal challenge and subversion, the tendency to militarize all response, and the
willingness to draw the lines of superiority/inferiority between us and them - were not specific to one
state or ideology. As a consequence, we need to rethink the convention understanding of foreign
policy, and the historicity of the cold war in particular.

19

Humanitarianism
Humanitarianism used by the aff has become synonymous with military actions and
must be questioned
Dillon & Reid 2000
(Michael, Julian, researches politics, security and war & PhD in Politics, Global Governance, Liberal
Peace, and Complex Emergency Sage Publications, Jan 2000, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644986)//AT
Liberal humanitarians have, for example, become politicized, geopolitically ambitious, and sometimes
warlike in pursuit of lib- eral peace. They have also found themselves in alliance with the institutions
of international political economy and governance as well as with branches of the military . Increasingly, the policies and
practices of "political conditionally" are also suborning them. Deals and contracts have inevitably to be struck
with local political groupings in order that aid might be delivered to the needful in areas of political turbulence. Political
conditionality is, however, more than this local pragmatism. At a policy level, it refers to the ways in which
government and international-aid agencies are in- creasingly making the delivery of aid
conditional on the recipients meeting the good governance criteria that global liberal politics
specifies for them. At a local level, it means calibrating the deliv- ery of aid to effect the internal politics and maneuvering of warring groups so that political settlements sought by international coalitions - such as the one, for example, that currently manages Bosnia might be secured. In

order both for policy-level practices and local political arm twisting to work,
governments and inter- national organizations must secure the compliance of the large number
of nongovernmental organizations that populate the zones of "complex emergency." These of course
provide many sig- nificant conduits for aid. The vast majority of them are, however, effectively the subcontractors of governmental
organizations and of international agencies. Their prized independence is problem- atic, and their classification as nongovernmental is
sometimes equally so. Effecting political conditionality requires their participation. To the extent, however, that they

comply - and
their very capacity to resource themselves and operate may be intimately de- pendent upon
their good standing with these governmental and international agencies - their "impartiality"
and humanitarian ideals are compromised. In such circumstances, they run the deadly risk of becoming
identified as active participants in conflicts rather than impartial ministers to the needy and
afflicted that are created by them. But many NGOs are not mere passive victims of this develop- ment, as it were, squeezed
by the demands of political condition- ality. They themselves also actively promote political conditionally
inasmuch as they, too, pursue a liberal agenda of promoting human rights, accountability, and
the formations and practices of civil society. In this, then, they are willing allies of political conditionality rather than suborned humanitarians. The distinction between the political and the humanitarian that has
created the space for humanitarian action is often thus conflated by the actions and ambitions of NGOs as much as it is by the goodgovernance policies and political conditionality pursued by governments. Needless to add, the

distinction between civil and

military that helps underwrite the category humanitarian is one that has also been conflated by
the theory and practice of modern war. Much is made of the ways in which the insurgency and coun- terinsurgency
conflicts and ethnic violence of the developing world do this. But the process began in the developed world - with the introduction, for
example, of total war, strategic bombing, the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, and the adoption of (nuclear) deterrent strategies.

bipolarity once
allowed subscription to the liberal dis- tinctions of civil/military, humanitarian/political, and
governmental/nongovernmental to effect a "humanitarian" position that eschewed the political
realism of the ideological conflict of the Cold War. Humanitarianism claimed then to be a space that was itself a kind
Some of these continue to deter- mine the formulation of official defense and strategic policies there. In sum,

of zone of indistinction. That is to say, here relief was on offer irrespective of religious, political, or other distinctions. The advent of global
liberal governance now represents the official propagation, however, of such distinctions, together with their al- lied governmental practices
and institutions. These have become one of the principle means by which global power currently cir- culates and operates. In doing so,
global liberal governance quite literally threatens nongovernmental and humanitarian agencies with recruitment into the very structures and
practices of power against which they previously defined themselves. Where once they practiced and enjoyed the space afforded by the
claim that they were without power - specifically, power politics - it is evident now that they are not. Major nongovernmental

humanitarian relief and development agencies are often also structured more like and operate
more like multinational corporations than voluntary workers. Their spokesmen and women act

20
and sound like the se- nior international diplomats and policymakers that they are. As hu- manitarian
NGOs increasingly devote themselves to the promotion of liberal governmental policies - for example those of trans- parency and
accountability - they,

too, have to meet penetrating questions about the legitimacy, accountability,

and transparency of their own practices. Doing good, especially by insisting on follow- ing the Hippocratic injunction to
do no harm - the classic gov- ernmental maneuver of effecting power by denying one's own po- liticality - is a fiction now increasingly
difficult to sustain in the context of global liberal governance.

21

Terrorism
Terrorism discourse masks state violence and represents the legitimation of the
international security crisis.
Der Derian 1995
(James Der Derian, Director of the Global Security Program and Research Professor of International Studies at the
Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Arms, Hostages, and the Importance of Shredding
in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture)
Just as Nietzsche alleged the precession of meaning to facts, North-the factotum of terror and counter-terror-preceded the factoids of
terrorism. To be sure, there are some commonly accepted "facts" about international terrorism. A selection of Rand corporation documents
on international terrorism reveals the following: over the last ten years terrorists have seized over fifty embassies and consulates, held the
oil ministers of eleven states hostage; kidnapped hundreds of diplomats, businessmen and journalists; made several hundred million dollars
in ransom money; assassinated Lord Mountbatten and President Sadat and the former premier of Italy, attempted to assassinate the president
of France, the Pope, and Alexander Haig (a near miss with a rocket launcher when he was supreme allied commander of NATO).

Terrorist incidents and their severity have increased over the last ten years, but most terrorist actions involve
few or no casualties: they are symbolic acts of violence. Compared to the ruthlessness and
destructiveness of states, or even to natural disasters, terrorism is a mere nuisance. Yet it is cause for crises of state,
media spasms on a seismic scale, and the hyper-production of institutes, conferences, and books on terrorism. Why is this? International
terrorism does represent a crisis, but not in terms of body-counts or a revolutionary threat to the states-system. On a political level, the

simulacrum of terrorism, that is, the production of a hyperreal threat of violence, anticipates a
crisis of legitimation.9 What this means is that international terrorism is not a symptom or a cause or an
effect of this systemic crisis: it has become a spectacular, micro-cosmic simulation. International
terrorism simulates a legitimating crisis of the international order ; conversely, counter-terrorism is a countersimulation, an attempt to engender a new disciplinary order which can save the dominant legitimacy principle of international relations.10O
n a representational level, the spectacle of terrorism displace-and distracts us from-the signs of a pervading international disorder. As a
result, much

of what is read and written of terrorism displays a superficiality of reasoning and a

corruption of language which effects truths about terrorism without any sense of how these
truths are produced by, and help to sustain official discourses of international relations. This was repeatedly evidenced by the
proceedings and documents of the Iran-contra hearings, in which our reason of state was exposed as ideological expediency and redressed
as principled policy. If the reader of terrorism is to break out of the dominant cultural economy, in which each of us acts as a factotum of
factoids, that is, a transmitter of official truths, then some critical interpretive skills must be deployed. Along with an empirical study of the
salient sources of disorder around us, we need a genealogy of our knowledge of international terrorism and legitimacy, of how consumers in
this cultural economy arrive at some shared assumptions about the exchange-value of both. One

goal, then, of a cultural reading is to

reach a better under-standing of whether these assumptions or constructions of terrorism and
legitimation serve to preserve principles and practices beneficial to the international order, or
whether they forestall the knowledge necessary to deal effectively with an increasing
fragmentation, a diffusion of power, and a sustained challenge to the sovereign state's once-natural monopoly of force: in short, the
neo-medievalism alluded to earlier.

Threats cannot be calculated objectively or holistically threats are based upon

arbitrary calculations of danger. The risk of terrorism is based upon false
calculations its occurrence is minimal.
Campbell 92
[David: Australian political scientist, written four books, PhD from Australian National University, and has been a professor at
several universities. Writing Security University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis p. 2]
This understanding

of the necessarily interpretive basis of risk has important implications for

international relations. It does not deny that there are 'real' dangers in the world: infectious diseases, accidents, and political
violence (among other factors) have consequences that can literally be understood in terms of life and death. But not all risks are
equal, and not all risks are interpreted as dangers. Modern society contains within it a veritable
cornucopia of danger; indeed, there is such an abundance of risk that it is impossible to objectively know all
that threatens us.3 Those events or factors which we identify as dangerous therefore come to be

22
ascribed as such only through an interpretation of their various dimensions of dangerousness.
Moreover, that process of interpretation does not depend upon the incidence of 'objective' factors for its veracity.
For example, HIV infection is considered by many to be America's major public health issue, yet pneumonia and influenza, diabetes,
suicide, and chronic liver disease were all (in 1987) individually responsible for many more deaths.4 Equally, an interpretation of danger
has licensed a 'war on (illegal) drugs' in the United States despite the fact that both the consumption level of, and the number of deaths
which result from, licit drugs exceeds by a considerable order of magnitude that associated with illicit drugs. And 'terrorism'

is
often cited as a major threat to national security even though its occurrence within the United
States is minimal (seven incidents without fatalities in 1985 according to the FBI) and its
contribution to international carnage minor

23

War
The affirmatives description of war as an ever-present threat fosters a crisis-based
politics that actively creates an unethical relationship with militarism that creates
error replication which makes violence inevitable.
Cuomo 96
(CHRIS J. CUOMO is assistant professor of philosophy and womens studies at the University of Cincinnati. She teaches courses
in ethics, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, environmental ethics, and lesbian and gay studies, fall 1996)

Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or
address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women. on people living in occupied
territories. on members of military institutions. and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways

military practices and institutions help construct aendered and national identity. and
because the.- justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during
peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an
extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant
presence of militarism, declared wars. and other closely related social phenomena. such as nationalistic glorifications of
motherhood. media violence. and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that
do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric
of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to
resist oppression and create alternative social and political options. crisis- based ethics and politics are problematic
because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed.
omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives.
Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared
armed conflicts is peace. the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by
the safety of privilege. and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism. to maintain this false belief.
The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict. creates
forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then
mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs. or when the stability of privilege is directly
threatened. and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all
other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep
resisters complacent about and complicitous in the General presence of global militarism. Seeing war as
necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific.
state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time. and that it is perpetrated
by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state .
because

24

Warming
Global Warming is not currently a securitized threat; however the 1AC speech act
causes the securitization of warming
Buzan & Waever 10
(Barry, Ole, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security Cambridge, p.465-466, April 2010,
http://blogriobranco.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/buzan.pdf) //ACT

Global warming It is an illusion (a nice sounding but ultimately false slogan) that environmental problems
generally are global, that they show the limits of the nation-state because they respect no
frontiers. Most environmental problems are heavily shaped by geography, and are often local
(e.g., a polluted lake, river, or piece of land) or at most regional (air pollution drifting across borders but not across the globe). A few
very high-profile cases of securitised environmental issues are global or at least transregional: the
depletion of the ozone layer and global warming (climate change). These are global in the sense that they are
responded to by negotiations among all states where all become more or less dependent on each other. In another sense, global warming is
interesting for producing distinct subgroups with shared interests and mutual dependence but along non-regional lines (yet shaped by
geography): e.g., AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, is a group of states with shared interests they would more or less disappear
with rising sea levels, but they are spread across the globe. As yet, however, and despite considerable help from Hollywood, global warming
and other global

environmental threats (such as asteroids and comets crashing into the earth) have not been
successfully securitised. They are certainly on the political agenda, but are not yet widely seen
as first-priority existential threats demanding emergency action . Transnational organised crime Although
transnational drugs mafias have a long history, organised crime has in recent years taken increasingly international shape. Much of this is
regional because it takes a network character, andmuchof its business is land-based, such as smuggling drugs, people, or arms across
borders, and therefore distance matters this is ceteris paribus easier over short than long distances. Accordingly, right after the fall of
communism, the Russian mafia started challenging the Italian in much of Europe, only to be followed by Albanians stronger on the crucial
capital in this business: ruthlessness. A decade later, however, the scene is gradually shifting from a regional set-up to an increasingly global
one, where the Japanese and Chinese organisations penetrate Europe, and various kinds of smuggling (of drugs, migrants, women, guns)
and money laundering take on a more global scale. Transnational crime is substantially deterritorialised but, although it has achieved
standing as a political issue, it is not yet generally securitised (Shelley 1995; Viano 1999; Mandel 1999; Williams 2001) in this global
respect. In analyses of particularly troubled (sub)regions like the Andean and the Balkans, it has become increasingly common to point to
organised crime as a key security problem (Corpora 2002; Hansen 2002), but then again it is on a (sub)regional scale, not global.

25

Impacts

26

Violence
Securitization creates all possibility for violence
Friis 2000
(Karaten, UN Sector at Norweigan Intitute of International Affairs, Peace and Conflict Studies, From Liminars to Others:
Securitization Through Myths, http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=2) //ACT
The problem with societal securitization is one of representation. It is rarely clear in advance who it is that speaks for a community.
There is no system of representation as in a state. Since literately anyone can stand up as representatives, there is room for entrepreneurs. It
is not surprising if we experience a struggle between different representatives and also their different representations of the society. What
they do share,

however, is a conviction that they are best at providing (a new) order. If they can do this
must be done is to make the uncertain certain and make the
unknown an object of knowledge. To present a discernable Other is a way of doing this. The Other is represented as an Other
convincingly, they gain legitimacy. What

-- as an unified single actor with a similar unquestionable set of core values (i.e. the capital O). They are objectified, made into an object
of knowledge, by re-presentation of their identity and values. In other words, the representation of the Other is depoliticized in the sense that
its inner qualities are treated as given and non-negotiable. In Jef Huysmans (1998:241) words, there

is both a need for a

mediation of chaos as well as of threat. A mediation of chaos is more basic than a mediation of threat, as it implies
making chaos into a meaningful order by a convincing representation of the Self a nd its surroundings.
It is a mediation of ontological security, which means ...a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity ... by fixing social relations into a
symbolic and institutional order (Huysmans 1998:242). As he and others (like Hansen 1998:240) have pointed out, the importance of a
threat construction for political identification, is often overstated. The mediation of chaos, of being the provider of order in general, is just
as important. This may imply naming an Other but not necessarily as a threat. Such

a dichotomization implies a necessity

to get rid of all the liminars (what Huysmans calls strangers). This is because they ...connote a challenge to
categorizing practices through the impossibility of being categorized, and does not threaten the community, ...but the possibility
of ordering itself (Huysmans 1998:241). They are a challenge to the entrepreneur by their very existence. They confuse the dichotomy of
Self and Other and thereby the entrepreneurs mediation of chaos. As mentioned, a liminar can for instance be people of mixed ethnical
ancestry but also representations of competing world-pictures. As Eide (1998:76) notes: Over and over again we see that the liberals
within a group undergoing a mobilisation process for group conflict are the first ones to go. The liminars threaten the ontological order of
the entrepreneur by challenging his representation of Self and Other and his mediation of chaos, which ultimately undermines the
legitimacy of his policy. The liminars

may be securitized by some sort of disciplination, from suppression

of cultural symbols to ethnic cleansing and expatriation. This is a threat to the ontological order of the entrepreneur,
stemming from inside and thus repoliticizing the inside/outside dichotomy. Therefore the liminar must disappear. It must be made into a
Self, as several minority groups throughout the world have experienced, or it must be forced out of the territory. A liminar may also become
an Other, as its connection to the Self is cut and their former common culture is renounced and made insignificant. In Anne Nortons
(1988:55) words, The presence of difference in the ambiguous other leads to its classification as wholly unlike and identifies it
unqualifiedly with the archetypal other, denying the resemblance to the self. Then the liminar is no longer an ontological danger (chaos),
but what Huysmans (1998:242) calls a mediation of daily security. This is not challenging the order or the system as such but has become
a visible, clear-cut Other. In places like Bosnia, this naming and replacement of an Other, has been regarded by the securitizing actors as the
solution to the ontological problem they have posed. Securitization

was not considered a political move, in the

sense that there were any choices. It was a necessity: Securitization was a solution based on a depoliticized ontology.10 This
way the world-picture of the securitizing actor is not only a representation but also made into reality. The mythical second-order language is
made into first-order language, and its innocent reality is forced upon the world. To the

entrepreneurs and other actors

involved it has become a natural necessity with a need to make order, even if it implies
making the world match the map. Maybe that is why war against liminars are so often total; it
attempts a total expatriation or a total solution (like the Holocaust) and not only a victory on the battlefield. If the
enemy is not even considered a legitimate Other, the door may be more open to a kind of violence that is way
beyond any war conventions, any jus in bello. This way, securitizing is legitimized: The entrepreneur has succeeded both in
launching his world-view and in prescribing the necessary measures taken against it. This is possible by using the myths, by speaking on
behalf of the natural and eternal, where truth is never questioned.

27

Environment
Security causes environmental destruction
Chernus 86
(Ira, professor of religious studies at Univeristy of Colorado, Dr. Strangegod; on the symbolic meaning of nuclear weapons
1986) //ACT

We lose the subtleties and nuances of human complexity and see the world in absolutes, "us versus
them." We view human relationships in terms of the mythic, apocalyptic vision, a vision whose ultimate promise is the annihilation of
"their" machine and unlimited license for "our" machine to do whatever it wants. In fact, the ultimate goal of machine
people is always to have total dominance, unlimited autonomy to manipulate the environment
both human and naturalin endless technological ways. Thus the machine God also shapes our
relationship with our physical and material environment, leading us to the environmental crisis
that we now face. Again, the fouling of the air, water, and land was hardly begun in the nuclear age, but the symbolism of the
Bomb makes it much more difficult to escape from this predicament too. Behind our callousness
toward the natural realm there is not only a desire for quick and easy profit, but a more
fundamental view of ourselves as radically separated from nature. In the battle of the machines to dominate
the elements, we are clearly on the side of the machineswe are the machinesand this battle is seen in radically dualistic, even
apocalyptic, terms. Thus,

having no meaningful relationship with nature, we are free, perhaps even

compelled, to manipulate it endlessly. The transformation of raw materials into manufactured
goods thus becomes our primary goal and value; if the Bomb is God, then the GNP is chief of the angels. Yet
our commitment to material goods as highest good may have a more complex significance. It is fostered not only by the
symbol of the Bomb as divine controller, manipulator, and dominator, but also by the psychic
numbing that the Bomb creates. If we dare not think about the true reality of our livesthe sword of Damocles that
constantly threatens total extinction at a moment's noticethen we must divert ourselves, making the other, numbed level so complex and
interesting that we shall not have time to think about the truth.

Apocalyptic rhetoric lays the groundwork for genocidal violence, giving leaders free
reign to do anything necessary to stave off the end of the world. This framework
makes real solutions to environmental problems impossible as people become so
convinced that the earth is beyond saving that they give up even trying.
Buell 03
Professor of English at Cornell (Frederick, From Apocalypse to Way of Life)
Elaborating crisis is thus not only hard to do but can also perhaps never really be done. Worse, even an actual occurrence of crisis, not just
an elaboration of its imminence, is no guarantee that people will fall in line with the analyses and prescriptions of environmentalists.

Environmental crisis, as Ulrich Beck has argued, is uniquely susceptible to social construction, and while an
actual crisis, like Samuel Johnson's hanging, can indeed concentrate the mind wonderfully, it can concentrate it on the wrong target .
Revenge against an outgroup can easily substitute for remedy to ecological crisis-especially
given the political machinery devoted to obscuring problems and displacing blame described in
Chapter 1. Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to
have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its
predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events. It
also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further,
concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a total solution to the problems involved-a phrase that, as an astute
analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich's infamous final solution. 55 A

total crisis of society-environmental crisis at its gravest-threatens to translate despair into

inhumanist authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in
place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite- and expert-led solutions are possible.

28
56 At the same time it depoliticizes people, inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many
people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might
as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps
the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple
proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one's back on the environment. This means,
preeminently, turning one's back on nature-on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from
organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is
thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature-a conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many
in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how deeply nature has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to
and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature-based environmental issues, not greater
concern with them. But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all

of
these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one specific notion of environmental crisis- with
1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a
whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious
reflection on environmental crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has
turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place.

Apocalyptic framing of climate change eliminates political response in favor

technological management. Their framing prevents changes in distribution and
consumption required to cope with climate change.
Swyngedouw 10
Erik Swyngedouw Geography @ Manchester 10 Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political populism and the
spectre of climate change Theory, Culture, and Society 27 (2-3) p. 216-219
The Desire for the Apocalypse and the Fetishization of CO2 It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of
capitalism. (Jameson, 2003: 73) We

shall start from the attractions of the apocalyptic imaginaries that

infuse the climate change debate and through which much of the public concern with the
climate change argument is sustained. The distinct millennialist discourse around the climate
has co-produced a widespread consensus that the earth and many of its component parts are in an ecological bind
that may short-circuit human and non-human life in the not too distant future if urgent and immediate
action to retrofit nature to a more benign equilibrium is postponed for much longer. Irrespective of the particular views of Nature held by
different individuals and social groups, consensus has emerged over the seriousness of the environmental condition and the precariousness
of our socio-ecological balance (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). BP has rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum to certify its environmental
credentials, Shell plays a more eco-sensitive tune, eco-activists of various political or ideological stripes and colours engage in direct action
in the name of saving the planet, New Age post-materialists join the chorus that laments the irreversible decline of ecological amenities,
eminent scientists enter the public domain to warn of pending ecological catastrophe, politicians try to outmanoeuvre each other in
brandishing the ecological banner, and a wide range of policy initiatives and practices, performed under the motif of sustainability, are
discussed, conceived and implemented at all geographical scales. Al Gores evangelical film An Inconvenient Truth won him the Nobel
Peace price, surely one of the most telling illustrations of how eco - logical matters are elevated to the terrain of a global humanitarian cause
(see also Giddens, 2009). While there is certainly no agreement on what exactly Nature is and how to relate to it, there is a virtually
unchallenged consensus over the need to be more environmentally sustainable if disaster is to be avoided; a climatic sustainability that
centres around stabilizing the CO2 content in the atmosphere (Boykoff et al., forthcoming). This consensual framing is itself sustained by a
particular scientific discourse.1 The complex translation and articulation between what Bruno Latour (2004) would call matters of fact
versus matters of concern has been thoroughly short-circuited. The changing atmospheric composition, marked by increasing levels of CO2
and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is largely caused by anthropogenic activity, primarily (although not exclusively) as a result of
the burning of fossilized or captured CO2 (in the form of oil, gas, coal, wood) and the disappearance of CO2 sinks and their associated
capture processes (through deforestation for example). These

undisputed matters of fact are, without proper

political intermediation, translated into matters of concern . The latter, of course, are eminently political in
nature. Yet, in the climate change debate, the political nature of matters of concern is disavowed to
the extent that the facts in themselves are elevated, through a short-circuiting procedure, on to
the terrain of the political, where climate change is framed as a global humanitarian cause . The
matters of concern are thereby relegated to a terrain beyond dispute, to one that does not
permit dissensus or disagreement. Scientific expertise becomes the foundation and guarantee for

29
properly constituted politics/ policies. In this consensual setting, environmental problems are generally
staged as universally threatening to the survival of humankind, announcing the premature
termination of civilization as we know it and sustained by what Mike Davis (1999) aptly called ecologies of
fear. The discursive matrix through which the contemporary meaning of the environmental condition is woven is one quilted
systematically by the continuous invocation of fear and danger, the spectre of ecological annihilation or at least seriously distressed socioecological conditions for many people in the near future. Fear is

indeed the crucial node through which much of

the current environmental narrative is woven, and continues to feed the concern with
sustainability. This cultivation of ecologies of fear, in turn, is sustained in part by a particular set of phantasmagorical imaginaries
(Katz, 1995). The apocalyptic imaginary of a world without water, or at least with endemic water shortages,
ravaged by hurricanes whose intensity is amplified by climate change; pictures of scorched land as global warming
shifts the geopluvial regime and the spatial variability of droughts and floods; icebergs that disintegrate around the poles as ice melts
into the sea, causing the sea level to rise; alarming reductions in biodiversity as species disappear or are threatened by extinction; postapocalyptic images of waste lands reminiscent of the silent ecologies of the region around Chernobyl; the threat of peak-oil that, without
proper management and technologically innovative foresight, would return society to a Stone Age existence; the devastation of wildfires,
tsunamis, diseases like SARS, avian flu, Ebola or HIV, all these imaginaries of a Nature out of synch, destabilized, threatening and out
ofcontrol are paralleled by equally disturbing images of a society that continues piling up waste, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere,

our
ecological predicament is sutured by millennial fears, sustained by an apocalyptic rhetoric and
representational tactics, and by a series of performative gestures signalling an overwhelming, mind-boggling danger, one that
deforesting the earth, etc. This is a process that Neil Smith appropriately refers to as nature-washing (2008: 245). In sum,

threatens to undermine the very coordinates of our everyday lives and routines, and may shake up the foundations of all we took and take
for granted. Table 1 exemplifies some of the imaginaries that are continuously invoked. Of course, apocalyptic imaginaries have been
around for a long time as an integral part of Western thought, first of Christianity and later emerging as the underbelly of fast-forwarding
technological modernization and its associated doomsday thinkers. However, present-day millennialism preaches an apocalypse without the
promise of redemption. Saint Johns biblical apocalypse, for example, found its redemption in Gods infinite love. The proliferation of
modern apocalyptic imaginaries also held up the promise of redemption: the horsemen of the apocalypse, whether riding under the name of
the proletariat, technology or capitalism, could be tamed with appropriate political and social revolutions. As Martin Jay argued, while
traditional apocalyptic versions still held out the hope for redemption, for a second coming, for the promise of a new dawn,
environmental apocalyptic imaginaries are leaving behind any hope of rebirth or renewal . . . in favour of an unquenchable fascination with
being on the verge of an end that never comes (1994: 33). The emergence of newforms of millennialism around the environmental nexus is
of a particular kind that promises neither redemption nor realization. As Klaus Scherpe (1987) insists, this

is not simply
apocalypse now, but apocalypse forever. It is a vision that does not suggest, prefigure or expect
the necessity of an event that will alter history . Derrida (referring to the nuclear threat in the 1980s) sums this up most
succinctly: . . . here, precisely, is announced as promise or as threat an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision,
without truth, without revelation . . . without message and without destination, without sender and without decidable addressee . . . an
apocalypse beyond good and evil. (1992: 66) The

environmentally apocalyptic future, forever postponed,

neither promises redemption nor does it possess a name; it is pure negativity . The attractions of such an
apocalyptic imaginary are related to a series of characteristics. In contrast to standard left arguments about the apocalyptic dynamics of
unbridled capitalism (Mike Davis is a great exemplar of this; see Davis, 1999, 2002), I would argue that sustaining

and
nurturing apocalyptic imaginaries is an integral and vital part of the new cultural politics of
capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) for which the management of fear is a central leitmotif (Badiou,
2007). At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or
displacing social conflict and antagonisms. As such, apocalyptic imaginations are decidedly populist and
foreclose a proper political framing. Or, in other words, the presentation of climate change as a
global humanitarian cause produces a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not
revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another, one that is not articulated with specific political
programs or socio-ecological project or revolutions. It is this sort of mobilization without political issue that led Alain Badiou to state that
ecology

is the new opium for the masses, whereby the nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted climate
exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations (Badiou, 2008; iek, 2008). We have to make sure that radical
techno-managerial and socio-cultural transformations, organized within the horizons of a
capitalist order that is beyond dispute, are initiated that retrofit the climate (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). In other words,
we have to change radically, but within the contours of the existing state of the situation the
partition of the sensible in Rancires (1998) words, so that nothing really has to change.

30

31

Extinction
Security leads to extinction.
Dillon 96
(author of books on security, war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural
research. Lecturer at The University of Lancaster) CF

How was it that seeking security became such an insistent and relentless (inter)national
preoccupation for humankind? What sort of project is the pursuit of security, and how does it relate to other
modern human concerns and enterprises, such as seeking freedom and knowledge through representativecalculative thought, technology and subjectification? Above all, how are we to accountamongst all the manifest contradictions
of our current (inter)national systems of security: which incarcerate rather than liberate; radically endanger rather than make safe; and
engender fear rather than create assurance for that terminal paradox of our modern (inter)national politics of security which Foucault
captured so well in the quotation that heads this chapter. A terminal

paradox which not only subverts its own

predicate of security, most spectacularly by rendering the future of terrestrial existence
conditional on the strategies and calculations of its hybrid regime of sovereignty and
governmentality, but which also seems to furnish a new predicate of global life, a new
experience in the context of which the political has to be recovered and to which it must then
address itself: the globalisation of politics of security in the global extension of nihilism and
technology, and the advent of the real prospect of human species extinction

32

Root Cause
Ideas of emergencies ultimately result in the impact trying to be stopped
Dillon & Reid 2000
(PHD; researches the problematisation of politics, security and war & PhD in Politics (Michael And Dillon, Global Governance, Liberal Peace,
and Complex Emerge Alternatives: Local, Global, Political Vol. 25 Issue 1 Jan-Mar 2000 JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644986) //ACT

Complex emergencies are intimately related to the liberal peace of global governance.1 They
are said to occur at the boundaries of liberal peace, where that regime of power encounters
institutions, norms, and practices that violently differ from its own. Global liberal governance does not,
however, simply encounter other so- called rogue states - such as Iraq, Libya, Serbia, or Iran - at the frontiers of the peace that it celebrates.

There has been a widely acknowledged weakening and dissolution of the state form in those
regions of Africa and Eurasia where complex emergencies are said to arise. That is among the reasons
why liberal peace en-counters what it calls "complex emergencies" there. Here, liberal peace finds itself deeply
implicated in a terrain of disorder in which some states are powerful, some states are in radical
dissolution, traditional societies are collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international
corporations and criminal cartels are also deeply involved, and where international
organizations and nongovernmental organizations are inextricably committed as well. The authors
of this article prefer to call these circumstances "emerging political complexes," because they are comprised of
dynamic power relations that have long, often convoluted, and poorly understood histories that
are social and cultural as well as political and economic and that are simultaneously undergoing
significant reformulation and change. The term complex emergency tends to elide these
dynamics, often.

33

Policy Paralysis
The affirmatives security discourse leads to social paralysis
Schneier 10
(Bruce, security technologist, Worst-case thinking makes us nuts, not safe, May 12, 2010,
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/12/schneier.worst.case.thinking/)//ACT

There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking . An extension of the precautionary principle,
it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It
substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis and fear for reason . It fosters
powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects
of terrorism. Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First,
it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and
rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to
happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor
job at assessing outcomes. Second, it's based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a
proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible. Third, it can be
used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt
down. If we don't build it, we will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy . If we
allow flights near Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we don't, organs won't arrive in time for transplant
operations and people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might
destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death. Of course, not all fears are equal. Those

that we tend to
exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost
everything else; technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children
need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet is bad. Basically,

any fear that would make a good movie

plot is amenable to worst-case thinking. Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking validates ignorance.
Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don't know -- and what we can
imagine. Remember Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's quote? "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always
interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known
unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know
we don't know." And this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance

isn't a cause for doubt; when

you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action.

34

VTL
The Aff preserves sovereign power ideology which reduces humans to bare life
Dillon & Reid 2000
(PHD; researches the problematisation of politics, security and war & PhD in Politics (Michael And Dillon, Global Governance, Liberal Peace,
and Complex Emerge Alternatives: Local, Global, Political Vol. 25 Issue 1 Jan-Mar 2000 JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644986) //ACT
For our purposes, Agamben's

analysis discloses a certain com-parability in the operation of sovereign

power and the power/ knowledge that Foucault termed governmentality . Not only are they both a strategic
form of power, they each operate by effecting a kind of "phenomenological" reduction. Both claim to reduce life to its bare
essentials in order to disclose the truth about it, but in so doing actually reduce it to a format
that will bear the pro-gramming of power to which it must be subject if the power of sovereignty (or, as we shall see, that of governance as well) is to be in- scribed, instituted, and operated. Life here is not
of course "natural" life, whatever that may be. It is in every sense the life of power. But since we are talking different operations of power,
we are also talking different forms of life; modalities formed by the different exercises of reduction through which each operation of power
institutes and maintains itself. Each form of life is the "stuff of power, but in dissimilar ways. That is what we mean when we say that
sovereignty and governmentality reproduce life amenable to their sway. It is not uncommon for a form of life thus reproduced to desire the
processes that originate it. Sovereign and governmental powers alike each also therefore work their own particular powers of seduction on
the subjects of power that they summon into being. Seduction, as well as imposition, is thus inte-gral also to their very modus operandi.31
Nationalism might be said to be one form of such seduction, consumerism another. In respect of sovereignty, Agamben calls the life of
sovereign power "bare life."

Bare life is thus life without context, meaning, or history - the state of nature - so
that sovereignty may be in-stalled as the power that orders it. In being abandoned, that which is
excluded is cast into a condition that places it at the mercy of the sovereign power that institutes
itself through instituting this relation. The formal structure of sovereign power understood as a strategic principle of
formation rather than as a metaphysical point of origin is therefore precisely this: "the excluded included as excluded." By virtue of that
inclusion as excluded, bare life is si-multaneously both produced by the exercise of sovereign power and subject to it in a particular way. As
excluded life, bare

life under the strategic ordering of sovereign power is life exposed to death - life
available to be killed. Mundanely, it is life that is disposable. In either instance - irrespective of the
different ratio-nales advanced for it - the bare life effected by the strategic or-dering of life
instituted by the operation of sovereign power is a life-form available ultimately to serve the
interest of continuously preserving the institution of sovereign power itself. Consider the
classical nature of sovereign warfare, the discourse of political re-alism that articulates it, and
the fictions of political subjectivity and interest that are said to fuel it.

Security reduces human lives to be manipulated in order Killing VTL

Dillon & Reid 2000
(PHD; researches the problematisation of politics, security and war & PhD in Politics (Michael And Dillon, Global Governance, Liberal Peace,
and Complex Emerge Alternatives: Local, Global, Political Vol. 25 Issue 1 Jan-Mar 2000 JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644986) //ACT
What is of primary interest here, however, is not the histori-cally well-documented propensity of liberal peace to make war against
authoritarian regimes. Nor are its extremely powerful mil-itary-industrial-scientific dynamics immediately at issue .

We are
concerned, for the moment, with exploring theoretically the ways in which it problematizes the
question of order itself, and with the correlate strategizing of power relations, locally and
globally de-rived from the ways in which it does so. We argue that these de-pend upon notions of immanent
emergency. Specifically, they de-pend upon its twin cognates, exception and emergence, to which the
phenomenon of complex emergency draws our attention. We argue in addition that each such
"emergency" reduces human life to a zone of indistinction in which it becomes mere stuff for
the ordering strategies of the hybrid form of sovereign and governmental power that
distinguishes the liberal peace of global governance. Interpreted this way, complex emergencies not only draw
attention to the operation of a specific international po-litical rationality - that of global liberal governance - but also to certain key
distinguishing features of it as a hybrid order of power.

35

Alt

36

Alt Security Discussions

Discourse on security opens a new world of thought.
Dillon 96
(p.22 Towards a politics of security)author of books on security, war, international political theory,
continental philosophy, and cultural research. Lecturer at The University of Lancaster) CF

Contesting our politics of security, therefore, not only requires more than a technical engagement over the
meaning, range, efficiency, effectiveness, morality or accountability of conventional and nuclear,
military and political, technologies of security, it also requires something in addition to genealogy
as well; because genealogy, however politicising it might beFoucault arguing, powerfully, that this politicising takes
place for, or rather around, the battle over truth as the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and
specific effects of power attached to the true16does

not directly pose and seek to think the question of the

political as such. However much it is therefore stimulated by the interrogatory disposition of the genealogist, my question, like
any question, sets something else, or at least in addition, in train. It opens-up another world of thought and discloses the
prospect also of another form of life, because that is how all questioning works. Such a world goes beyond the project
which allowed the question to be posed in the first place. In the world that a question opens-up, the
question itself multiplies and plurifies. It divides and sub-divides demanding more of you and
provoking you to other thought. That is the way the world of a question builds. And in this burgeoning world
not only do new considerations arise but all manner of other established issues are amplified and intensified in
different ways.

37

Alt Solves Ecology

Our alternative expands the notion of security to include new interpretations about
practices. This re-framing of security is essential to solve ecological sustainability
Barnett 97
[Jon Barnett postgraduate student at the Centre for Resource & Environmental Studies, Australian National
University, now has a PhD and teaches at the Univ. of Melbourne, Peace Review, Sep 1997.Vol.9, Iss. 3; pg. 405411]

Dalby understands "dissident security discourses" as having different geographical frameworks

that look, with equal measure, both within and beyond the state. These critical approaches erode
state-centered parochialism. Once overcome, people and cultures-united by common concerncan take priority over states and borders. To this we can add a more sociological perspective. Kevin Clements, for
example, claims that: "Linking security explicitly to community building and the enlargement of safe spaces provides individuals, social
movements, and political leaders with important criteria for determining whether or not behavior is likely to enhance or diminish net
security." Addressing the problem of inequity, Clements

asks if there can be "any real security for anyone in a

world that is so radically divided into rich and poor?" Likewise, Ken Booth claims that "the trouble with
privileging power and order is that they are at somebody elses expense (and are therefore
potentially unstable)." According to Booth, "emancipation, not power or order, produces true security .
Emancipation, theoretically, is security." This emancipatory vision introduces security theorizing to a new philosophical domain that poses
questions of ethics, reciprocal rights, individual responsibility, and universal ideals. New

security interpretations change

the "what" question. Rather than limiting security to orthodox questions of armed conflict, it
instead expands to include social, economic, environmental, political, and even health issues.
Likewise, new interpretations alter the "who" question. The state no longer dominates; it
becomes only one of several referents for security. These changes also help us shift from
negative (reactive) approaches to positive (proactive) approaches for real security. Security has moved
towards a more universal understanding. Expanding the security agenda makes human collectives more interdependent around a host of
indivisible issues that threaten well being. Decoupling security from the state helps legitimize alternative social groupings. Identifiable
common interests emerge when we reclaim security from militarism and attach it instead to basic needs and survival. Increasing
interdependence has now become the fundamental organizing principle of the increasingly "dense" international system, eroding
sovereignty and state authority in both domestic and international affairs. Thus, reclaiming

security creates a normative

framework for connecting people on issues common to human well being. It endorses an
ecologically sustainable approach to meeting the basic needs of all people. (Continued)The process
of reclaiming security undermines the dominant discourse. But expanding securitys meaning
holds value only if it actually alters practice. We should beware of the danger that new concepts
of security might be coopted by the dominant paradigm, and thus do more to legitimize than to
challenge the status quo. This has already happened to notions of economic security;
environmental security could well be next. Thus, we need practical strategies to make the
reclamation of security into a concrete reality .

Only a transition away from traditional security politics can solve the contradictions
in modern environmental policy actions
Franke 04
(Volker, McDaniel College of Swag, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological Politics and
Policy in the New Security Era Sage Publications, 2004, p.158, pdf) //ACT

38
Here Barnett

examines the extent to which the environment-conflict thesis shapes US national

security. He finds that the 1998 US National Security Strategy selectively interprets environmental
problems to include those with the potential to directly threaten US national security, while
simultaneously downplaying less-tangible problems (such as declining biodiversity and climate change), and
completely ignoring problems that exist exclusively in other places (such as famine or drought).
In this way, Barnett argues, the NSS contributes to the us-versus-them conception of the nation-state, thereby legitimizing traditional
security practicesincluding the need to constantly recreate a discourse of danger. This [desire to understand where environmental
conditions contribute to instability] suggests new reasons to maintain military readiness and so a further reason to forestall budgetary
cutbacks. The possibility of a peace dividend is reduced when the impossibility of peace is constantly proven through these discourses of
danger (p. 81). For the US government, then, environmental

security is used to preserve legitimacy, avoid

radical reform and distract attention from the contradictions of the modern world for which the
US is inextricably responsible (p. 87). Barnett demonstrates that, when the direct impact of war is combined with the
pollution and wastes generated in preparing for war, the worlds militaries are most probably the single largest institutional source of
environmental degradation. Yet he is also hopeful that the military can be induced to assist in the recovery and protection of the
environment. What

is needed, in Barnetts opinion, is a reconfiguration of environmental security

that avoids the principal failings of traditional security conceptions that propagate
environmentally degrading security practices through the conduct of and preparation for war. Those practices defend
the environmentally destructive modern way of life and ignore the needs and desires of most of the worlds population. Instead, Barnett
makes a convincing case for a reformulation of environmental security that does not prioritize
national security and conflict over the needs of those who are most insecure.

39

Alt Solves - Politics

The alternative allows for greater dialogue of the usage of security rhetoric and is
able to create better politics in the future
Browning & McDonald 11
(Christopher, Matt, University of Warwick and University of Queensland, The future of critical security studies: Ethics and the politics of
security European Journal of International Relations, October 2011, p. 241-243)//ACT
If the critical security studies project is deficient in providing us with a sophisticated and convincing understanding of either the politics or
ethics of security two core animating themes of its research agenda where does this leave such a project? Does the contribution of
critical security studies extend no further than a compelling critique of traditional approaches to security on a range of analytical and
normative grounds? We would argue that there

is a future in critical security studies. This future will

ultimately be determined by the extent to which scholars recognize the limits and tensions of
existing approaches (especially Schools) and take up the challenge of moving beyond first
principles or universalized assumptions about security to engage in nuanced, reflexive and
context-specific analyses of the politics and ethics of security. Indeed, we make such a case using the critical
theoretical tool of immanent critique, defined here as a method of critique concerned with locating possibilities for progressive change in
existing social and political orders.6 In this context, we note in particular the possibility for building upon the tensions and limits in existing
critical security studies scholarship to move this research project forward. We identify two key imperatives for this project by way of
conclusion. The

first of these imperatives concerns the need to develop understandings of the

politics of security that are context-specific; that recognize and interrogate the role of different
security discourses and their effects in different settings; and that come to terms with
sedimented meanings and logics without endorsing these as timeless and inevitable. In terms of
context-specificity, the Western-centric nature of (critical) security studies has ultimately encouraged a focus on how security works in
liberal democratic settings. This is particularly applicable to the Copenhagen School framework, whose dichotomy between panic politics
and normal politics ultimately suggests a conception of politics parasitic on a liberal democratic political context (see McDonald, 2008;
Williams, 2003). While some have attempted to explore securitization dynamics outside these settings (e.g. Wilkinson, 2007), the
framework itself continues to work with a securitypolitics dichotomy that may be wholly unfamiliar to those outside liberal democratic
states. In a fundamentally illiberal state regime such as Burma or North Korea, for example, what does the language of security do and what
does normal politics mean? In what ways do different cultural, social and historical contexts determine different security logics, and how
do these dynamics look in terms of communities above and below the state? And can we accept the claim that there is no difference in the
logic or effects of securitization if security is understood as referring to the welfare of the most vulnerable in global society, for example,
rather than the territorial preservation of the nation-state? Here,

the failure to differentiate between logics of

security on the basis of what understanding of security inheres in a particular discourse
potentially blinds Copenhagen School and post-structural theorists of security to (the possibility
of) difference in security dynamics and logics in different places, for different actors and at
different times. In the case of the Copenhagen School, such parsimony might be in part a response to the desire to provide analytical
boundaries around the study of security rather than descend into contextual analysis (see Williams, 2010: 213216), but it nonetheless
results in a partial and (we would argue) Western-centric image of the politics of security. Ultimately, these points suggest the need for far
more nuance than is currently evident in critical security studies scholarship. As noted earlier, the critical security studies project appears
bifurcated between opposing logics of security that position the logic of security as inherently pernicious (Copenhagen School, poststructuralism) or inherently progressive (Welsh School). In

a sense, these Schools correct the limits and

tendencies of each other in important ways, suggesting (immanent) possibilities for a more
nuanced understanding of the politics of security in the critical security studies project as a
whole. Copenhagen School and post-structural theorists explore the logic of security that follows from the dominant discourse of security
in contemporary world politics, rightly cautioning against any assumed linkage between security and progress and pointing to the ways in
which the promise of security can be used to justify illiberal practices. The Welsh School framework, meanwhile, recognizes that this
dominant discourse of security does not necessarily capture the essence of security across time and space, in the process pointing to
possibilities for progressive change in security dynamics and practices. In

a sense, these different approaches to the

logic of security broadly reflect structural and agential tendencies in International Relations
more generally. We would argue that they suggest the need to take seriously the political limitations associated with dominant
security discourses while recognizing and exploring the possibility for security to mean and do something different. A brief analysis
of the different constitutive security logics underlying various secu rity communities around the
world provides ample evidence of the problems of universalizing claims about the politics of

40
security. As Rumelili (2008) has noted, an instructive comparison can be drawn between the EU and ASEAN, in particular in terms of
how these organizations conception of self-identity results in them relating themselves to otherness very differently. Propounding an
inherently inclusive (i.e. democratic) identity and normative agenda, the EU is liable to locate otherness in an inferior position to itself, as
something to transform and render acceptable/normal. Otherness is therefore something to be eradicated and to the extent to which it rejects
transformation, it becomes destabilizing and potentially threatening. Such processes are, for example, clearly evident in the European
Neighbourhood Policy (Browning and Pertti, 2008). In contrast, ASEAN operates with a largely exclusivist (i.e. civilizational, geographic,
ethnic) identity where norms of sovereignty and non-interference dominate. This, Rumelili suggests, facilitates more equitable relationships
with otherness since the goal in such relationships is not one of conversion to the cause. In terms of the politics of security, what becomes
evident here is how concepts of security and subjectivity are intimately connected to conceptions of identity and the limits of political
community in different contexts. The second imperative for the future of the critical security studies project concerns the ethics of security.

We advanced the claim that a shared concern with expanding the realm of dialogue underpins
much of the critical security studies project, albeit to differ ent degrees and in different ways.
But to the extent that an ethics of security a conception of the good or progress regarding
security orients around a concern with such a position, this commitment needs to be
acknowledged and defended. A range of pressing questions suggest themselves here, including
the bases for prioritizing open dialogue; the relationship between spheres of deliberation and
material conditions of existence; the possibilities for and limitations to the establishment of open
dialogue; and the broader relationship between dialogue and outcomes. Elaborating on these
commitments would also entail engaging with the argument that movements towards greater
dialogue could potentially encourage the desire to exclude power, identity, emotion and other
central features of global politics (see Price, 2008). Where difficult questions emerge about this and other dimensions of an
ethical engagement with security such as the role of violence in the Welsh School framework, for example (Peoples, 2011) these
need to be confronted. If there is a consistency across critical security studies scholarship in this sense, it is that ethical commitments are
evident (in commitments to resistance, desecuritization or emancipation, for example) but are insufficiently developed to provide a genuine
account of what constitutes ethical action regarding security. Indeed, immanent possibilities for the development of the critical security
studies project arise from these (often implied) commitments that need drawing out and examining in the context of difficult dilemmas in
world politics. This

process of drawing out ethical commitments should be viewed as a reflexive

movement towards recognizing the assumptions and potential implications of ones own
theorizing, a position central to both broader definitions of Critical Theory (see Cox, 1981) and
to the compelling critique of traditional security studies as insufficiently engaged with the eth ics
and effects of its own theorizing about world politics. And it needs also to be matched up with the preceding
understanding of the politics of security. Is the expansion of deliberation and movement away from violence, for example, always
progressive, and does it require the rejection of security as a political category or its reform? The example of Australian debates around the
arrival by boat of asylum-seekers in 2010 illustrates tensions and ambiguities at work regarding the ethics of security, particularly as
understood in key critical approaches to the study of security. In that context, Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillards call for a frank, open,
honest national conversation about asylum and border security particularly encouraged the articulation of negative and exclusionary views
of asylum-seekers, paradoxically rendering the (re)securitization of asylum in the Australian context more likely (see McDonald, 2011).
Particularly striking here was the Prime Ministers suggestion that this national conversation should take place outside the limits imposed by
political correctness that would otherwise discourage the articulation of right-wing or racist sentiments towards asylum-seekers. In this
example, the apparent opening of dialogic space encouraged by the Prime Minister was intimately related to the movement towards
exclusionary security logics and practices orienting around the imperatives of border security

41

Alt Sovles - Education

Knowledge is a product of power; it is no longer based in truth the alternative is
the only way to unmask the violence that this knowledge produces
Flyvbjerg 02
(Bent, professor of Planning at Aalborg University Denmark and chair of Infrastructure Policy and Planning at Delft University
of Technology Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory, Planning Futures: New Directions for
Planning Theory,http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/DarkSide2.pdf) //ACT
Foucault rarely separated knowledge from power, and the idea of power/knowledge was of crucial importance: we should abandon a
whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can
develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests ... we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the
same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power

produced
knowledge .. that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power
relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge ... (Foucault 1979, 27). For Foucault,
then, rationality was contingent, shaped by power relations, rather than context-free and
objective. According to Foucault, Habermass (undated, 8) authorisation of power by law is inadequate (emphasis deleted). [ The
juridical system] is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power, says Foucault (1980a, 89),
methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its
apparatus... Our historical gradient carries us further and further away from a reign of law.
The law, institutions - or policies and plans - provide no guarantee of freedom, equality or
democracy. Not even entire institutional systems, according to Foucault, can ensure freedom, even
though they are established with that purpose. Nor is freedom likely to be achieved by imposing abstract theoretical
systems or correct thinking. On the contrary, history has demonstrated--says Foucault--horrifying examples that it is precisely
those social systems which have turned freedom into theoretical formulas and treated practice
as social engineering, i.e., as an epistemically derived techne, that become most repressive . [People]
reproach me for not presenting an overall theory, says Foucault (1984b, 375-6), I am attempting, to the contrary,12 apart from any
totalisation - which would be at once abstract and limiting - to open up problems that are as concrete and general as possible. What
Foucault calls his

political task is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both

neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which
has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight
them (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171). This is what, in a Foucauldian interpretation, would be seen as an effective approach to
institutional change, including change in the institutions of civil society. With direct reference to Habermas, Foucault (1988, 18) adds:
The

problem is not of trying to dissolve [relations of power] in the utopia of a perfectly

transparent communication, but to give...the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also
the ethics...which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination .
Here Foucault overestimates his differences with Habermas, for Habermas also believes that the ideal speech situation cannot be established
as a conventional reality in actual communication. Both thinkers see the regulation of actual relations of dominance as crucial, but whereas
Habermas approaches regulation from a universalistic theory of discourse, Foucault seeks out a genealogical understanding of actual power
relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas Habermass orientation is towards episteme. For
Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or theories. Freedom is a practice, and its ideal is not a utopian absence of
power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus, is for Foucault the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Whereas Habermas
emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses substantive micro politics, though with the important shared feature that neither
Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual content of political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and
Foucault are bottom-up thinkers as concerns the content of politics, but where Habermas thinks in a top-down moralist fashion as regards
procedural rationality - having13 sketched out the procedures to be followed - Foucault is a bottom-up thinker as regards both process and
content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for
discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the outcome of this procedure. Foucault would prescribe neither process nor
outcome; he

would only recommend a focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective
point of departure for the fight against domination. It is because of his double bottom-up thinking that Foucault
has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981) says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those who
work in the institutional setting of planning: Its true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the
prison...are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books to tell them what is to be done. But my

project is precisely to
bring it about that they no longer know what to do, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that

42
up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller
1993, 235).

43

Perm
Perm fails the affirmative takes realist IR theory as a transparent reality, which
always coopts the alternative into the affirmatives political strategy of fear and
scare tactics.
Campbell 92
[David: Australian political scientist, written four books, PhD from Australian National University, and has been a professor at
several universities. Writing Security University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis p. 64]
In this context, the war

of all against all in international relations did not produce the misery of civil war but was
a means of princely politics, guided by raison d'etat
{National Interests} and reduced to the common formula of a 'European balance of power.'13 This interstate
relationship resembles more a conception of international society and less an understanding of
pervasive conflict. That the end result of Hobbes's schema should be the existence of sovereign states in a network of relationships
'pared down to a purely interstate relationship . . . war became

that was considerably less destructive and violent than the original state of nature is hardly surprising given that these states were
supposed to be the site in which civil and international war was mediated: 'Logically it was impossible for them to be in the same position
as that which they transformed.'14 These

critiques raise serious and fundamental objections to the use of

Hobbes's state of war to undergird a crude realist understanding of international relations (an
understanding which makes possible the conventional representation of foreign policy) as the
perpetual struggle for power amongst states in a pervasive condition of anarchy . However, all
these critiques proceed from one important starting point. These critiques all treat Hobbes's
text as a transparent rendering of the social and political reality of the time. Implicitly or explicitly, they
support the contention that Leviathan stands as a recording of the important facts in a historical narrative to educate his and subsequent
generations about the perils of their ways. We can object to this understanding in an important way. We can maintain that Hobbes was not
a historian; that he was 'not a collector or reporter of past and present facts.'15 This is not an objection based upon the arbitrary
disciplinary grounds that divide up intellectual activities. It is an objection based on the proposition that in seeking to overcome civil war,
Hobbes selfreferentially took the condition of civil war as evidence for his proposition that peace could only be restored by a return to the

Hobbes's conclusion of a powerful state is implied in the premise of civil

war; individuals are always described as 'subjects,' that is as people subordinated to a higher
sovereign authority.16 Moreover, in chapter thirteen's famous discussion of the state of nature where Hobbes denies its universal
status quo ante. In other words,

applicability, he declares that where 'there were no common Power to feare' - a condition ''which men that have formerly lived under
peaceful/ government*17 have known - then there would be civil war. But t absence of a common power to fear is not a feature that
characterizes contemporary society, for men have formally lived under peaceful government. Clearly, then, it is the fear of slipping back
into the state of nature should men give up their allegiance to the sovereign power in the state, rather than an argument that men should
proceed from the state of nature to the state, which is the force behind Hobbes's reasoning. Moreover, Hobbes needs to establish this dire
prospect as the grounds from which his radical prescriptions can be judged as worthy of pursuit.18 In this context, Leviathan

comes to be seen as a text implicated in, and fundamental to the form of, modernity's
discourses concerning the 'state' and '[hu]man.' An explication of this theme will demonstrate
its significance for the conventional understandings of international relations and foreign
policy. But it is worth noting that this reading will emphasize - indeed, probably over-emphasize - the role
fear and danger play in Hobbes' rendering of identity and order. This reading is not designed to
foreclose the possibility of an alternative interpretation.19 Instead, its concern with the
constitutive nature of fear and danger is intended to problematize international relations'
realist rendering of fear and danger as either natural conditions or instrumentalities deployed
by settled identities.

44

Focus on policy relevant theory relegates all agenda setting to policymakers,

censoring alternative views and leading to structural violence
Bilgin 05
pinar (department of international relations, bilkent university, ankara, turkey) regional security in the middle east 2005 p 49-50
The positions of Gray and Garnett regarding the theory/practice relationship are similar to that of their conception of theory. Both authors

practice is restricted in
as policy-making and implementation at governmental level . In this sense, those
who do not engage in issues directly relevant for policymaking are not considered to be engaging with practice. This position hints
at a narrow view of politics where it is considered only to do with governance at the state level.
This, in turn, flows from the objectivist position adopted by the authors where the study of strategy in particular
are in favour of and open about the role theories play in informing practice. However, their conception of
that they understand practice

and academic enterprise in general is viewed as a politics-free zone. This is a powerful move, for once an approach is regarded as
objective,

others that are critical of it are immediately labelled at best subjective or political in a
and at worst propaganda. It is not only the conception of practice adopted by Gray and Garnett but also
that of theory that is restricted in that both conceive theory as problem-solving theory, in Robert Coxs (1981) terms; it is there to
assist policy-makers in solving problems (Gray 1992: 62631). Security Studies, in this sense, is supposed to deal with issues that
derogatory sense,

are deemed problematic by policy-makers,21 leaving untouched other issues that do not make it to governmental agendas. This, in turn,

creates a vicious circle where issues to be put on the security agenda are decided by policymakers and analysed by those who they consider as experts. Those who propound alternative views are
dismissed as mere propagandists and the issues they identified, such as structural violence, are
not allowed on security agendas. This position is still prevalent in certain strands of security thinking in the post-Cold War
era (see, for example, Walt 1991).

The permutations attempt to solve is another linkthe critique is a prior question

and the plan is a predetermined answer.
Bartleson 2k
(Jens Bartleson, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Stockholm, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, 47-8)
The synthesis advocated by structurationists and scientific realists not only holds out the hope of resolving conceptual conflicts within
existing fields of knowledge. It also makes the breaching of disciplinary boundaries look virtuous, since it promises to settle the ontological
differences underlying their compartmentalization into distinct fields. What makes this promise look attractive is the quite naive assumption
that the way a problem in political philosophy is formulated is independent of the way in which solutions to it are presented. The general
incommensurability between agency and structure, first elevated into a problem of imperial proportions by structurationists, is then opened
to a glorious peace-by-interdependence between conflicting concepts and estranged fields of knowledge. From a deconstructive viewpoint,
however, it

is the 'undisputed truth' underlying the 'agent-structure problem' that is the real

problem, since it is the former which makes the latter look like a chicken-and-egg debate. To say that all social and political life is
ultimately composed of two kinds of stuff is simply to presuppose that essence is essential to social and political theory. Ontological
questions invariably yield ontological answers, since they drag the political philosopher into a quest for firm
foundations and proper origins. Starting with the assumption that agency and structure are radically
different in essence, which it is necessary to do in order to depict all prior theoretical efforts to
wrestle with this conceptual zero-sum game as vain, the structurationist then solves his problem by pointing to the
fact that what is different always shares one thing in common, namely, the fact of being different. At this point, the 'agent-structure' debate
seems to deconstruct itself; being centred on the quest for essence, it pushes us back in an infinite series of reversals. Whenever a structure
is identified, its existence is conditioned by a prior agency, which in turn is made possible by yet another structure, and so forth. However
far back we push in this series in search of a foundation, what appears as essential will always prove to be supplementary, in a way that
deprives it of the authority of ontological simplicity. The

attempted synthesis tries to overcome the same

ontological difference that nourishes it: if the problem could be solved, the solution must also
indicate that there was no problem in the first place. The reconceptualization of sovereignty
that comes with the structurationist effort to relate the domestic inside and the international outside can be

45
regarded as symptomatic of the quest for essence that governs it . The very problem that the conceptualization
of sovereignty in relational terms hopes to solve, merely crops up again at a more certain depth, but now beyond the reach of critical
concepts. To say that sovereignty is constitutive with respect to both the domestic and the international by being that which makes the
internal internal and the external external, is either to turn sovereignty into an agency that structures or a structure that acts; in both cases the
original problem is restored.

46

Reps Debate

47

Reps Shape Reality

Representations of security shape all aspects of reality and result in violence
Browning & McDonald 11
(Christopher, Matt, University of Warwick and University of Queensland, The future of critical security studies: Ethics and the politics of
security European Journal of International Relations, October 2011, p. 239-241)//ACT
A number of scholars from across the broad spectrum of critical security studies have been concerned with exploring the politics of security,
or asking what security does. As noted, this has tended to entail a focus on the ways in which representations

or discourses of
security encourage sets of practices, legitimize particular actors or indeed constitute political
communities and their limits in particular ways. While not primarily associated with insights into the political effects
of representations of security, for example, the Welsh Schools commitment to reorienting security around notions of emancipation is
underpinned by a belief in the mobilizing potential of security. However, in

the critical security studies project,

direct engagement with this question has tended to come from those operating in the broadly
post-structural tradition, for whom representations or discourses of world politics constitute
world politics itself. David Campbell (1998), for example, has used the example of American representations of
threat regarding the USSR during the Cold War to point to the ways in which such
representations served to define American identity and the legitimate boundaries of national
community. More recently, Richard Jackson (2005) draws broadly similar conclusions about American representations of
threat in the context of the war on terror, pointing to the role of these representations in
enabling expeditionary military intervention, domestic violations of civil liberties and the
suspension of obligations to enemy combatants. In these cases, representations of threat defined and
constructed identity and community in particular ways; justified a series of exceptional
practices; and constituted the world in ways that has impacted significantly upon the practices
of the most powerful actors in it. Engaging with the philosophical foundations of security in liberal societies, Michael Dillon
(1996) has suggested that the promise of providing security underpins perceptions of the political
legitimacy of states, ultimately suggesting a merge between liberal politics and security politics
(see also Dillon and Reid, 2009). Anthony Burke (2007: 20) develops this theme, suggesting that security can be viewed as a
political technology that enables, produces and constrains individuals within larger systems of
power and institutional action. In particular, he is concerned with showing how security ties individuals to the
state through demands of citizenship, with this in turn entailing different possibilities and
limitations for how we think of security and relate our security to that of others . A range of feminist
accounts of security politics have pointed to similar dynamics in suggesting that discourses of security serve to sustain existing hierarchies
of power and the gendered identities associated with them (Peterson, 1992; Sjoberg, 2010). The so-called Paris School, meanwhile, has been
concerned with practices of security, illustrating how security

and insecurity are mutually constituted through elite

how individuals and groups conduct
themselves in regard to particular issues and other groups/individuals (Bigo, 2002, 2008; Huysmans, 2006).
knowledge and routinized bureaucratic practices. These practices in turn shape

One prominent concern here has been with the notion of the exception, drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and more
recently Georgio Agamben. The notion of the exception concerns the ways in which representations

of existential threat
or crises (for Schmitt, articulated by the sovereign) enable forms of extraordinary politics that would
otherwise be stymied by normal liberal democratic checks and balances on coercive and
authoritarian regimes (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010: 71). Indeed, in the context of the war on terror, some suggest
that the invocation of states of exception in modern liberal societies has become a part of everyday political practice, enabling
governments to instigate exceptional measures and allowing the state of exception to emerge as a paradigm of government (Agamben,
2005; van Munster, 2007: 241). In a similar vein, various authors have recently drawn on the insights of Foucault in exploring the
biopolitics of security. These authors are concerned with pointing to forms of government that regulate populations through the exertion of
power over human life (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). At the heart of these (broadly post-structural) insights into the political is an
abiding suspicion of security: discourses of security have profoundly problematic political implications in this schema. Security

entails a logic that is exclusionary and violent, limiting individual freedom and constructing a
narrow vision of national community that serves the interests of the state machinery. This abiding
suspicion is articulated most directly by Mark Neocleous (2008: 5), who argues that: security has become the master narrative through
which the state shapes our lives and imaginations producing and organizing subjects in a way that is always already predisposed towards

48
the exercise of violence in defence of the established order. This suspicion of security is certainly characteristic of post-structural
engagements with security, but is also a prominent feature of the work of the so-called Copenhagen School. Their approach is similarly
concerned with the political effects of representations of security, with Ole Wver (1995) drawing explicitly on Austins speech act theory
and implicitly on Schmitts notion of exceptionalism (see Aradau, 2004; Williams, 2003) to suggest that representations of existential threat
can have significant performative effects. If

an issue is securitized represented as an existential threat by a

it
is ultimately elevated from the realm of normal politics to the sphere of panic politics (Buzan et
consequential political actor (usually a states leader) and accepted as such by a relevant audience (usually the domestic population)

al., 1998: 34). Here, the way that issue is subsequently addressed is characterized by urgency, secrecy and the employment of extraordinary
measures. The concept of securitization has, of course, proved highly successful at penetrating academic debates about security and a range
of analysts have applied the concept to issues as diverse as disease (e.g. Elbe, 2006; Enemark, 2009), the environment (e.g. Floyd, 2010)
and asylum/immigration (e.g. Buonfino, 2004; Ceyhan and Tsoukala, 2002; McMaster, 2002; Sasse, 2005). Regarding issues such as
immigration/ asylum in particular, the framework seems to have captured something important about the political effects of security
language regarding issues not traditionally acknowledged as security issues. Here, leaders of liberal democratic states have represented
immigrants/ asylum-seekers as threats to the sovereignty of the state or social cohesion of the nation as a means of justifying the denial of
their international responsibilities and enabling action (such as the deployment of troops or the closing of borders) that would traditionally
be characteristic of a time of war. Here too, the normative preference expressed for desecuritization (the removal of issues from the security
realm) would seem to be most consistent with progressive policy outcomes. While not without analytical purchase and some degree of
normative appeal, however, the Copenhagen Schools conceptualization of the politics of security of what security does is
problematic. Put simply, the suggestion that security has an inherent, universal logic (associated with urgency and exceptionalism, for
example) is a claim that lacks attention to the multiple ways in which security is understood and practised in world politics. Here, and to
reiterate a core claim of this article, greater attention is needed to the varied social, historical and political contexts in which security is
constructed.

49

Reps First
Evaluation of representations comes prior to any policy action
Doty 96
Roxanne; Assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University; Imperial Encounters: The Politics of
Representations in North-South Relations [SM]

This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of
global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations
are inextricably bound up with discursive practices that put into circula tion representations that
are taken as "truth." The goal of analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but
rather to examine how certain representations under lie the production of knowledge and identities
and how these representations make various courses of action possible. As Said (1979: 21) notes, there is no such
thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the
material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such
within discourse. So, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real," though the march of troops across a piece of
geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is
attached to the troops and "Grenada" to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until
discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion," a "show of force," a "training exercise," a "rescue," and so on. What

is "really" going on in
situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat
separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely
linguistic, assumes a series of dichotomiesthought/reality, appearance/essence, mind/matter,
word/world, subjective/objectivethat a critical genealogy calls into question. Against this, the
perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. In suggesting that global
politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to
representational practices I am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur
within a "reality" whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of
the first world. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that
produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of
political, military, and economic power. Drawing especially upon the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as
extensions of their work by Laclau (1990), and Laclau and Mouffe (1990), I understand a discourse to be a structured, relational totality. A discourse
delineates the terms of intelligibility whereby a particular reality can be known and acted
upon. When we speak of a discourse we may be referring to a specific group of texts, but also importantly to the social practices to which those texts are
such a

inextricably linked. To refer to a discourse as a structured totality is not meant to suggest that it is closed, stable, and fixed once and for all. On the contrary, a
discourse is inherently open-ended and incomplete. Its exterior limits are constituted by other discourses that are themselves also open, inherently unstable, and
always in the process of being articulated. This understanding of discourse implies an overlapping quality to different discourses. Any fixing of a discourse and
the identities that are constructed by it, then, can only ever be of a partial nature. It is the overflowing and incomplete nature of discourses that opens up spaces
for change, discontinuity, and variation.

50

Reps matter
Our violent reps are the root cause of war and violence
Kappeler 95
Susanne; Al Akhawayn University, freelance writer and teacher in England and Germany. Lecturer
in English at the University of East Anglia and an Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and
Social Sciences, taught at Cambridge while a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge and was a parttime tutor for the Open University Course; A History of Violence, 1995 [SM]
Violence what we usually recognize as such It is no misbehaviour of a minority amid good
behaviour by the majority, nor the deeds of inhuman monsters amid humane humans, in a
society in which there is no equality, in which people divide others according to race, class, sex
and many other factors in order to rule, exploit, use, objectify, enslave, sell, torture and kill
them, in which millions of animals are tortured, genetically manipulated, enslaved and
slaughtered daily for 'harmless' consumption by humans. It is no error of judgement, no moral lapse and no transgression
against the customs of a culture which is thoroughly steeped in the values of profit and desire, of self-realization, expansion and progress. Violence as we
usually perceive it is 'simply' a specific and to us still a visible form of violence, the consistent and logical application of the
principles of our culture and everyday life. War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful
society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks
do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no
solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense
everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual
preparation, the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the
'outbreak' of war, of sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at
all.`We are the war', writes Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her existential analysis of the question, 'what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell [my
friend], but I see it everywhere. It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in
your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you, in the fact that you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in the way in
which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values in short: us. We are the war ... And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone else
responsible. We

make this war possible, we permit it to happens 'We are the war' and we also 'are'
the sexual violence, the racist violence, the exploitation and the will to violence in all its
manifestations in a society in so-called 'peacetime', for we make them possible and we permit
them to happen.

Discourse shapes the way we view reality and questioning discourse can breakdown
our flawed reps
Cavelty and Kristensen 8
Myriam, Kristian; lecturer and head of the new risks research unit at the Center for Security studies; PhD candidate working with
the Research Unit on Defense and Security at the Danish Institute for International Studies; Securing the Homeland Critical
infrastructure, risk and (in)security pg.157-158 [SM]
There are different ways of paying tribute to the importance of written and/or spoken language in social science research, but a common
feature is the focus on the defining moment of interrelatedness

between power, knowledge and discourse. This

manifested in different ways, such as in the establishment and maintenance
(disciplining) of knowledgeable practices (norms) or in the development of commonly accepted
interrelatedness is

51
historical narratives. The phenomenon of discourses as being productive (or reproductive) of
things defined by the discourse (Milliken 1999: 229) includes a complex process in which
knowledgeable practices are defined and where disciplining techniques and practices are
elaborated and applied. The societal production of meaning (truth) is the nexus linking power
and discourse; to be the holder of discursive agency is empowering. It is the linguistic practice of
discursive framing that mediates meaning between objects and subjects (Der Derian 1992, cited in
Huysmans 1997). Frames are to be understood as central basic perception categories and structures through which actors perceive their
environment and the world (Dunn and Mauer 2006). These categories have a pre-existence in the perception of collective culture and in the
memory of the actors. Therefore, the actors attribute meaning to the things they recognize as corresponding to the previously structured world
(Donati 2001). In

short, discursive framing is the rhetorical (written and spoken) allusion to such preexisting cognitive models, while simultaneously, through these iterative references, the particular
cognitive models are shaped and perpetuated. When this is done successfully with resonance discursive
framing leaves an impression on social reality. To put it differently, through the framing mechanism, discourse
imparts meaning to the material world by paying tribute to the earlier absorbed meanings . In this
way, discourse is constitutive of reality . Equally important, because discourses work to define and to
enable, and also to silence and to exclude by endorsing a certain common sense, but making
other modes of categorizing and judging meaningless, impracticable, inadequate or otherwise
disqualified (Milliken 2001: 139), the analytical relevance of such mechanisms becomes evident. By exposing them, the
analysis has the potential to denaturalize dominant meanings and practices and to disclose their
contingency. The constitutive consequentiality, or performativity, of discourse points to the importance of examining both the homeland
security narrative and the role of gendered underpinnings therein

52

Realism

53

Realism Bad
Turn: security experts cant keep us safe - the ideological apparatus of realism
escalates all problems into global disaster
Der Derian 05
(James, the Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies at The University
of Sydney, National Security: An Accident Waiting to Happen, Harvard International Review 27.3, p. 83)//ACT
It often takes a catastrophe to reveal the illusory beliefs we continue to harbor in national and homeland security. To keep us safe, we place
our faith in national borders and guards, bureaucracies and experts, technologies and armies. These and other instruments of national
security are empowered and legitimated by the assumption that it falls upon the sovereign country to protect us from the turbulent state of
nature and anarchy that permanently lies in wait offshore and over the horizon for the unprepared and inadequately defended. But this
parochial fear, posing as a realistic worldview, has recently taken some very hard knocks. Prior

to September 11, 2001, national

borders were thought to be necessary and sufficient to keep our enemies at bay; upon entry to
Baghdad, a virtuous triumphalism and a revolution in military affairs were touted as the best means to bring
peace and democracy to the Middle East; and before Hurricane Katrina, emergency preparedness and
intricate system of levees were supposed to keep New Orleans safe and dry. The intractability of disaster,
especially its unexpected, unplanned, unprecedented nature, erodes not only the very distinction of the local, national, and global, but,
assisted and amplified by an unblinking global media, reveals the contingent and highly interconnected character of life in general. Yet
when it comes to dealing with natural and unnatural disasters, we continue to expect (and, in the absence of a credible alternative,
understandably so) if not certainty and total safety at least a high level of probability

and competence from our national

and homeland security experts However, between the mixed metaphors and behind the metaphysical concepts given voice by US
Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff early into the Katrina crisis, there lurks an uneasy recognition that this administration--and
perhaps no national government--is up to the task of managing incidents that so rapidly cascade into global events. Indeed, they suggest that
our national plans and preparations for the "big one"--a force-five hurricane, terrorist attack, pandemic disease-- have

become

part of the problem, not the solution. His use of hyberbolic terms like "ultra-catastrophe" and "fall-out" is telling: such events
exceed not only local and national capabilities, but the capacity of conventional language itself. An easy deflection would be to lay the
blame on the neoconservative faithful of the first term of US President George W. Bush, who, viewing through an inverted Wilsonian prism
the world as they would wish it to be, have now been forced by natural and unnatural disasters to face the world as it really is--and not even
the most sophisticated public affairs machine of dissimulations, distortions, and lies can close this gap. However, the discourse of the
second Bush term has increasingly returned to the dominant worldview of national security, realism. And if

language is, as Nietzsche

prisonhouse, realism is its supermax penitentiary. Based on linear notions of causality , a
correspondence theory of truth, and the materiality of power, how can realism possibly account--let alone prepare or provide
remedies--for complex catastrophes, like the toppling of the World Trade Center and attack on the Pentagon by a handful of
claimed, a

jihadists armed with box-cutters and a few months of flight-training? A force-five hurricane that might well have begun with the flapping of
a butterfly's wings? A northeast electrical blackout that started with a falling tree limb in Ohio? A possible pandemic triggered by the
mutation of an avian virus? How, for instance, are we to measure the immaterial power of the CNN-effect on the first Gulf War, the AlJazeera-effect on the Iraq War, or the Nokia-effect on the London terrorist bombings? For events of such complex, non-linear origins and
with such tightly-coupled, quantum effects, the national security discourse of realism is simply not up to the task. Worse, what if the

"failure of imagination" identified by the 9/11 Commission is built into our national and homeland security
systems? What if the reliance on planning for the catastrophe that never came reduced our capability to flexibly respond and improvise
for the "ultra-catastrophe" that did? What if worse-case scenarios, simulation training, and disaster exercises -as well as border guards, concrete barriers and earthen levees--not only prove inadequate but might well act as force-multipliers-what organizational theorists identify as "negative synergy" and "cascading effects"-- that produce the automated bungling
(think Federal Emergency Management Agency) that transform isolated events and singular attacks into global
disasters? Just as "normal accidents" are built into new technologies--from the Titanic sinking to the Chernobyl meltdown to the
Challenger explosion--we must ask whether "ultra-catastrophes" are no longer the exception but now part and
parcel of densely networked systems that defy national management; in other words, "planned disasters." What,
then, is to be done? A first step is to move beyond the wheel-spinning debates that perennially keep security
discourse always one step behind the global event. It might well be uni-, bi-, or multi-polar, but it is time to recognize
that the power configuration of the states-system is rapidly being subsumed by a heteropolar
matrix, in which a wide range of different actors and technological drivers are producing profound
global effects through interconnectivity. Varying in identity, interests, and strength, these new actors and drivers gain

54
advantage through the broad bandwidth of information technology, for networked communication systems provide the means to traverse
political, economic, religious, and cultural boundaries, changing not only how we interpret events, but making it ever more difficult to
maintain the very distinction of intended from accidental events. According to the legal philosopher of Nazi Germany, Carl Schmitt, when
the state is unable to deliver on its traditional promissory notes of safety, security, and well-being through legal, democratic means, it will
necessarily exercise the sovereign exception: declaring a state of emergency, defining friend from foe, and, if necessary, eradicating the
threat to the state. But what if the state, facing the global event, cannot discern the accidental from the intentional? An external attack from
an internal auto-immune response? The natural as opposed to the planned disaster? The enemy within from the enemy without? We can,
as the United States has done since September 11, continue to treat catastrophic threats as issues of national rather than global security, and
go it alone. However, once declared, bureaucratically installed, and repetitively gamed, national states of emergency grow recalcitrant and
become prone to even worse disasters. As Paul Virilio, master theorist of the war machine and the integral accident once told me: The fullscale accident is now the prolongation of total war by other means.

55

Realism Is False
Realisms wrong and based on flawed assumptions; even if its not still vote neg
Mack, 88
(John E., M.D. an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. The
Enemy System 1988. http://www.johnemackinstitute.org/passport/enemysystem.html)//ACT

The threat of nuclear annihilation has stimulated us to try to understand what it is about
mankind that has led to such self-destroying behavior. Central to this inquiry is an exploration
of the adversarial relationships between ethnic or national groups. It is out of such enmities that war,
including nuclear war should it occur, has always arisen. Enmity between groups of people stems from
the interaction of psychological, economic, and cultural elements. These include fear and hostility (which are often closely related),
competition over perceived scarce resources,[3] the need for individuals to identify with a large group or cause,[4] a tendency to disclaim
and assign elsewhere responsibility for unwelcome impulses and intentions, and a peculiar susceptibility to emotional manipulation by
leaders who play upon our more savage inclinations in the name of national

security or the national interest. A full

understanding of the "enemy system"[3] requires insights from many specialities, including psychology,
anthropology, history, political science, and the humanities. In their statement on violence[5] twenty social and behavioral
scientists, who met in Seville, Spain, to examine the roots of war, declared that there was no scientific
basis for regarding man as an innately aggressive animal, inevitably committed to war. The Seville
statement implies that we have real choices. It also points to a hopeful paradox of the nuclear age: threat of nuclear war may have
provoked our capacity for fear-driven polarization but at the same time it has inspired unprecedented efforts towards cooperation and
settlement of differences without violence. The Real and the Created Enemy: Attempts

to explore the psychological

roots of enmity are frequently met with responses on the following lines: "I can accept
psychological explanations of things, but my enemy is real. The Russians [or Germans, Arabs,
Israelis, Americans] are armed, threaten us, and intend us harm. Furthermore, there are real
differences between us and our national interests, such as competition over oil, land, or other scarce resources, and
genuine conflicts of values between our two nations. It is essential that we be strong and maintain a balance or
superiority of military and political power, lest the other side take advantage of our weakness".
This argument does not address the distinction between the enemy threat and one's own
contribution to that threat-by distortions of perception, provocative words, and actions . In short, the
enemy is real, but we have not learned to understand how we have created that enemy, or how the
threatening image we hold of the enemy relates to its actual intentions. "We never see our enemy's motives
and we never labor to assess his will, with anything approaching objectivity".[6] Individuals may have little to do with the choice of
national enemies. Most Americans, for example, know only what has been reported in the mass media about the Soviet Union. We are
largely unaware of the forces that operate within our institutions, affecting the thinking of our leaders and ourselves, and which determine
how the Soviet Union will be represented to us. Ill-will and a desire for revenge are transmitted from one generation to another, and we

are not taught to think critically about how our assigned enemies are selected for us. In the
relations between potential adversarial nations there will have been, inevitably, real grievances
that are grounds for enmity. But the attitude of one people towards another is usually
determined by leaders who manipulate the minds of citizens for domestic political reasons which are generally
unknown to the public. As Israeli sociologist Alouph Haveran has said, in times of conflict between nations historical accuracy is the first
victim.[8] The Image of the Enemy and How We Sustain It: Vietnam veteran William Broyles wrote: "War

begins in the mind,

with the idea of the enemy."[9] But to sustain that idea in war and peacetime a nation's leaders must maintain public support for
the massive expenditures that are required. Studies of enmity have revealed susceptibilities, though not
necessarily recognized as such by the governing elites that provide raw material upon which the
leaders may draw to sustain the image of an enemy .[7,10] Freud[11] in his examination of mass psychology
identified the proclivity of individuals to surrender personal responsibility to the leaders of large groups. This surrender takes place in both
totalitarian and democratic societies, and without coercion. Leaders

can therefore designate outside enemies and take

actions against them with little opposition. Much further research is needed to understand the psychological mechanisms
that impel individuals to kill or allow killing in their name, often with little questioning of the morality or consequences of such actions.
Philosopher and psychologist Sam Keen asks why it is that in

virtually every war "The enemy is seen as less than

56
human? He's faceless. He's an animal"." Keen tries to answer his question: "The image of the enemy is not only the soldier's most
powerful weapon; it is society's most powerful weapon. It enables people en masse to participate in acts of violence they would never
consider doing as individuals".[12] National

leaders become skilled in presenting the adversary in

dehumanized images. The mass media, taking their cues from the leadership, contribute powerfully to the process. The image of
the enemy as less than human may be hard to dislodge. For example, a teacher in the Boston area reported that during a high school class on
the Soviet Union a student protested: "You're trying to get us to see them as people". Stephen Cohen and other Soviet experts have noted
how difficult it is to change the American perception of the Soviet Union, despite the vast amount of new information contradicting old
stereotypes." Bernard Shaw in his preface to Heartbreak House, written at the end of World War I, observed ironically: "Truth telling is not
compatible with the defense of the realm". Nations

are usually created out of the violent defeat of the former

inhabitants of a piece of land or of outside enemies, and national leaders become adept at
keeping their people's attention focused on the threat of an outside enemy .[14] Leaders also provide what
psychiatrist Vamik Volkan called "suitable targets of externalization"[10] i.e., outside enemies upon whom both leaders and citizens can
relieve their burdens of private defeat, personal hurt, and humiliation.[15] All-embracing ideas, such as political ideologies and fixed
religious beliefs act as psychological or cultural amplifiers. Such ideologies can embrace whole economic systems, such as socialism or
capitalism, or draw on beliefs that imply that a collectivity owes its existence to some higher power in the universe. It was not Stalin as an
individual whom Nadezhda Mandelstam blamed for the political murder of her poet husband Osip and millions of other citizens but the
"craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony at one go.[16] Every
nation, no matter how bloody and cruel its beginnings, sees its origins in a glorious era of heroes who vanquished less worthy foes. One's
own race, people, country, or political system is felt to be superior to the adversary's, blessed by a less worthy god. The nuclear age has
spawned a new kind of myth. This is best exemplified by the United States' strategic defense initiative. This celestial fantasy offers
protection from attack by nuclear warheads, faith here being invested not in a god but in an anti-nuclear technology of lasers, satellites,
mirrors, and so on in the heavens.Individual Group Linkages and Lessons in Childhood: To find out the source of hatred or antagonism we
need to understand the complex relationship between the psychology of the individual, and the national group.[17] We can start by
examining how enmity develops in childhood. In the first year of life a child begins to have a sense of self,[18] which includes the ability to
distinguish between familiar people with whom he or she feels comfortable and those who are strangers or are felt to be alien. The small
child's ability to distinguish between friends and strangers[19] is accompanied by thought patterns that tend to divide people and things into
good and bad, safe and unsafe. It is out of such primitive thinking that the structures of enmity later grow. In the second year the child learns
that ill-will directed towards those upon whom he is dependent is dangerous to his own well-being. He develops, therefore, mechanisms
such as displacement and externalization which allow him to disown such negative impulses. Grandparents and parents may pass on to their
children stories of the designated enemy groups' evil actions so that chosen displacements persist from one generation to another. From the
drawings and comments of children in Germany, the United States, Central America, and Samoa, Hesse showed that by age five a child
understands the idea of an enemy, which he or she will depict as whatever in the culture seems most immediately fearful or threatening-a
monster, wild animal, or bad man.[20] By age eight a child understands that "the idea of the enemy" has to do with an unfriendly
relationship. But this idea does not usually become cast in political terms until age ten to twelve. It is noteworthy that Hesse's research
children, including the older ones, tend not to see their own country as bad or responsible for bad actions. The small child's sense of
helplessness is accompanied by a feeling of vulnerability and awareness of dependence on others. The formation of relationships or
alliances with other individuals and groups, beginning with family members and extending to the neighborhood, classroom, school
playground, and teenage youth group, is an important strategy for gaining a sense of power. Such alliances are the prototype for later
political relationships. All of these primitive, or child-like, mechanisms provide fertile soil for political leaders in real life interethnic or
international conflicts. Nationalistic slogans and media manipulation focus the child's mind (or the child-mind of the adult) on the peoples
or system he is supposed to hate or fear (Jews, Arabs, capitalists, or communists). In the United States patriotic recruitment is accompanied
by commercial profiteering-for example, robotic war toys designed to kill communists.[21] The

extraordinary dimensions of
the nuclear threat have also spawned examples of apocalyptic thinking, in which the world is
divided into forces of good and evil, and the belief that, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the
good would be saved and the evil would perish. In such thinking the primitive, polarizing tendencies of the child's
mind are all too evident. Creating a Safer World: Hesse's finding that even older children do not perceive their own country's responsibility
for states of enmity is in accord with those of psychologists and social scientists - that there is no self-awareness or self-responsibility at the
political level which corresponds to the awareness of personal responsibility with which we are familiar in a clinical setting." In political
life, the assignment of blame, disclaiming of responsibility, and the denial of one's own nation's contribution to tensions and enmity are the
norm.[23] The first task, therefore, is to apply the insights of the behavioral sciences to create a new expectation of political selfresponsibility. Nuclear weapons have connected all the peoples of the earth. Not

only the nuclear superpowers but also

all peoples are now interdependent and mutually vulnerable. Nations may have conflicting
values but they cannot afford to have enemies. Education in elementary and secondary schools that reflects this new
reality should be our highest priority. Instead of constant blaming of the other side, we need to give new attention to the adversary's culture
and history, to his real intentions as well as his hopes, dreams, and values. To understand is not to forgive, but awareness and knowledge
could lead to a more realistic appreciation of who has contributed what to the problems and tensions that exist in the world. Young people
should be taught in their homes and schools how to identify and resist ideological propaganda. In

the nuclear age we need to

redefine hackneyed ideas such as national security or the national interest. just as we can no longer

57
afford enemies, there is no longer such a notion as national security . The security of each depends on the
other, and the communication of this reality must become a major focus of our educational system.

Realism is not a superior method of describing the worldit fails to describe the
subjective category of human nature despite its objective data
Crawford, 00
Robert; Lecturer of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia; Idealism and Realism in International
Relations [SM]
How, specifically, does neorealism render Realism "more scientific"? The

main claim is that neorealism transcends classical

Realism's appeal to power as an end in itself and argues instead for an understanding of state
power based on the seemingly objective criteria of a state's position relative to other states in the
system. Morgenthau, even while recognizing state behavior as a function partly of its position relative to other states, does not break with the methodological
individualism characteristic of Hobbesian political theory. State action (political behavior) remains ultimately rooted in and a
function of-the distinctly unscientific category of human nature (Morgenthau 1993, 26). The neorealists argue that
states, rendered functionally similar by the structural constraints of anarchy, will act in ways similar to the expectation of more conventional Realists: "at a
minimum (states) seek their own preservation, and at a maximum, drive for universal domination" (Waltz 1986b, 172-3 and 191). What is significant, however, is

there are good reasons

to doubt both the moral and intellectual superiority of neorealism. First, Waltz seems merely to
have replaced one set of constraints for another. Neorealism 'rescues' Realist theory from its
precarious reliance on the "metaphysics of fallen man" only to reconceptualize and reaffirm a
realist power politics, rooted this time "securely in the scientifically defensible terrain of
objective necessity" (Ashley 1986, 261). Human nature is out, structure is in, but the human
predicament is unchanged. Second, Waltz's structural theory abstracts from-and thus tells us little
about-particular events or facts. Neorealism is thereby exposed to the paradoxical charge that its
scientific status is purchased at the expense of actual research and empirical analysis (Kratochwil 1993,
that power for Waltz is not an end sought for its own sake, but a "possibly useful means" to security (Waltz 1986b, 36). But

67).

Realism is no longer a superior mode of thought and fails to have positivist

approach collapsing its claim to objective truth
Donnelly 2000
Jack; Professor of International Studies at the University of Denver; Realism and International Relations, 2000 [SM]

This primarily negative and cautionary contribution of realism helps to explain its cyclical rise
and fall. Realism may be "the necessary corrective to the exuberance of utopianism" (Carr 1946: 10). Once that correction has been made, though, its
time as a fruitful dominant mode of thought has passed. In fact, postwar realism's very success in
this negative, corrective task brought to the fore its shortcomings as a positive theory. The laws
of international politics to which some "realists" appealed in such a knowing way appeared on
closer examination to rest on tautologies or shifting definitions of terms. The massive investigations of historical
cases implied in their Delphic pronouncements about the experience of the past had not always, it seemed, actually been carried out . . . Indeed, not even
the best of the "realist" writings could be said to have achieved a high standard of theoretical
refinement: they were powerful polemical essays (Bull 1972: 39).' A similar, though less severe, reaction against the thinness of structural realism's
"indeterminate predictions" has characterized the 1990s.

58

AT: Realism Inevitable

Realism is not inevitable hundreds of different theories prove that it is not a
neutral description of reality
Grondin 2004
(David,, Masters in Political Science and Ph.D. Candidate at University of Ottawa, (Re)Writing the National Security State, Center for United
States Studies, p. 12-17) //ACT
Approaches that deconstruct theoretical practices in order to disclose what is hidden in the use of concepts such as national security have
something valuable to say. Their more reflexive and critically-inclined view illustrates how terms used in realist

discourses, such as
produced by a specific historical,
geographical and socio-political context as well as historical forces and social relations of power (Klein, 1994: 22). Since realist
analysts do not question their ontology and yet purport to provide a neutral and objective
analysis of a given world order based on military power and interactions between the most important political units, namely states,
realist discourses constitute a political act in defense of the state . Indeed, [] it is important to recognize that
state, anarchy, world order, revolution in military affairs, and security dilemmas, are

to employ a textualizing approach to social policy involving conflict and war is not to attempt to reduce social phenomena to various
concrete manifestations of language. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations governing policy thinking. And it is important to
recognize that policy thinking is not unsituated (Shapiro, 1989a: 71). Policy

thinking is practical thinking since it imposes an

analytic order on the real world, a world that only exists in the analysts own narratives. In this
light, Barry Posens political role in legitimizing American hegemonic power and national security conduct seems obvious: U.S. command
of the commons provides an impressive foundation for selective engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy. [] Command of
the commons gives the United States a tremendous capability to harm others. Marrying that capability to a conservative policy of selective
engagement helps make U.S. military power appear less threatening and more tolerable. Command of the commons creates additional
collective goods for U.S. allies. These collective goods help connect U.S. military power to seemingly prosaic welfare concerns. U.S.
military power underwrites world trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial remote sensing, which all depend on peace and
order in the commons (Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David Campbell points out that [d]anger

is not
an objective condition. It (sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may
become a threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all depends on how one analyses the danger, considers
the event (Campbell, 1998: 1-2). In the same vein, national security discourse does not evaluate objective threats; rather, it is itself a
product of historical processes and structures in the state and society that produces it. Whoever

has the power to define

security is then the one who has the authority to write legitimate security discourses and conduct the policies
that legitimize them. The realist analysts and state leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the same individuals who
hold the power to securitize threats by inserting them in a discourse that frames national identity and freezes it.9 Like many concepts,
realism is essentially contested. In a critical reinterpretation of realism, James Der Derian offers a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the
uniform realism represented in IR: he reveals many other versions of realism that are never mentioned in International Relations texts (Der
Derian, 1995: 367). I am aware that there are many realist discourses in International Relations, but they all share a set of assumptions, such
as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the main actor in international relations, states pursue power defined as a national
interest, and so on. I want to show that realism is one way of representing reality, not the reflection of reality. While my aim here is not to
rehearse Der Derians genealogy of realism, I do want to spell out the problems with a positivist theory of realism and a correspondence
philosophy of language. Such a philosophy accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral description corresponds to reality. This is
precisely the problem of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American realist theoretical discourses. And since for
poststructuralists language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as constructed in these discourses is called for.10 These scholars
cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and then use realism as the best language to reflect a self-same phenomenon
(Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist discourses in International
Relations are not useful. Rather, I want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms

of realism serve political

purposes, used as they are in many think tanks and foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political
leaders. This is the relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as used in International Relations): it brings to light its locatedness
in a hermeneutic circle in which it is unwittingly trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil argues, [] the rejection
of a correspondence theory of truth does not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism and/or to endless deconstruction
in which anything goes but it leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate competing theoretical creations (Kratochwil,
2000 : 52). Given that political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to ideas formed independently of structures of
signification that sustain political action and thought, American realist discourses belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist
traditions cannot be taken as mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in the production of discourses in which national leaders and
security speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce a notion of national identity as synonymous with national
security.

59

K Tricks

60

Case is a Lie
Knowledge is a product of power; it is no longer based in truth the alternative is
the only way to unmask the violence that is created by the state
Flyvbjerg 2
(Bent, professor of Planning at Aalborg University Denmark and chair of Infrastructure Policy and Planning at Delft
University of Technology Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory, Planning
Futures: New Directions for Planning Theory,http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/DarkSide2.pdf) //ACT
Foucault rarely separated knowledge from power, and the idea of power/knowledge was of crucial importance: we should abandon a
whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can
develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests ... we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the
same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power

produced
knowledge .. that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power
relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge ... (Foucault 1979, 27). For Foucault,
then, rationality was contingent, shaped by power relations, rather than context-free and
objective. According to Foucault, Habermass (undated, 8) authorisation of power by law is inadequate (emphasis deleted). [ The
juridical system] is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power, says Foucault (1980a, 89),
methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its
apparatus... Our historical gradient carries us further and further away from a reign of law.
The law, institutions - or policies and plans - provide no guarantee of freedom, equality or
democracy. Not even entire institutional systems, according to Foucault, can ensure freedom, even
though they are established with that purpose. Nor is freedom likely to be achieved by imposing abstract theoretical
systems or correct thinking. On the contrary, history has demonstrated--says Foucault--horrifying examples that it is precisely
those social systems which have turned freedom into theoretical formulas and treated practice
as social engineering, i.e., as an epistemically derived techne, that become most repressive . [People]
reproach me for not presenting an overall theory, says Foucault (1984b, 375-6), I am attempting, to the contrary,12 apart from any
totalisation - which would be at once abstract and limiting - to open up problems that are as concrete and general as possible. What
Foucault calls his

political task is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both

neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which
has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight
them (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171). This is what, in a Foucauldian interpretation, would be seen as an effective approach to
institutional change, including change in the institutions of civil society. With direct reference to Habermas, Foucault (1988, 18) adds:
The

problem is not of trying to dissolve [relations of power] in the utopia of a perfectly

transparent communication, but to give...the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also
the ethics...which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination .
Here Foucault overestimates his differences with Habermas, for Habermas also believes that the ideal speech situation cannot be established
as a conventional reality in actual communication. Both thinkers see the regulation of actual relations of dominance as crucial, but whereas
Habermas approaches regulation from a universalistic theory of discourse, Foucault seeks out a genealogical understanding of actual power
relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas Habermass orientation is towards episteme. For
Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or theories. Freedom is a practice, and its ideal is not a utopian absence of
power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus, is for Foucault the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Whereas Habermas
emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses substantive micro politics, though with the important shared feature that neither
Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual content of political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and
Foucault are bottom-up thinkers as concerns the content of politics, but where Habermas thinks in a top-down moralist fashion as regards
procedural rationality - having13 sketched out the procedures to be followed - Foucault is a bottom-up thinker as regards both process and
content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for
discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the outcome of this procedure. Foucault would prescribe neither process nor
outcome; he

would only recommend a focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective
point of departure for the fight against domination. It is because of his double bottom-up thinking that Foucault
has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981) says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those who
work in the institutional setting of planning: Its true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the
prison...are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books to tell them what is to be done. But my

project is precisely to
bring it about that they no longer know what to do, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that

61
up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller
1993, 235).

Case is a lie it is created by fear in order to generate tainted knowledge about the
world
Hagmann & Cavelty 12
(Jonas, Myriam, international relations scholars, National risk registers: Security scientism and the propagation of permanent
insecurity Security Dialogue, Feb 15th 2012, pdf p. 82-84) //ACT

Risk registers are the latest prototype of a decades-long evolution of governmental technologies
to substantiate danger knowledge. This evolution is marked both by shifting security policy concerns and by changes inside
the defence establishment (see Burgess, 2011). Historically, during most of the Cold War, the quintessential procedure for
seizing security knowledge was military contingency planning. Conducted by ministerial cells and general
staffs, and aided by data from the intelligence complex, the assessment of foreign countries military capabilities, strategies, postures and
alliances represented the classic procedure for the appreciation and monitoring of military attacks from abroad (Hulnick, 2005). Civil
defence complemented this procedure. During the 1960s and 1970s, NATO, the Warsaw Pact and neutral countries alike developed
comprehensive policy frameworks to address the likely impacts of nuclear conflict on civilian populations and installations. Newly

established civil defence agencies defined sets of protective instruments: Fallout shelters,
underground hospitals and supply depots were erected; public alimentation and health plans
were devised according to expected contamination effects on food production and human
bodies; the general public was instructed in protective behaviour according to what was
considered the best individual preparation (De Weck and Maurer, 1990; US Department of Homeland Security, 2011).
The explicit focus on the population and domestic civilian installations inside a country led
these civil defence agencies to develop their own assessment methods for identifying specific
areas where attention was most needed (Collier and Lakoff, 2008). However, the main rationality behind
the overall civil defence efforts was, in accordance with the overall security rationale, deterrent
and preventative in nature, aimed at favourably influencing a countrys ability to recuperate
after a nuclear strike (Aradau and Van Munster, 2011: 267). When military aggression from the outside became increasingly
improbable in Europe in the 1990s, events such as the Balkan wars, environmental catastrophes or collapsing state structures were seized
upon to give new mandates to the existing security institutions, whose legitimacy was beginning to dwindle (Huysmans, 1998: 224). In

particular, the fusion of traditional security concerns with non-actor hazards, such as natural
disasters or large-scale accidents , extended national security to the realm of non-exceptional
dangers, anchoring the security apparatus firmly in the far less contested domain of public
safety provision populated by civil defence actors. This reconceptualization of security empowered civil defence
agencies to a great degree. Not only had they been engaged in erecting shelters, coordinating emergency alimentation plans and instructing

had also been entrusted with additional emergency coordination

tasks in the realms of technical and natural risks in the wake of a number of civilian disasters in
the late 1980s (Lentzos and Rose, 2009). As a result, they had amassed experience in mobilizing what was
regarded as particularly secure danger knowledge emanating from the natural sciences . In the
the populace in protective behaviour, they

1990s, their mandates were then expanded from civil defence (protecting non-combatants against the effects of a military attack) towards
civil protection (protecting the population against a diffuse set of potential emergencies and disasters), and formerly scattered
responsibilities and structures were bundled under their ministerial leadership in the process. With their diverse and expanded mandates on
issues such as reactor safety, hazardous materials, industrial accidents and flooding, the

reorganized civil protection

entities proved well-positioned to be charged with comprehensive risk analyses, or at least with
the development of risk-assessment methodologies for later use by other ministries or political
actors at the substate level. With this, such assessments efforts were no longer subordinated to military planning or held
contingent upon the threat of a nuclear strike. Instead, they became powerful technologies in their own right,
intended to lead to the comparability, objectivization and genuine prioritization of public
security investments. Overall, this development was favoured by a more general trend whereby risk-management practices were
transferred from the private domain to the public sector (see Power, 2004). However, while the rationale behind risk

62
registers and risk-management efforts alike is to provide a basis for cost-effective decisions, the
two frameworks differ on at least one crucial point: Private-sector risk management and its
offshoots in the public sector deal with risks mainly conceptualized as risks to the entity
conducting the assessment, and resulting from inadequacies in internal processes ormisconduct
of employees. An entity conducting this type of risk assessment is hence essentially making decisions about risks that affect its own
operations and stem from its own operations; it owns these risks.2 In the case of risk registers, however, the risks that are identified and

Who selects
them, who is responsible for them, and who deals with them in what ways are questions
intimately intertwined with the establishment of risk registers, implicating authority and
legitimacy in security affairs and rearranging the relationship between politics and security.
analysed by civil protection agencies are conceptualized as risks to the collective (the state or, rather, the population).

63

Prediction Impossible
Risk analysis is impossible and leads to serial policy failure
Hagmann & Cavelty 12
(Jonas, Myriam, international relations scholars, National risk registers: Security scientism and the propagation of permanent
insecurity Security Dialogue, Feb 15th 2012, pdf p. 87-88) //ACT
Risk registers advance a specific understanding of what kinds of authority should be entrusted with guiding security politics. They strongly
draw on scientific methods to assess and rank public dangers and privilege the risk-assessment methodologies of hard sciences such as
engineering or econometrics. Ultimately, this methodological decision is directly conducive to providing a detailed and convincing map of
public danger. In

practice, however, neither are the chosen scientific bases as hard as they appear
to be, nor is their selection devoid of effects on the wider politics of security as such. Indeed, the
kind of risk analysis that is predicated on engineering or econometrics is a highly demanding
operation requiring solid and often large amounts of data. Often, such data are not available, or
not or only partially reliable. In the realm of social and political dangers in particular, expert
focus groups function as the primary sources of knowledge. In such instances, expert opinions
normally provide the only data available to risk-register production. This means that informed
subjective estimations, or peer-discussed agreements, often function as the sole available data
on certain risks a far cry from hard facts. On the other hand, data on natural and technical
hazards are also often less reliable than they are made to appear . More often than not, data on
natural hazards are incomplete and therefore cannot provide detailed understandings of
historical occurrences and damages (Brndel, 2009). By contrast, data on technical hazards are typically generated by
controlled experiments. The results of such controlled experiments working on closed technical systems are still partially applicable to the
everyday use of technology that is, its interaction with social and natural systems. In many respects, then, risk

registers rely on
a patchwork of scientist/expert data rather than on secure scientific knowledge . Notwithstanding the
questionable validity of risk registers scientific bases, risk analysts tend to handle and especially present their data as if they were hard
facts. The risk-register publications are a case in point: While assemblers of risk registers acknowledge the patchy construction of data in
private conversations, the published findings do not problematize methodology or data. Instead, risk maps and rankings are presented as
authoritative truth statements. Far

from providing entry points for debates on validity or content, risk

evaluation and its results are presented in a seemingly unproblematic, matter-of-fact way. This
mobilization of science allows risk registers to assume powerful positions of authority on the
subject of public danger, as the intimate reliance on scientific methodology empowers a
modernist kind of truth-speaking (Bourdieu, 2004). By claiming the mantle of science, risk registers purport to define public
insecurity in a disengaged manner. Drawing on scientific modes of inquiry, risk registers claim to operate from an Archimedean vantage
point, a position from which a neutral, objective and truthful description of reality can be made. This

assertion of scientific
truth is sought after and broadly welcomed by the larger policymaking apparatus, as the
assertion of scientific knowledge about public dangers provides a stable paradigm for
policymaking. Within that paradigm, scientific knowledge provides tangible and undisputed guidance for policy design in the form of
actionable knowledge. The assertion of scientific authority has larger effects on how security can be discussed. Given the
modernist standing of science as disengaged objective truth, scientific inquiry is held to trump
other processes of knowledge creation (Feyerabend, 1981).

64

Prior Question
The ability to choose rationally between competing policy options rests on
positivism. Our K is a prior question
Marston 04
(Greg, Bachelor of Social Science (QUT), PHD (UQ) Social policy and Discourse Analysis , 2004 p. 14-15)//ACT
The positivist paradigm informs an idealized rational actor understanding of the policy-making
process. The rational approach to policy-making is an extension of particular forms of positivism and neo-positivism that seek to purge the
social scientist of values (Bryman, 1988, p.14). This idea of reason without values is maintained through instrumental and technical rationality.
Instrumental rationality in policy-making can be defined as follows: 'in any organization there might be a number of ways of reaching goals; and when faced
with the need to make a choice between alternatives the rational decision maker chooses the alternative most likely to achieve the desired outcome' (Ham and
Hill, 1993, p.77). The

idealistic representation of policy as a form of 'rational decision making' between

available choices and options is problematic for a number of reasons. The limitations of rational approaches to policy-making
arise from an insufficient account of the political context, insufficient emphasis on the
participants in the process (and their conflicting interests) and the 'ideal type' nature of the models themselves (Dalton et al, 1996, p.17). A positivist
view of policy-making asserts policy solutions as universal truths waiting to be discovered by the so-called policy 'expert'. Hillyard and Watson (1996, p.324)
argue that this perception denies the constitutive role of discourse. In short, a positivist epistemology is not an adequate position for researchers and policy
analysts aiming to explore and understand how policy meanings are discursively constructed, how regulatory functions of the state are being transformed and

By focusing on 'objective' outcomes and grand

narratives of 'progress', 'rationality' and 'truth', we remain blind to the multifaceted nature of policymaking processes. Positivist accounts of the social world do not recognize the constructive nature of discursive
processes that produce knowledge and identities, or how conflict over policy meanings is manifested within specific policy
environments. While not denying the place of positivist informed research in social planning, this paradigm is limited when it comes to
understanding questions of power as experienced in the production, reproduction and transformation of policy
agendas. As Yanow (1996, p.6) argues. 'positivist knowledge does not give us information about meanings made by actors in a situation. When we read a
policy we see more than just marks on a page. we hear more than just sound waves'. Exploring the discursive dimensions of
policy-making requires alternative theoretical frameworks and epistemologies that are able to capture the
processes of subjectification and the relationship between agency, identity and discourse in local policy contexts. The various
how policy actors represent and articulate policy problems and solutions.

strands of critical social theory and post-structuralism are areas of theorizing that offer social policy researchers different ways of thinking about language and
culture.

65

Serial Policy Failure (Environment)

Representations of climate change apocalypse masks underlying causes and renders
policy decisions solely technicalshielding the system that is at the root of the crisis.
Crist 07
[Eileen Christ, Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse 2007]

While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in
representing it as the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner
deserves to be challenged for two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to
the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the needed approaches are those that
directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planets ecological predicament
as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all
others.Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the
highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific
challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve the
problem. Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind
turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use,
developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the suns
rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas
emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating
their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to face climate change by
changing our whole style of living.16 But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come away with, is
his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, the one lifeline we can use
immediately.17 In the policy realm, the first step toward the technological fix for global
warming is often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty,
comparing the need for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. The
Montreal protocol, he submits, marks a signal moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity
over a global pollution problem.18 He hopes for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet

the deepening
realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone
depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the
planets predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long
underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be nave not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after
the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if

greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by

means of technological shifts and innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole
would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of production, trade, extraction, land-use,
waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth, would go unchallenged,
continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has
entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and
perceived entitlement to, the entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climatechange discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization
that are causing the climate crisisamong numerous other catastrophesclimate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is
endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.The

dominant
frame of climate change funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing
global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate change looms so
huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying
other facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued
old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear
secondary and more forgiving by comparison with dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

66

FW

67

FW K First
Critique comes before policymaking: problem-solution models follow from
epistemological and ontological assumptions about the world in which they function.
Dillon and Reed 2000
[Michael, Professor of Politics at Lancaster, and Julian, Lecturer in International Relations at Kings College, Global
Governance, Liberal Peace, Complex Emergency, in Alternatives 25:1]
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses

the question of
order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of
the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of
specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not
necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics,
resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where

there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and

where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault
noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and
redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and
dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality .
[ 34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is
expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and
elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains.
Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically
and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous
attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers . Policy "actors" develop and
compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we
may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that
Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In

principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be
problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any
problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a
market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy
sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is
constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems,"
and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological
assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an
epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the
suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such
assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since
they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in
fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the
control that they want. Yet serial policy failurethe fate and the fuel of all policy--compels
them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in
which they constantly find themselves enmeshed .[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple
shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy
failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in
which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through
fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to

68
negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very
changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy
failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems
simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs
socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very

In consequence, thinking and acting politically

is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge
networks, and by the local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their
policies. These now threaten to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about .[ 36] It
is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that
there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The
"subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well , since the concept
detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.

69

FW Discourse Key
Discourse is the fundamental mechanism that makes the affirmatives
representations possible policymaking is a secondary question to the discursive
constructions that make the policy possible in the first place.
Campbell 92
[David: Australian political scientist, written four books, PhD from Australian National University, and has been a professor at
several universities. Writing Security University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis p. 43]
More specifically, this question concerns the problematizations which make possible our conventional understanding of global politics as
international relations and of foreign policy as the province of a state. Thus, if one were operating in terms of the 'levels-of-analysis'
metaphor to be found in the traditional international relations literature, the argument here needs to be regarded at a level beyond that
associated with either the state or the international system.3 The

argument here is concerned with the

representation of history that allows us to talk in terms of 'the state' and 'the international
system,' and the impact that problematization has had on our understanding of foreign policy.
In this context, the discussion of foreign policy is not about policy per se, although it has
manifest political implications. Rather, it is about how the conventional understanding of
foreign policy was made possible via a discursive economy that gave value to representational
practices associated with a particular problematization. The first task is to examine the
conventional understanding of foreign policy dominant within the discipline and the
representation of history that makes it possible.

Framework is discourse and discourse is framework: discourse is the medium

through which we comprehend and constitute the world around us.
Bleiker 2k
Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National
University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular
Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)
While appreciating these basic assumptions about contemporary global politics, my conceptualisation of transversal dissent embarks on a
different path, and this not only because of the problematic statecentric nature around which the structureagency debate has developed.
Instead of articulating issues of agency in relation to structures, my approach relies on what could be called a discourseagency axis.

Discourses are, in their broadest meaning, frameworks of knowledge and power through which
we comprehend (and constitute) the world around us. Because the conceptual range of a discursive approach is
broader than that of a structural one, it is better suited to scrutinise transversal struggles. The notion of structure, especially
as applied in international theory, is intrinsically linked to neorealist, statist and spatial
perceptions of world politics. But even outside the realist paradigm, structures often remain too
closely identified with institutional practices and the type of societal order they sustain. The notion of
discourse, by contrast, encapsulates not only the structural terrains of rules and norms, but also
a variety of other aspects, such as language and culture, that interfere with the mutually
constituted and transversal production of power and knowledge. 29 But posing questions of
transversal dissent and human agency in relation to discourses breaks theoretical taboos. It creates
various forms of anxieties. There are possible objections from those who employ the concept of discourse in their work. Neither Heidegger
nor Foucault, for instance, nor many of their subsequent interpreters, have dealt with questions of agency in an explicit and systematic way.

This omission has often been equated with an image of the world in which human beings are
engulfed by discursive webs to the point that action becomes no more than a reflection of

70
externally imposed circumstances. Towards such interpretations my challenge will consist in
demonstrating that it is feasible as well as worthwhile to conceptualise the notion of human
agency. In fact, my analysis will seek to show how this alleged inability or unwillingness to speak of agency is
more often than not a reflection of anti-postmodern polemic, rather than a position that is
inherent to or advocated by most authors who have sought to apply a discursive approach to the
study of global politics.

71

Epistemology First
Epistemology comes first- The question of action must take a backseat to questions
of policy formation and assumptions surrounding problem-solving techniques.
Owen 02, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton (David, Reorienting
International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/653)
The first dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR theory and postmodernist IR theory (and
the examples illustrate the claims concerning pluralism and factionalism made in the introduction to this
section). It is exhibited when we read Walt warning of the danger of postmodernism as a kind of theoretical
decadence since issues of peace and war are too important for the field [of IR] to be diverted into a prolix
and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world,12 or find Keohane asserting sniffily that
Neither neorealist nor neoliberal institutionalists are content with interpreting texts: both sets of theorists
believe that there is an international political reality that can be partly understood, even if it will always

We should be wary of such denunciations

precisely because the issue at stake for the practitioners of this
prolix and self-indulgent discourse is the picturing of international
politics and the implications of this picturing for the epistemic and
ethical framing of the discipline, namely, the constitution of what phenomena are
appropriate objects of theoretical or other forms of enquiry. The kind of accounts provided
by practitioners of this type are not competing theories (hence Keohanes
complaint) but conceptual reproblematisations of the background that
informs theory construction, namely, the distinctions, concepts,
assumptions, inferences and assertability warrants that are taken for
granted in the course of the debate between, for example, neorealists and neoliberal
remain to some extent veiled.13

institutionalists (hence the point-missing character of Keohanes complaint). Thus, for example, Michael

The global system of sovereign states has been familiar both

structurally and symbolically in the daily acts of imagination through
which space and human identity are construed. The persistence of this
international imaginary has helped to support the political privilege
of sovereignty affiliations and territorialities. In recent years, however, a
variety of disciplines have offered conceptualizations that challenge
the familiar, bordered world of the discourse of international
relations.14 The point of these remarks is to call critically into question
the background picture (or, to use another term of art, the horizon) against which the
disciplinary discourse and practices of IR are conducted in order to make
this background itself an object of reflection and evaluation. In a similar vein, Rob Walker argues: Under
the present circumstances the question What is to be done? invites
a degree of arrogance that is all too visible in the behaviour of the
dominant political forces of our time. . . . The most pressing questions
of the age call not only for concrete policy options to be offered to
existing elites and institutions, but also, and more crucially, for a
serious rethinking of the ways in which it is possible for human
beings to live together.15 The aim of these comments is to draw to our attention the easily
forgotten fact that our existing ways of picturing international politics
emerge from, and in relation to, the very practices of international
politics with which they are engaged and it is entirely plausible (on
standard Humean grounds) that, under changing conditions of political activity,
Shapiro writes:

72
these ways of guiding reflection and action may lose their epistemic
and/or ethical value such that a deeper interrogation of the terms of
international politics is required. Whether or not one agrees with Walker that this is
currently required, it is a perfectly reasonable issue to raise. After all, as Quentin Skinner has recently
reminded us, it is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. . . .

As

we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to

become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about
them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual
traditions must be the ways of thinking about them.16 In this respect, one
effect of the kind of challenge posed by postmodernists like Michael Shapiro and Rob Walker is to prevent us
from becoming too readily bewitched.

The assumption that policymaking occurs in an objective vacuum is false--the

preconditions for any communicative exchange include the establishment of some
normative framework for evaluation. Their framework arguments only serve to
whitewash the value-ladenness of their procedural standards.
Owen 02
Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton (David, Reorienting International Relations: On Pragmatism,
Pluralism and Practical Reasoning, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3,
http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/653)
The third dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR theory and critical IR theory, where Whites

the confusion between

holding that forms of positivist IR theory ( e.g., neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism)
are necessarily either value-free or evaluative. It does so because we can now
see that, although forms of positivist IR theory are not normative theories, they presuppose
a background picture which orients our thinking through the framing of
not only what can be intelligibly up for grabs as true-or-false (the epistemic
framing) but also what can be intelligibly up for grabs as good-or-bad (the ethical
framing). As Charles Taylor has argued, a condition of our intelligibility as agents is that we
inhabit a moral framework which orients us in ethical space and our practices
of epistemic theorising cannot be intelligibly conceived as existing
independently of this orientation in thinking.21 The confusion in IR theory arises because, on the
one hand, positivist IR theory typically suppresses acknowledgement of its
own ethical presuppositions under the influence of the scientific model (e.g., Waltzs neorealism and
Keohanes neoliberal institutionalism), while, on the other hand, its (radical) critics typically view its ethical
characteristics as indicating that there is an evaluative or normative theory hidden, as it were,
within the folds of what presents itself as a value-free account . Consequently,
both regard the other as, in some sense, producing ideological forms of
knowledge; the positivists claim is that critical IR theory is ideological by virtue of its explicitly normative
distinction enables us to make sense of a related confusion, namely,

character, the critical theorists claim is that positivist IR theory is ideological by virtue of its failure to acknowledge

this mutual disdain is also a product

of the confusion of pictures and theories. Firstly, there is a confusion
between pictures and theories combined with the scientistic suppression
of the ethical presuppositions of IR theory. This finds expression in the
thought that we need to get our epistemic account of the world sorted out
before we can engage responsibly in ethical judgement about what to do,
and reflect on its own implicit normative commitments. But

73
where such epistemic adequacy requires the construction of a positive
theory that can explain the features of the world at issue. An example of this position is
provided by Waltzs neorealism.22 Against this first position, we may reasonably point
out that epistemic adequacy cannot be intelligibly specified independently
of background ethical commitments concerning what matters to us and
how it matters to us. Secondly, there is the confusion of pictures and theories combined with the
moralist overestimation of the ethical (ideological) commitments of IR theory. This finds expression in the thought

we need to get our ethical account sorted out before we can engage
responsibly in epistemic judgement about what to know, where such
ethical adequacy requires the construction of a moral theory and, more
particularly, a moral ideal that can direct the enterprise of epistemic
theorising. An example of this position is provided by Linklater s version of critical IR theory.23 Against this
position, we can reasonably point out that the kind of ethical adequacy required does not
entail the construction of a moral ideal but only the existence of some
shared ethical judgements concerning what matters to us that orient our
epistemic enquiries. The dual confusion in question leads fairly
straightforwardly to the thought that what is at stake here are
incompatible epistemological commitments and hence that debate
between positivist and critical forms of IR theory needs to be conducted at
an epistemological level. However, as my remarks indicate, this thought is mistaken insofar as the
that

apparent incompatibility from which it derives is an illusion.

74

A2 Section

75

Cede The Political

We dont cede the political, but take it back
Brown, 05
(Wendy, Professor of political science at UC Berkeley Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, p.95)//ACT
On the one hand, critical

theory cannot let itself be bound by political exigency; indeed, it has

something of an obligation to refuse such exigency. While there are always decisive choices to be
made in the political realm (whom to vote for, what policies to support or oppose, what action to take or defer), these very
delimitations of choice are often themselves the material of critical theory. Here we might remind
ourselves that prying apart immediate political constraints from intellectual ones is one path to being "governed a little less" in Foucault's
sense. Yet allowing

thinking its wildness beyond the immediate in order to reset the possibilities of
the immediate is also how this degoverning rearticulates critical theory and politics after
disarticulating them; critical theory comes back to politics offering a different sense of the times
and a different sense of time. It is also important to remember that the "immediate choices" are just that and often last no longer
than a political season (exemplified by the fact that the political conundrums with which this essay opened will be dated if not forgotten by
the time this book is published). Nor

is the argument convincing that critical theory threatens the

possibility of holding back the political dark. It is difficult to name a single instance in which
critical theory has killed off a progressive political project. Critical theory is not what makes
progressive political projects fail; at worst it might give them bad conscience, at best it renews
their imaginative reach and vigor.

76

Extinction First
The anxiety caused by security rhetoric destroys being and outweighs extinctions
Davis 01
(Walter, Professor of English at Ohio State, Deracination: Historocity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, p. 103-104) //ACT

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experiencethe one most deeply denied.
Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within, the fear that one has already been
annihilated; that, like Beckett, one has never been born properly and never will be because inner
paralysis is the psyches defining conditiona truth attested each time when, striving to cohere as a subject, one
collapses before the tidal wave of an aggression against oneself that rises up from within. An unspeakable dread weds the
psyche to terror. All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts. There is a threat worse than extinction . The
deepest self-knowledge we harbor, the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest selfreference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being. Death is the icy
wind that blows through all we do. This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements,
delays, and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread that is nameless and
must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us. In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of
ones power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is
experienced as an event that has already happened. That event forms the first self-reference:
the negative judgment of an Other on ones beinginternalized as self-undoing. Postmodern posturing
before the phrase I am an other here receives the concretization that shatters free play. There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity, a
self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world. The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice, in a despair that apparently
cannot be mediated: the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake, alone and arrested, all exits barred, facing inner paralysis as the
truth of ones life. We

ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an
even more terrifying process begins: an implosion in which ones subjective being is resolved
into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which
each suffered state descends in a final, chilling recognitionthat everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury, signifying

One has become a corpse with insomnia . Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void.
This is the hour of the wolf, where one is arrested before the primary fact: at the deepest register of the psyche one
finds a voice of terror. Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects. Subjectivity is
founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror,
fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us, resolving our subjective being into
traumatic episodes of pure persecution. At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides. To put it in nuclear
nothing.

metaphors: catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the others unlimited destructiveness. To complete the picture we need only
add Winnicotts point: people

live in dread of this situation, projecting fear of a breakdown into the

future, because the breakdown has already occurred.

The affirmative attempts to preserve stability and order, but neither are critical to
existence. The affirmative is complicit with structural violence that renders lack of
order as dirt, disease, and undesirability
Campbell 92 [David: Australian political scientist, written four books, PhD from Australian National
University, and has been a professor at several universities. Writing Security University of Minnesota
Press Minneapolis p. 93]
However one might begin to fathom the many issues located within those challenges, our current situation leaves us with one certainty:

because we cannot escape the logic of differentiation we are often tempted by the logic of
defilement. To say as much, however, it {is} not to argue that we are imprisoned within a particular and
permanent system of representations. To be sure, danger is more often than not represented as
disease, dirt, or pollution. As one medical text argues: 'Disease is shock and danger for existence.'32 Or as Karl Jaspers maintains:

77
'Disease is a general concept of non-value which includes all possible negative values.'33 But such
concerns have less to do with the intrinsic qualities of those conditions than the modernist
requirements of order and stability: 'Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative
moment, but a positive effort to organize the environment.'34 One might suggest that it is the extent to which we want
to organize the environment - the extent to which we want to purify our domain - that determines how likely it is that we represent danger in
terms of dirt or disease. Tightly

defined order and strictly enforced stability, undergirded by notions of

purity, are not a priori conditions of existence; some order and some stability might be required for
existence as we know it (i.e., in some form of extensive political community), but it is the degree of tightness, the
measure of strictness, and the extent of the desire for purity which constitutes danger as dirt or
disease.

78

Threats Real
Even if threats are real, embracing the danger of those is key to reinterpretation of
our security logic and start to break it down
Der Derian 98
(James, professor at Brown Univeristy of International Studies, The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard,
Ciaonet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html)//ACT

What if we leave the desire for mastery to the insecure and instead imagine a new dialogue of
security, not in the pursuit of a utopian end but in recognition of the world as it is , other than us ?
What might such a dialogue sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to understand the
discursive power of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess its economy of
use in the present, to reinterpret--and possibly construct through the reinterpretation --a late modern
security comfortable with a plurality of centers, multiple meanings, and fluid identities. The steps I take here in this direction are tentative
and preliminary. I first undertake a brief history of the concept itself. Second, I present the "originary" form of security that has so
dominated our conception of international relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider the impact of two major
challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And finally, I suggest that Baudrillard provides the best, if most
nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity. In short, I retell the story of realism as an historic encounter of fear and danger with power
and order that produced four realist forms of security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To preempt a predictable criticism, I
wish to make it clear that I am not in search of an "alternative security." An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who declared that

I am not
looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another
problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history
of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative . My point is not that
everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. 10
The hope is that in the interpretation of the most pressing dangers of late modernity we might
be able to construct a form of security based on the appreciation and articulation rather than
the normalization or extirpation of difference.
"questioning is the piety of thought." 9 Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security:

79

Util
Utilitarian forms of security are null and void.
Dillon 96
(p.29)author of books on security, war, international political theory, continental philosophy, and cultural research.
Lecturer at The University of Lancaster) CF

The questions about security, which the tradition ordinarily takes as its guide, ask: What ultimately secures us?
What do we ultimately wish to secure? How can we secure security? or, What is the most secure way of securing security? The
grounding questionWhat is the essence of security?simply does not unfold in our politics of
security at all; because it is taken to be the very ground of things itself, that unquestionable thing which anybody and anything needs in
order for it to be at all. Neither then does the answer which begins to emerge from that question that
security and insecurity are inherently relatedbegin to be addressed. Rather, throughout the course of its successive transformations,
Western political thought has been impelled by its metaphysical determination to secure the appropriate theoretical grounds and
instrumental means by which security itself could be secured. The politics of Western thought has, therefore, been a security project in the
fullest sense of the term. Driven by the requirement to secure security, it not only constituted an escape from politics but also, for reasons
and in ways I will elaborate later, a form of tragic denial. Preoccupied with command and rule, rather than with politics, it has been
substantially concerned in the modern period with specifying the conditions under which rulers can guarantee their subjects a secure
private existence. Along with that preoccupation, it has further found itself concerned to figure-out what price, in terms of obligations and
duties, subjects ought to pay for this privilege; and with whether, and under what terms and conditions,

they might determine

that this utilitarian security contract has been rendered null and void, so leaving them free to conclude
another.

80

AFF

81

Always VTL
Always a value to life
Augustine 2k
Keith, Death and the Meaning of Life http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/augustine1.html
These considerations show that we must create our own meaning for our lives regardless of whether or not our lives serve some higher
purpose. Whether

our lives are meaningful to us depends on how we judge them. The absence or presence of
greater purpose is as irrelevant as the finality of death. The claim that our lives are 'ultimately' meaningless does not
make sense because there is no sense in which they could be meaningful or meaningless outside of how
we regard them. Questions about the meaning of life are questions about values. We attribute values to things in life rather than
discovering them. There can be no meaning of life outside of the meaning we create for ourselves because the universe is not a sentient
being that can attribute values to things. Even if a sentient God existed, the value that he would attribute to our lives would not be the same
as the value that we find in living and thus would be irrelevant.

82

Epistemology Defense

83

Epistemological Focus Bad

Discursive focus generates epistemological blind spots and wont alter security
structures
Hyde-Price 2000
Adrian Hyde-Price 2k (Professor of International Politics at Bath) 2001 Europes new security challenges p. 39

Securitization thus focuses almost exclusively on the discursive domain and eschews any
attempt to determine empirically what constitutes security concerns. It does not aspire to
comment on the reality behind a securitization discourse or on the appropriate instruments for
tackling security problems. Instead, it suggests that security studies or what Waever calls securitization
studies should focus on the discursive moves whereby issues are securitized. The Copenhagen school thus
emphasizes the need to understand the speech acts that accomplish a process of securitization. Their focus is on the linguistic and
conceptual dynamics involved, even though they recognize the importance of the institutional setting within which securitization takes
place.

The concept of securitization offers some important insights for security studies. However,
it is too epistemologically restricted to contribute to a significant retooling of security studies . On
the positive side, it draws attention to the way in which security agendas are constructed bgy politicians and other political actors. It also
indicates the utility of discourse analysis as an additional tool of analysis for security studies. However, at

best, securitization
studies can contribute one aspect of security studies. It cannot provide the foundations for a
paradigm shift in the subdiscipline. Its greatest weakness is its epistemological hypochondria.
That is, its tendency to reify epistemological problems and push sound observations about
knowledge claims to their logical absurdity. Although it isimportant to understand the
discursive moves involved in perception of security in, say, the Middle East, it is also necessary to make
some assessment of nondiscursive factors like the military balance or access to freshwater
supplies. For the Copenhagen school, however, these nondiscursive factors are relegated to second place. They are considered only to
the extent that they facilitate or impede the speech act. In this way, the Copenhagen school is in danger of cutting security studies off from
serious empirical research and setting it adrift on a sea of floating signifiers.

84

Empiricism Good
Empiricism creates accurate representations our epistemology is sound
Liu 96
(Xiuwu, Assistant Prof. Interdisciplinary Studies Miami U. Ohio, Western perspectives on Chinese higher education, p. 2224, Google Print)
The pervious section goes to some lengths to underscore the plain fact that the studied society exists independently of studies of it.
Constructivists may contend that I missed their point. They may say, for example, that they never doubted the independent existence of
society and that the thrust of their position lies in denying that we can arrive at the Truth about any aspect of society. Their point about the
perspectival nature of knowledge is well taken, and realist constructivism contains that insight. "Anything goes" is a realist or rationalist
caricature of relativism (Geertz 1984; Putnam 1990; Rorty 1982) just as talk about Truth is a constructivist caricature of the epistemology
of "old-fashioned" scholarship. What I call social ontological realism is part of the general philosophical position of ontological realism,
which asserts the mind-independent existence of reality. It asserts the study-independent existence of society and, in cross-cultural inquiry,
the study independent existence of other societies. I give it special emphasis for two reasons. First, the concept of social reality has been
neglected in recent constructivist works. Sometimes

constructivists imply or even insist that there is no

reality except that which is represented (Lincoln and Guba 198, chap. 3). For example, in her survey of feminist methods
in social research, Shulamit Reinharz discusses a prevalent attitude of feminist ethnographers toward positivism.13 Some feminist
researchers continue to reject positivism [referring in this context to testing or large-scale
surveys] as an aspect of patriarchal thinking that separates the scientist from the phenomenon
under study. They repudiate the idea of a social reality out there independent of the observer.
Rather, they think that social research should be guided by a constructivist framework in which researchers acknowledge that they interpret

This position commits the epistemic fallacy in that it reduces social

reality to what is known about it (Bhaskar 1989; Outhwaite 1987, 76). While scholarly understanding of social
reality is, to use a catchphrase of hermeneutics, always already interpreted, social reality in itself has its
and define reality. (1992, 46)14

own existence . Because that reality has its own existence, insufficient attention to it will result
in unrealistic representations of it. Put differently, realist constructivism attends to both ontological
and epistemological aspects of cross-cultural inquiry, redressing the balance brought about by constructivist
thinking. How this may be done in one area of empirical cross-cultural studies will be shown in my analyses of Western studies of Chinese
education. In the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of social science a prevalent position on ontological realism (usually
called metaphysical realism) is that it is trivial or banal (Hesse 1992; McGinn 1995). This is because once the existence of specific entities
(class, in social science, for example) is broached, the discussion becomes theory-laden.15 On the other hand, as Walker and Evers point
out, from

the fact that all experience is theory-laden, that what we believe exists depends on
what theory we adopt, it does not follow that all theories are evidentially equivalent or equally
reasonable (1988, 33). To reconcile these two insights for the present discussion, I suggest that in cross-cultural inquiry, ontological
realism is not so trivial as has been deemed generally, where empirical checks are crucial to producing highly realistic representations of
other societies.16 The objection that it is not so much the fact that another society has an independent existence but how that society exists
that matters to empirical inquiry, though helpful, ignores the fact that the latter assumes the former. My second reason for emphasizing
social ontological realism concerns the requirement that an adequate account of cross-cultural inquiry satisfactorily explains why some
statements are realistic while others are not. As the remaining chapters of this book aim to show, in most cases the task is not deciding
between an account that is realistic and another that is not. Rather, in actual inquiry, a scholars task amounts to choosing from a limited
number of plausible accounts what she considers to be the most appropriate one. Nevertheless, in those limiting taken-for-granted cases,
social ontological realism does make possible a distinction between realistic statements and unrealistic ones (unrealistic in the sense that
they utterly fail to represent or belie an aspect of social reality within a given conteExt.). An adequate model for cross-cultural inquiry
should account for these limiting cases.

85

Predictions Good
Even if we cant be certain about every cause, our predictions are good enough
guides to create successful policies
Walt 2005
(The relationship between theory and policy in international relations Annual review of political science, 23-48)

Policy decisions can be influenced by several types of knowledge. First, policy makers
invariably rely on purely factual knowledge (e.g., how large are the opponents forces? What is the current balance of
payments?). Second, decision makers sometimes employ rules of thumb: simple decision rules
acquired through experience rather than via systematic study (Mearsheimer 1989).3 A third type of knowledge
consists of typologies, which classify phenomena based on sets of specific traits. Policy makers can also rely on
empirical laws. An empirical law is an observed correspondence between two or more
phenomena that systematic inquiry has shown to be reliable. Such laws (e.g., democracies do
not fight each other or human beings are more risk averse with respect to losses than to
gains) can be useful guides even if we do not know why they occur, or if our explanations for
them are incorrect. Finally, policy makers can also use theories. A theory is a causal explanation
it identifies recurring relations between two or more phenomena and explains why that
relationship obtains. By providing us with a picture of the central forces that determine realworld behavior, theories invariably simplify reality in order to render it comprehensible. At the
most general level, theoretical IR work consists of efforts by social scientists. . .to account for
interstate and trans-state processes, issues, and outcomes in general causal terms (Lepgold &
Nincic 2001, p. 5; Viotti & Kauppi 1993). IR theories offer explanations for the level of security
competition between states (including both the likelihood of war among particular states and
the warproneness of specific countries); the level and forms of international cooperation (e.g.,
alliances, regimes, openness to trade and investment); the spread of ideas, norms, and
institutions; and the transformation of particular international systems, among other topics. In
constructing these theories, IR scholars employ an equally diverse set of explanatory variables.
Some of these theories operate at the level of the international system, using variables such as the distribution of power among states (Waltz
1979, Copeland 2000, Mearsheimer 2001), the volume of trade, financial flows, and interstate communications (Deutsch 1969, Ruggie
1983, Rosecrance 1986); or the degree of institutionalization among states (Keohane 1984, Keohane & Martin 2003). Other theories
emphasize different national characteristics, such as regime type (Andreski 1980, Doyle 1986, Fearon 1994, Russett 1995), bureaucratic
and organizational politics (Allison & Halperin 1972, Halperin 1972), or domestic cohesion (Levy 1989); or the content of particular ideas
or doctrines (Van Evera 1984, Hall 1989, Goldstein & Keohane 1993, Snyder 1993). Yet another family of theories operates at the
individual level, focusing on individual or group psychology, gender differences, and other human traits (De Rivera 1968, Jervis 1976,
Mercer 1996, Byman&Pollock 2001, Goldgeier&Tetlock 2001, Tickner 2001, Goldstein 2003), while a fourth body of theory focuses on
collective ideas, identities, and social discourse (e.g., Finnemore 1996, Ruggie 1998, Wendt 1999). To develop

these ideas, IR
theorists employ the full range of social science methods: comparative case studies, formal
theory, large-N statistical analysis, and hermeneutical or interpretivist approaches.

86

Realism Good
Rejecting realism makes it more dangerous we have to use it strategically
Guzzini 98
Stefano Guzzini, Assis. Prof @ Central European U, Realism in Intl Relations, 1998, p. 212
Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that it is

impossible just to heap realism onto the dustbin of

history and start anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a disappointment, various
realist assumptions are well alive in the minds of many practitioners and observers of
international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a theory which helps us to understand a real world with objective laws, it
is a world-view which suggests thoughts about it, and which permeates our daily language for making sense of it. Realism
has been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which, in the hands of its
most gifted representatives, have been proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international
affairs. Realism

is alive in the collective memory and self-understanding of our (i.e. Western) foreign
policy elite and public whether educated or not. Hence, we cannot but deal with it. For this reason, forgetting realism
is also questionable. Of course, academic observers should not bow to the whims of daily politics. But staying at distance, or being
critical, does not mean that they should lose the capacity to understand the languages of those
who make significant decisions not only in government, but also in firms, NGOs, and other institutions. To the
contrary, this understanding, as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very profession. More
particularly, it is a prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name although not always
necessarily in the spirit, of realism.

Perm solves realism is self-reforming. The alternative is out of touch with obstacles
within the current structure of international politics, which undermines effective
transition strategies.
Murray 97
[Alastair J.H. Murray, Politics @ Wales, Reconstructing Realism, 1997, p. 178-9]
In Wendts constructivism, the argument appears in its most basic version, presenting an analysis of realist assumptions which associate it
with a conservative account of human nature. In Linklaters critical theory it moves a stage further, presenting an analysis of realist theory
which locates it within a conservative discourse of state-centrism. In Ashleys post-structuralism it reaches its highest form, presenting an
analysis of realist strategy which locates it not merely within a conservative statist order, but, moreover, within an active conspiracy of
silence to reproduce it. Finally, in Tickners feminism, realism becomes all three simultaneously and more besides, a vital player in a
greater, overarching, masculine conspiracy against femininity. Realism thus appears, first, as a doctrine providing the grounds for a
relentless pessimism, second, as a theory which provides an active justification for such pessimism, and, third, as a strategy which
proactively seeks to enforce this pessimism, before it becomes the vital foundation underlying all such pessimism in international theory.
Yet, an examination of the arguments put forward from each of these perspectives suggests not only that the

effort to locate
realism within a conservative, rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to
provide reformist strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves. The
progressive purpose which motivates the critique of realism in these perspectives ultimately generates a bias
which undermines their own ability to generate effective strategies of transition. In constructivism, this
bias appears in its most limited version, producing strategies so divorced from the obstacles presented by the
current structure of international politics that they threaten to become counter-productive. In
critical theory it moves a stage further, produc[es]ing strategies so abstract that one is at a loss
to determine what they actually imply in terms of the current structure of international politics. And, in post-modernism, it
reaches its highest form producing an absence of such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at which we are left

87
with nothing but critique. Against this failure, realism contains the potential to act as the basis
of a more constructive approach to international relations, incorporating many of the strengths
of reflectivism and yet avoiding its weaknesses. It appears , in the final analysis, as an opening within
which some synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism, of conservatism and progressivism, might
be built.

Alt cant solve behind closed doors elites like Bush will still speak the language of
power you cant change their minds
Mearsheimer 2001
John Mearsheimer, pub. date: 2001, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Because Americans

dislike realpolitik, public discourse about foreign policy in the United States is
usually couched in the language of liberalism. Hence the pronouncements of the policy elites are heavily flavored with
optimism and moralism. American academics are especially good at promoting liberal thinking in the marketplace of idea.
Behind closed doors, however, the elites who make national security policy speak mostly the
language of power not that of principle and the United States acts in the international system
according to the dictates of realist logic. In essence, a discernible gap separates public rhetoric from the actual conduct of

88

Impact Framing

89

Extinction First
Preventing extinction is the only way to be able to discuss our assumptions and the
world around us
Wapner 3
[Paul Wapner is associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University,
DISSENT / Winter 2003]
All attempts to listen to nature are, indeed, social constructions, except one. Even

the most radical postmodernist

acknowledges the distinction between physical existence and nonexistence. As mentioned,
postmodernists assume that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world, even if
they argue about its different meanings. This substratum is essential for allowing entities to
speak or express themselves. That which doesn't exist, doesn't speak. That which doesn't exist,
manifests no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting
nature's expressions. And everyone should be wary about those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including when
environmentalists and students of global environmental politics do so). But we should not doubt the simple-minded
notion that a prerequisite of expression is existence. That which doesn't exist can never express
itself. And this in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by ecocritics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation.

The possibility of extinction requires the assessment of risks despite probability

Yudkowsky 8
(Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder Eliezer, January 22 nd 2008,
Circular Altruism)
Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X

is not an existential risk and you don't

need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E
potentially extinguishes the human species. "We don't need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because a UN
commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time as an active shield is developed, capable of
defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will
persist indefinitely." Vivid, specific

scenarios can inflate our probability estimates of security, as well as misdirecting

defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly detailed risk scenarios. More generally, people tend to overestimate
conjunctive probabilities and underestimate disjunctive probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1974.) That is, people tend
to overestimate the probability that, e.g., seven events of 90% probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to underestimate the
probability that at least one of seven events of 10% probability will occur. Someone judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup,
must evaluate the probability that many individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers
will want the product) while also considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses a loan, the biggest
project fails, the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44% of entrepreneurial ventures3 survive after 4 years. (Knaup 2005.)
Dawes (1988) observes: 'In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions ("either this or that or the other could have occurred,
all of which would lead to the same conclusion") in favor of conjunctions. Rationally, of course, disjunctions are much more probable than
are conjunctions.' The scenario of humanity

going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive event. It could happen

as a result of any of the existential risks discussed in this book - or some other cause which none of us fore saw. Yet for a
futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy.

90

Impact Turns
Enemy creation is critical to avoid a violent state of psychosis that creates
comparatively more violence
Reinhard 2004
Kenneth Reinhard (professor at UCLA) 2004 Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/jewishst/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf
If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition , the
world we find ourselves in today is one from which the political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange
new shape. A world

not anchored by the us and them binarisms that flourished as recently as

the Cold War is one subject to radical instability , both subjectively and politically, as Jacques Derrida points out in
The Politics of Friendship: The effects of this destructuration would be countless: the subject in question would be looking for new
reconstitutive enmities; it

would multiply little wars between nation-states; it would sustain at any

price so-called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still
identifiable adversaries China, Islam? Enemies without which it would lose its political being without an enemy, and therefore
without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? (PF 77) If one accepts Schmitts account of the political, the

disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring
relationship between Us and Them provides a form of stablility , albeit one based on projective identifications
and repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the imaginary tripod
that props up the psychotic with a sort of pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to
collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. Hence, for Schmitt, a world
without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is surrounded by enemies ; as Derrida
writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice
knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented therefore monstrous forms; a violence in the
face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours,
because they would be identifiable (PF 83).

International politics is a cold-hearted system of selfish intentions- securitization is

necessary. For short-term and long-term survival
Mearsheimer 2001
John J. Mearsheimer 2001 the tradgedy of great power politics

States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Beacause other states are
potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911,
states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable
and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for tis own survivial. In intentional politics, God helps those who
help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances. But alliances are only temporary marriages of
convenience: todays alliance partner might be tomorrows enemy, and todays enemy might be tomorrows alliance partner. For example,
the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flip-flopped
enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. States

operating in a self-help world almost always act according to their own self-interest and do not
subordinate their interests to the interests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called
international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the
short term as well as in the long term, because if a state loses in the short run, it might not be
around for the long haul.

91

A2: Ethics
Moral absolutism creates tunnel vision, bad action and irrelevant education
Isaac 2
(Jeffrey C. Isaac, professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and
Public Life, PhD from Yale, Spring 2002, Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an

unyielding concern
with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable,
reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity
of ones intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or
refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right
thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral
good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence
and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity
in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a
potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with
any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant.
Just as the alignment with good may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This is
the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always,
to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral
absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political
effectiveness.

92

Perm Key to Confront Threats

We must confront threats key to prevent ceding the political does not preclude
the transformative potential of securitization
Franke 9
(Associate Prof of Comparative lit at Vanderbilt William Poetry and Apocalypse Page 92-93)

Apocalypse prima facie refuses and makes an end of dialogue: it thunders down invincibly from
above. But for this very reason the greatest test of our dialogical capacity is whether we can
dialogue with the corresponding attitude or must resort to exclusionary maneuvers and force. What is
called for here is a capacity on the part of dialogue not to defend itself but to let itself happen in interaction with an attitude that is
apparently intolerant of dialogue. Letting

this possibility be, coming into contact with it, with the threat of dialogue
itself, may seem to be courting disaster for dialogue. It is indeed a letting down of defenses. Can dialogue
survive such a surrendering of itself in utter vulnerability to the enemy of dialogue? Or perhaps we should ask, can it rise up again, after this
self-surrender, in new power for bringing together a scattered, defeated humanity to share in an open but commonly sought and
unanimously beckoned Logos of mutual comprehension and communication? May this, after all, be

the true and authentic

end of dialogue provoked by apocalypse? For what it is worth, my apocalyptic counsel is that we must attempt
an openness to dialogue even in this absolute vulnerability and risk. The world is certainly not a
safe place, and it will surely continue not to be such, short of something apocalyptic. Needed ,
ever again, is something on the order of an apocalypse, not just a new attitude or a new anything that we can
ourselves simply produce. Philosophy itself, thought through to its own end, can hardly resist concluding
that only a god can save us (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten). But can not our attitude make a difference- perhaps make
possible the advent of apocalypse beyond all our powers, even those of our own imaginations? I will wager an answer to this
question only in the operative mood. May we bring a voice speaking up for mutual understanding onto
the horizon of discourse in our time, a time marked by the terrifying sign of apocalyptic
discourse. May we do this not by judging apocalyptic discourse, but by accepting that our
condition as humans is as much to be judged as to judge and that all our relatively justified judgments are such to the extend that
they offer themselves to be judged rather than standing on their own ground as absolute. In other words, may our discussions remain
open to apocalypse, open to what we cannot represent or prescribe but can nevertheless undergo in a process of
transformation that can be shared with others and that may be genuinely dialogue.

93

Perm Includes Realism

Perm solvesincludes realism.
Recchia 07
(Stefano Recchia, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Restraining Imperial Hubris: The
Ethical Bases of Realist International Relations Theory Volume 15, No 4, EBSCO Host)
In conclusion, twentieth-century

realism represents a rich and inspiring, although largely negative tradition of argument in
against imperial hubris by advocating prudence and moral restraint,
and it displays an overall healthy skepticism concerning the perfectibility of social and political
relationships. However, the utter pessimism on human nature and politics more broadly often bordering on outright cynicism of
international ethics: it counsels

influential realist figures, such as Morgenthau in particular, appears largely unwarranted today and was probably in large part a disillusioned
reaction to the experience ofWorldWar II. Perhaps most crucially from a normative viewpoint, the traditional realists all greatly
underestimated our moral duties towards other fellow human beings across national borders. Given the awareness of such duties by
American citizens, and the influence this awareness has had on U.S. foreign policy, the traditional realists quite dogmatic denial that such
international duties exist ultimately reduced their ability to engage in a fruitful dialogue on the ethical underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy.
As E.H. Carr, the founder of modern Anglo-American realism and one of the most eclectic IR theorists ever put it roughly seventy years
ago: in

order to develop purposive or meaningful international thought, followed by action that aims
notions of prudence and restraint ultimately need to be
supplemented with the aspirations of liberal universalism; in other words, utopianism needs to penetrate the
citadel of realism.75 Contemporary realists ought to cherish this advice, by reengaging with and
further developing the normative theory of their forebears, to ensure the paradigms continued
relevance in the future.
beyond mere self-preservation, realist

94

Boggs
Abdicating political engagement causes elites to take control of the government and
culminates in extinction
Boggs 97 (Carl, Professor of Political Sience National University, Theory & Society 26, December, p.
773-4)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological
currents scrutinized here ^ localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post- modernism, Deep Ecology intersect with and reinforce each other.
While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite
their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized

expression of struggles to
combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such
mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship
and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this
ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go
unsolved perhaps even unrecognized only to fester more ominously into the future. And such
problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological
displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized
markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by
localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or side- step these global realities
will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the
increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting
the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of
the world hangs in the balance. The

unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes

more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power
that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The
shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that
social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose
their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, wellinformed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and
reactionary elites an already familiar dynamic in many lesser- developed countries. The
fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence
that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face
of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise or
it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the
embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.75

95

Alt Turns
Total rejection of security discourse causes war.
Doran 99
Charles F. Doran is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins Universitys School of Advanced
International Studies, Washington DC, Is Major War Obsolete? An Exchange Survival, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 139
52
The conclusion, then, is that the probability of major war declines for some states, but increases for others. And it is very difficult to argue
that it has disappeared in any significant or reliable or hopeful sense. Moreover, a

problem with arguing a position that

might be described as utopian is that such arguments have policy implications. It is worrying that as a
thesis about the obsolescence of major war becomes more compelling to more people, including presumably governments,
the tendency will be to forget about the underlying problem, which is not war per Se, but security.
And by neglecting the underlying problem of security, the probability of war perversely
increases: as governments fail to provide the kind of defence and security necessary to maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility
of new challenges. In this regard it is worth recalling one of Clauswitzs most important insights: A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He
would like to make his entry into our state unopposed. That is the underlying dilemma when one argues that a major war is not likely to
occur and, as a consequence, one need not necessarily be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security itself. History
shows that surprise threats emerge and rapid destabilising efforts are made to try to provide that missing defence, and all of this contributes
to the spiral of uncertainty that leads in the end to war.

The alternatives fails and causes a spiral of insecurity that causes the most violent
aspects of your impact claims only taking strategic political action like the plan
solves
Liotta 05
P. H. Liotta (Professor of Humanities at Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, andExecutive Director of the Pell Center for
International Relations and Public Policy) 2005 Through the Looking Glass Sage Publications

Although it seems attractive to focus on exclusionary concepts that insist on desecuritization, privileged referent
objects, and the belief that threats and vulnerabilities are little more than social constructions
(Grayson, 2003), all these concepts work in theory but fail in practice . While it may be true that national security paradigms can,
and likely will, continue to dominate issues that involve human security vulnerabilities and even in some instances mistakenly confuse vulnerabilities as threats there are distinct
linkages between these security concepts and applications. With regard to environmental security, for example, Myers (1986: 251) recognized these linkages nearly two decades ago:
National security is not just about fighting forces and weaponry. It relates to watersheds, croplands, forests, genetic resources, climate and other factors that rarely figure in the minds of
military experts and political leaders, but increasingly deserve, in their collectivity, to rank alongside military approaches as crucial in a nations security. Ultimately, we are far from what
OHanlon & Singer (2004) term a global intervention capability on behalf of humanitarian transformation. Granted, we now have the threat of mass casualty terrorism anytime,

the global community today also faces many of the

same problems of the 1990s: civil wars, faltering states, humanitarian crises. We are nowhere
closer toaddressing how best to solve these challenges, even as they affect issues of environmental, human, national
anywhere and states and regions are responding differently to this challenge. Yet,

(and even embedded) security. Recently, there have been a number of voices that have spoken out on what the International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty has termed the responsibility to protect:10 the responsibility of some agency or state (whether it be
a superpower such as the United States or an institution such as the United Nations) to enforce the principle of security that sovereign states
owe to their citizens. Yet, the

creation of a sense of urgency to act even on some issues that may not have some impact
is perhaps the only appropriate first response. The real cost of not
investing in the right way and early enough in the places where trends and effects are
accelerating in the wrong direction is likely to be decades and decades of economic and political
frustration and, potentially, military engagement . Rather than justifying intervention (especially military), we ought to be justifying
for years or even decades to come

investment. Simply addressing the immensities of these challenges is not enough. Radical improvements in public infrastructure and support for better governance, particularly in states
and municipalities (especially along the LagosCairoKarachiJakarta arc), will both improve security and create the conditions for shrinking the gap between expectations and
opportunity. A real debate ought to be taking place today. Rather than dismissing alternative security foci outright, a larger examination of what forms of security are relevant and right
among communities, states, and regions, and which even might apply to a global rule-set as well as what types of security are not relevant seems appropriate and necessary. If this
occurs, a truly remarkable tectonic shift might take place in the conduct of international relations and human affairs. Perhaps, in the failure of states and the international community to
respond to such approaches, what is needed is the equivalent of the 1972 Stockholm conference that launched the global environmental movement and established the United Nations

96
Environmental Programme (UNEP), designed to be the environmental conscience of the United Nations. Similarly, the UN Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996 focused on the
themes of finding adequate shelter for all and sustaining human development in an increasingly urbanized world. Whether or not these programs have the ability to influence the futures
direction (or receive wide international support) is a matter of some debate. Yet, given that the most powerful states in the world are not currently focusing on these issues to a degree
sufficient to produce viable implementation plans or development strategies, there may well need to be a groundswell of bottom-up pressure, perhaps in the form of a global citizenry
petition to push the elusive world community toward collective action.Recent history suggests that military intervention as the first line of response to human security conditions
underscores a seriously flawed approach. Moreover, those who advocate that a states disconnectedness from globalization is inversely proportional to the likelihood of military (read: US)
intervention fail to recognize unfolding realities (Barnett, 2003, 2004). Both middle-power and major-power states, as well as the international community, must increasingly focus on
long-term creeping vulnerabilities in order to avoid crisis responses to conditions of extreme vulnerability. Admittedly, some human security proponents have recently soured on the
viability of the concept in the face of recent either with us or against us power politics (Suhrke, 2004). At the same time, and in a bit more positive light, some have clearly recognized
the sheer impossibility of international power politics continuing to feign indifference in the face of moral categories. As Burgess (2004: 278) notes, for all its evils, one of the promises

it is still
not feasible to establish a threshold definition for human security that neatly fits all concerns
and arguments (as suggested by Owen, 2004: 383), it would be a tragic mistake to assume that national, human, and environmental
of globalization is the unmasking of the intertwined nature of ethics and politics in the complex landscape of social, economic, political and environmental security. While

security are mutually harmonious constructs rather than more often locked in conflictual and contested opposition with each other.
Moreover, aspects of security resident in each concept are indeed themselves embedded with extraordinary contradictions. Human security,
in particular, is not now, nor should likely ever be, the mirror image of national security. Yet, these contradictions are not the crucial
recognition here. On the contrary, rather

than focusing on the security issues themselves, we should be

focusing on the best multi-dimensional approaches to confronting and solving them. One approach,
which might avoid the massive tidal impact of creeping vulnerabilities, is to sharply make a rudder shift from constant
crisis intervention toward strategic planning, strategic investment, and strategic attention. Clearly, the time is now to reorder our entire
approach to how we address or fail to address security.

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Discourse/representations

98

Impact D war
Securitized framing doesnt create violence or war historical studies prove
Kaufman 9
Prof Poli Sci and IR U Delaware (Stuart J, Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case,
Security Studies 18:3, 400 434)

Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly present, war occurs
only if these factors are harnessed. Ethnic narratives and fears must combine to create
significant ethnic hostility among mass publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to
manipulate that hostility, evoking hostile narratives and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of
chauvinist mobilization. Such mobilization is often spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes
of violence) that increase feelings of hostility and make chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side's
felt security needs threaten the security of the other side, the

result is a security dilemma spiral of rising fear, hostility, and

mutual threat that results in violence. A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist logic explains why
ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war. Even if hostile narratives, fears, and
opportunity exist, severe violence usually can still be avoided if ethnic elites skillfully define group
needs in moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is
consociationalism.17 War is likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist mobilization, and a
security dilemma.

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Impact D Structural Violence

No impact real-world conditions determine who commits violence not the words
we use or vague underlying assumptions
Taft-Kaufman 95
Speech prof @ CMU; Jill, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3, Other Ways
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of
subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The

political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their

ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with
the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on
intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have
produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice . In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern
emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and
transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or
commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or
politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and
laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours?
Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with
the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530)
Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment
against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations
are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To
this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of
society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly
ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but
its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The

realm of the discursive is derived from

the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or
symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment.
Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive
emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working
towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape
the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson
(1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the
starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299).
West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going
on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities
of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete
circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share
the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their
collective historical and current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told
they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing

the discursive self

when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need
to look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers
from marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political
agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.

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Environmental Threats Real

Climate change can negatively impact our welfare
Detraz 11
[Nicole: International Relations, University of Memphis "Threats or Vulnerabilities?" August 2011,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/global_environmental_politics/v011/11.3.detraz.html, CL]

The links between climate change and security are not necessarily new.27 Indeed, in June 1988 the first
major global conference on climate change, held in Toronto, was entitled "The Changing
Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security." The conference documents list a number of ways
that climate change may negatively impact humans and the globe, including by: imperiling human
health and well-being; diminishing global food security; increasing political instability and the
potential for international conflict; and accelerating the extinction of animal and plant species
upon which human survival depends.28 One year later in a Washington Post article, then US Senator Al Gore argued that

"[a]s a nation and a government, we must see that America's future is inextricably tied to the
fate of the globe. In effect, the environment is becoming a matter of national securityan issue that
directly and imminently menaces the interests of the state or the welfare of the people." 29 Gore went on
to directly link "the greenhouse effect" with issues of national security. In these early examples, we see evidence of multiple
security and environment discourses.

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Biosecurity Solves
New biological threats have occurred that only biosecurity can solve
Koblentz 10
[Gregory: Foreign Relations, George Mason University "Biosecurity Reconsidered" Spring 2010,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v034/34.4.koblentz.html, CL]

Advances in science and technology, the rise of globalization, the emergence of new diseases,
and the changing nature of conflict have increased the risks posed by naturally occurring and
[hu]man-made biological threats. A growing acceptance of a broader definition of security since the end of the Cold War
has facilitated the rise of biosecurity issues on the international security agenda. Developing strategies to counter biological threats is
complicated by the lack of agreement on the definition of biosecurity, the diverse range of biological threats, and competing
perspectives on the most pressing biological threats. A comprehensive definition of biosecurity that encompasses naturally occurring,
accidental, and deliberate disease outbreaks can help to further research, analysis, and policymaking. Operationalizing this broad
conception of biosecurity requires a taxonomy of biological threats based on a levels-of-analysis approach that identifies which types of

A biosecurity taxonomy can

provide a common framework for the multidisciplinary research and analysis necessary to
assess and manage these risks. It also has implications for how to prevent and respond to
biological threats, as well as for the future of biosecurity research.
actors are potential sources of biological threats and the groups most at risk from these threats.