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Security

The attempt to explore space reflects an insatiable urge to colonize and dominate.
Going to space does not resolve problems on earth it merely expands the destructive
potential of our worst impulses
Bormann and Sheehan, 2009 (Natalie Bormann, Department of Politics, Northeastern University, Boston, and Michael Sheehan,

Professor of International Relations at Swansea University, Securing Outer Space, 2009, p. 1-3)
That day in October 1957 also marked the beginning of serious concerns regarding the modes and kinds of space activities that we would be witnessing,
and these concerns were dominated from the outset by the fact that the first journey into space was accompanied by - if not entirely driven by -

the Cold War arms race. The initial steps in the exploration of space were inexorably linked with pressures to militarize
and securitize this new dimension. As a geographical realm that had hitherto been pristine in relation to mankind's warlike history, this
immediate tendency for space exploration to be led by military rationales raised profound philosophical and political questions.

What should the purpose of space activity be, and what should it not be? And how would we approach, understand and distinguish between military
activities, civilian ones, commercial ones, and SO forth? More than a half century later, the questions as to what we bring to space' as well as how space
activities challenge us, and to what effects, seem ever more pressing. While the debate over some of the assumptions, modes and effects of the space age
never truly abated, most of the contributors in this volume agree that there is sense of urgency in raising concern, re-conceptualizing the modes of the
debate, and engaging critically with the limits and possibilities of the dimension of space vis-a-vis the political. This sense of urgency reflects the
revitalization of national space programmes, and particularly that of the United States and China since the start of the twenty-first century. In January
2004, at NASA headquarters, US President George W. Bush announced the need for a new vision for America's civilian and scientific
space programme. This call culminated in a Commission's Report on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, which
emphasized the fundamental role of space for US technological leadership, economic validity, and most importantly, security.
While this certainly stimulated the debate over the future direction of US space exploration, it has led many to express concern over the
implicitly aggressive and ambitious endeavor of colonizing space in the form of calling upon the need for permanent access to and presence
in space. A critical eye has also been cast on the Commission's endorsement of the privatization and commercialization of space and its support for
implementing a far larger presence of private industry in space operations. Certainly also at the forefront of the current debate on space activities
are notions of its militarization and securitization. The deployment of technologies with the aim to secure, safeguard, defend
and control certain assets, innovations and activities in space is presented to us as an inevitable and necessary development. It is argued that just
as the development of reconnaissance aircraft in the Fitst World War led inexorably to the emergence of fighter aircraft to deny the enemy the ability to
carry out such reconnaissance and then bombers to deliver weapons against targets that could be identified and reached from the air, so too has the
'multiplier effect' on military capabilities of satellites encouraged calls for the acquisition of space-based capabilities to defend one's own satellites and
attack those of adversaries, and in the longer term, to place weapons in space that could attack targets on Earth. Here, the Bush administration's
indication that it envisaged a prominent role for space-based weapons in the longer term as part of the controversial national missile defence system
contributed to the atmosphere of controversy surrounding space policy. As space has become crucial to, and utilized by, far more international actors, so
the political implications of space activities have multiplied. The members of the European Space Agency have pursued space development for economic,
scientific and social reasons. Their model of international space Cooperation has been seen as offering an example to other areas of the world,
particularly in their desire to avoid militarizing efforts. Yet even Europe has begun to develop military space capabilities, following a path that has
already been pursued by other key states such as China and India, suggesting that there is an inevitability about the militarization, and perhaps
ultimately the weaponization, of space. How we conceptualize space has therefore become of fundamental moral, political and
strategic importance. Outer space challenges the political imagination as it has always challenged the human imagination in many other
fields. For millennia people have looked up to the stars and imagined it as the home of gods or the location of the afterlife. For centuries they have looked
to it for answers about the physical nature of the universe and the place of mankind's ancestral home within it. And for decades, it has been seen as the
supreme test for advanced technology. Space exploration is a driver of innovation, encouraging us to dream of what might be possible, to
push back the boundaries of thought and to change the nature of ontological realities by drawing on novel epistemologies. The
physical exploration of the solar system through the application of science and technology has been the visible demonstration of this. The challenges that
Space poses for political theory are profound. If space-is about the use of imagination, and the application of novel developments to create new
possibilities for human progress, how has political theory and political reality responded to this challenge'? The answer, at least thus far, is both that it
has changed everything, and that it has changed very little. For international law, most notably in the Outer Space Treaty, the denial of territoriality and
limitations on sovereignty beyond planet Earth offers a fundamental challenge to the way in which international relations has been conceptualized and
operationalized in the modern era. On the other hand, the dream of many, that humanity would leave behind its dark side as it entered
space, has not been realized. For the most part, the exploration and utilization to space has reflected, not challenged, the political patterns and
impulses that characterized twentieth-century politics and international relations. Propaganda, military rivalry, economic competition and
exploitation, NorthSouth discrimination and so on have extended their reach beyond the atmosphere . Industrialization and
imperialism in the nineteenth century helped produce powerful new social theories, as well as new philosophy, political ideologies and
conceptualizarions of the meaning of politics and the nature of human destiny. The realities of the space age demand novel social theories
of the same order.
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The affirmative performs a world-view limited to a reactionary elite. The think-tanks and
policy papers that make up the 1AC exist in order to justify complacency with structural
inequality, coercion, and hierarchy.
David CAMPBELL Geography @ Durham ET AL 7 Performing Security: The Imaginative Geographies of current US strategy Political
Geography 26 (4) doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.12.002 (Other Authors: Luiza Bialasiewicz, Stuart Elden, Stephen Graham, Alex Jeffrey and Alison J.
Williams
It is important to highlight the way performativity's idea of reiteration calls attention to changes in historically established imaginative geographies.
While US foreign policy has been traditionally written in the context of identity/difference expressed in self/other relationships (Campbell, 1992), we

detect in recent strategic performances a different articulation of America's relationship to the world. Signified
by the notion of integration we identify elements in the formation of a new imaginative geography which enable the US to

draw countries into its spheres of influence and control. We show how integration (and its coeval strategies of
exclusion) has been enunciated over the last 15 years through popular-academic books, think-tank documents, policy
programmes and security strategies, as well as popular geopolitical sources. This concept of integration, we argue, is enacted
through a number of practices of representation and coercion that encourage countries to adopt a raft of US
attitudes and ways of operating or else suffer the consequences. As such, we are witnessing the performance of a security
problematic that requires critical perspectives to move beyond a simple ideal/material dichotomy in social analysis in order to account for more complex
understandings of opposition, including the emergence of new, mobile geographies of exclusion. Non-state scribes To understand the power of the
imaginative geographies guiding current US strategy it is important to look back at the recitation, reiteration and resignification of previous strategic
formulations. During the Clinton years, a number of figures who had been involved in various guises in previous Republican administrations wrote
widely on the geopolitical opportunities and threats of a post-Cold War era. From specifications of the threat posed by international

terrorism, failed states and rogue regimes, to the dangers posed by cultural/civilisational conflicts . The
individuals and institutions we choose to examine in this section are those whose geographical imaginations have been
central in laying the ground for some of the securitizing strategies of the current Bush administration and,
specifically, whose work has been key in specifying the importance of integrating a chaotic world where conflict
is inevitable. The writers whose work we highlight here occupy a liminal position within policy circles. While not paid
members of the administration, they have either occupied such positions in the past or were aspiring to them in the future. They do not,
therefore, directly speak for the state (a position that grants them a veneer of objectivity), and they navigate
in the interstices between academic and policy-oriented research : a location that, in turn, absolves them from
the rigors of a scholarly discipline, including disciplinary critique. By the term non-state scribes we wish to indicate
those who occupy a liminal zone between academic and non-academic work, working in a range of governmental and private research centres,
think-tanks and study groups. What we would like to highlight are some of the ways in which their influence problematises simple, secure
understandings of the state and the constitution of state-interest. While these individuals appear as impartial commentators-cum-advisers-cumanalysts, their access to policy circles is open, if not privileged. To the extent that their geographical imaginations are invoked by state power, they

are
consummate intellectuals of statecraft: those who designate a world and fill it with certain
dramas, subjects, histories and dilemmas ( Tuathail & Agnew, 1992: 192). Certainly the most prominent self-styled
community of experts intersecting with the Bush administration is the Project for a New American Century (for critical analysis
also today's

see Sparke, 2005). The PNAC, founded in the spring of 1997, defines itself as a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American
global leadership (see PNAC, 2006). Putatively lying outside formal policy networks, the Project from its inception has aimed to provide the
intellectual basis for continued US military dominance and especially the willingness to use its military might. As sole hegemon, PNAC argued,

the US could not avoid the responsibilities of global leadership . But it should not simply react to threats as they present
themselves: it should, rather, actively shape the global scenario before such threats emerge: the history of the 20th century
should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire (PNAC, 2000: i).
The resonance of these views with those of the Bush administration should come as no surprise : among the

Project's founders were individuals who had held posts in previous Republican administrations and went on to serve in Bush's cabinet: VicePresident Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy and now World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, along with
the former ambassador to Iraq (and soon to be US Ambassador to the UN) Zalmay Khalilzad, in addition to well known neoconservatives shaping
policy debates in the US today, including Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podhoretz, and William Kristol (see Fukuyama, 2006 and Williams, 2005).
Unsurprisingly, the most explicit formulation of what would become goals of the Bush administration can be found in the PNAC's manifesto Rebuilding
America's Defenses, which appeared in the election year of 2000. Here and in subsequent documents, the PNAC envisages the US military's role to be
fourfold: Defend the American Homeland; fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars; perform the constabulary duties
associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions; and transform U.S. forces to exploit the revolution in military affairs (PNAC,
2000: iv, 5; cf. The White House, 2002b: 30). It is telling just how spatialised some of these specifications become when worked through in detail.
Already in 2000, PNAC argued that the major military mission is no longer to deter Soviet expansionism, but to secure and expand

zones of democratic peace; deter rise of new great-power competitor; defend key regions ; exploit transformation of war
(PNAC, 2000: 2). They suggested that rather than the Cold War's potential global war across many theatres, the concern now is for several potential
theatre wars spread across the globe fought against separate and distinct adversaries pursuing separate and distinct goals (2000: 2, 3). To counter
such threats, the US needs to station its troops broadly , and their presence in critical regions around the world is the

visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty, peace and
stability (2000: 14). They claimed that while US security interests have expanded, and that its forces provide the first line of defense in what may
be described as the American security perimeter, at the same time the worldwide archipelago of U.S. military installations has contracted (2000: 14,
15). Because the security perimeter has expanded slowly but inexorably since the end of the Cold War, US forces the cavalry on the new

American frontier must be positioned to reflect the shifting strategic landscape (2000: 14, 15). Equally, their use of
the term homeland drew strongly on its use in the Clinton administration and prefigured the creation of the Office for Homeland Security under G.W.
Bush, with the concept strengthened by both the PATRIOT acts and the establishment of U.S. Northern Command. Again, it is essential that we

conceptualize these strategies as both containing and making imaginative geographies; specifying the ways the
world is and, in so doing, actively (re)making that same world . This goes beyond merely the military action or aid
programmes that governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production of ways of seeing the world,
which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as political strategy. These performative imaginative
geographies are at the heart of this paper and will re-occur throughout it. Our concern lies specifically with the ways in which the US
portrays and over the past decade has portrayed certain parts of the world as requiring involvement, as threats, as zones of instability, as
rogue states, states of concern, as global hotspots, as well as the associated suggestion that by bringing these
within the integrated zones of democratic peace, US security both economically and militarily can be

preserved. Of course, the translation of such imaginations into actual practice (and certainly results) is never as simple as some might like to suggest.
Nonetheless, what we wish to highlight here is how these strategies, in essence, produce the effect they name . This,
again, is nothing new: the United States has long constituted its identity at least in part through discourses of danger
that materialize others as a threat (see Campbell, 1992). Equally, much has been written about the new set of threats and enemies that
emerged to fill the post-Soviet void from radical Islam through the war on drugs to rogue states (for a critical analyses see, among others, Benjamin
and Simon, 2003 and Stokes, 2005; on the genealogies of the idea of rogue states see Blum, 2002 and Litwak, 2000).

The affirmatives securitizing narratives make a politics of permanent

war inevitable. Voting negative to endorse of criticism of their
securitizing narrative is the essential first step towards a peaceful
approach to space science.
Felicity Mellor, Science CommunicationImperial College, 2007
Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science, 37(4), August, p. 499-502

The asteroid impact threat offered a scientifically validated enemy onto which could be projected the fears on
which a militaristic culture depends. Far from providing a replacement outlet for weapons technologies, the
promotion of the asteroid impact threat helped make the idea of war in space more acceptable and helped
justify the continued development of space-based weaponry. Arguably, with the Clementine and Deep Impact missions, the
asteroid impact threat even facilitated the testing of SDI-style systems. The asteroid impact threat legitimized a
way of talking, and thinking, that was founded on fear of the unknown and the assumption that advanced
technology could usher in a safer era. In so doing, it resonated with the politics of fear and the
technologies of permanent war that are now at the centre of US defence policy. In this post-Cold War

period, scholars of the relation between military and civilian science need to examine carefully claims about ploughshare or conversion technologies.
New technologies arise not just out of funding and policy decisions, but also out of the social imaginaries in which new weapons can be imagined and
construed as necessary. Concepts such as dual use or cover also need to be assessed critically.35 One way of characterizing the Clementine missions
would be as dual-use technologies whose scientific aims served as cover for the testing of SDI technologies. Yet this fails to reveal the ways in which these
missions were just one concrete output of a more fundamental conceptual alliance between weapons designers and astronomers. In this paper, I have
attempted to show that by also considering the narrative context in which such initiatives are located, it is possible to

throw some light on the cultural web that binds civilian science to military programmes . But the focus on
narrative also begs a question: Which stories would we prefer to frame our science? Should science be driven
by fear or by curiosity? Should it be aimed at creating technologies of war or cultures of compassion? These are
normative questions, but they are also precisely the questions that make the military influence on science such
an important issue. Narratives are inherently ideological and a refusal to see them as such does no more to
enhance the scholars objectivity than it does the scientists. The stories told by the asteroid scientists led them
into collaborations with weapons scientists and helped fuel a discourse of fear that served a particular
ideological purpose. This should be both recognized and challenged, not for the sake of regaining some
impossible ideal of an undistorted science but because there are other stories, based on different ideological
assumptions, that we could tell in order to guide science towards more peaceful ends.
Security discourse is the bridge between liberalism and fascism the only ethical response is a
rejection of the notion of security.
Neocleous 2008 (Mark, Professor of the Critique of the Political Economy at Brunel University UK, Critique of Security pg 9-10)
A final introductory word on fascism. A number of writers have noted that there is a real Schmittian logic underpinning security politics: that
casting an issue as one of security tends to situate that issue within the logic of threat and decisio n, of friend and
enemy, and so magnifies the dangers and ratchets up the strategic fears and insecurities that encourage the
construction of a certain kind of political reason centred on the violent clampdown of the moment of decision .35
Speaking and writing about security is never innocent , says Jef Huysmans, it always risks contributing to the
opening of a window of opportunity for a fascist mobilisation.36 Events since 11 September 2001, bear witness to
this. It seems abundantly clear that any revival of fascism would now come through the mobilisation of society in the
name of security.37 This potential for fascist mobilisation underlines once more that far from being a distinct
political force outside of liberalism and capital, fascism is in fact liberal capitalisms doppelgnger . The lesson of the
twentieth century is that the crises of liberalism, more often than not expressed as crises threatening the security of the state
and the social order of capital, reveal the potential for the rehabilitation of fascism; thriving in the crises of liberalism, the fascist
potential within liberal democracy has always been more dangerous than the fascist tendency against democracy.38 The critique of security
being developed here is intended as a reminder of the authoritarian, reactionary and fascist potential within
the capitalist order and one of its key political categories . To this end, the aim of the critique of security is not a set
of proposals for democratising security, humanising security, balancing security with liberty, or any other
policy proposal to improve the wonderful world of security. There are more than enough security intellectuals for that. The aim
is to play a part in freeing the political imagination from the paralysis experienced in the face of security to

free ourselves from security fetishism by provoking and intriguing others to try and think politics without
security. It is often said that security is the gift of the state; perhaps we ought to return the gift.
And, Totalitarianism outweighs extinction because it destroys all positive value to life.
Caplan 06 [Bryan, Department of Economics and Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University, The Totalitarian Threat,
January 06]
It is obviously harder to refine my numbers than it is to refine estimates of the probability of an extinction-level asteroid impact. The regularities of social
science are neither as exact nor as enduring as the regularities of physical science. But this is a poor argument for taking social disasters like
totalitarianism less seriously than physical disasters like asteroids. We compare accurately-measured to inaccurately-measured things all the time.
Which is worse for a scientist to lose: 1 point of IQ, or his "creative spark"? Even though IQ is measured with high accuracy, and creativity is not, loss of
creativity is probably more important. Finally, it is tempting to minimize the harm of a social disaster like totalitarianism,

because it would probably not lead to human extinction. Even in Cambodia, the totalitarian regime with the highest death rate percapita, 75% of the population remained alive after three years of rule by the Khmer Rouge. (Margolin 1999b) But perhaps an eternity of totalitarianism
would be worse than extinction. It is hard to read Orwell and not to wonder: Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact
opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of

trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.
Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice.
Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy
everything... There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother . There

will be no laughter, except for the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no
science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be
no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed . (1983: 220)
Our alternative:
Reject the affirmative demand for the securitization of outer space.
This is the only way to raise critical ethical questions about the racialized discourse and
practice of IR.
Shampa BISWAS Politics @ Whitman 7 Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist
Millennium 36 (1) p. 117-125

The recent resuscitation of the project of Empire should give International Relations scholars particular pause.1 For a discipline long
premised on a triumphant Westphalian sovereignty, there should be something remarkable about the ease with which the case for brute
force, regime change and empire-building is being formulated in widespread commentary spanning the political spectrum. Writing
after the 1991 Gulf War, Edward Said notes the US hesitance to use the word empire despite its long imperial history.2 This
hesitance too is increasingly under attack as even self-designated liberal commentators such as Michael Ignatieff urge the US to
overcome its unease with the e-word and selfconsciously don the mantle of imperial power, contravening the limits of sovereign
authority and remaking the world in its universalist image of democracy and freedom.3 Rashid Khalidi has argued that the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq does indeed mark a new stage in American world hegemony, replacing the indirect and proxy forms of
Cold War domination with a regime much more reminiscent of European colonial empires in the Middle East.4 The ease with which a
defence of empire has been mounted and a colonial project so unabashedly resurrected makes this a particularly opportune, if not
necessary, moment, as scholars of the global, to take stock of our disciplinary complicities with power , to account for colonialist
imaginaries that are lodged at the heart of a discipline ostensibly interested in power but perhaps far too deluded by the formal equality
of state sovereignty and overly concerned with security and order.
Perhaps more than any other scholar, Edward Saids groundbreaking work in Orientalism has argued and demonstrated the long and deep complicity of
academic scholarship with colonial domination.5 In addition to spawning whole new areas of scholarship such as postcolonial studies, Saids writings
have had considerable influence in his own discipline of comparative literature but also in such varied disciplines as anthropology, geography and
history, all of which have taken serious and sustained stock of their own participation in imperial projects and in fact regrouped around that
consciousness in a way that has simply not happened with International Relations.6 It has been 30 years since Stanley Hoffman accused IR of

being an American social science and noted its too close connections to US foreign policy elites and US
preoccupations of the Cold War to be able to make any universal claims,7 yet there seems to be a curious amnesia and lack of curiosity about
the political history of the discipline, and in particular its own complicities in the production of empire.8 Through what
discourses the imperial gets reproduced, resurrected and re-energised is a question that should be very much at the heart of
a discipline whose task it is to examine the contours of global power.
Thinking this failure of IR through some of Edward Saids critical scholarly work from his long distinguished career as an intellectual and activist, this
article is an attempt to politicise and hence render questionable the disciplinary traps that have, ironically,
circumscribed the ability of scholars whose very business it is to think about global politics to actually think globally and
politically. What Edward Said has to offer IR scholars, I believe, is a certain kind of global sensibility, a critical but sympathetic and felt awareness of

an inhabited and cohabited world. Furthermore, it is a profoundly political sensibility whose globalism is predicated on a cognisance of the imperial and
a firm non-imperial ethic in its formulation. I make this argument by travelling through a couple of Saids thematic foci in his enormous corpus of
writing. Using a lot of Saids reflections on the role of public intellectuals, I argue in this article that IR scholars need to develop what I call

a global intellectual posture. In the 1993 Reith Lectures delivered on BBC channels, Said outlines three positions for public intellectuals to
assume as an outsider/exile/marginal, as an amateur, and as a disturber of the status quo speaking truth to power and selfconsciously siding with those who are underrepresented and disadvantaged.9 Beginning with a discussion of Saids critique of
professionalism and the cult of expertise as it applies to International Relations, I first argue the importance, for scholars of global politics, of taking
politics seriously. Second, I turn to Saids comments on the posture of exile and his critique of identity politics, particularly in its nationalist
formulations, to ask what it means for students of global politics to take the global seriously. Finally, I attend to some of Saids comments on humanism
and contrapuntality to examine what IR scholars can learn from Said about feeling and thinking globally concretely, thoroughly and carefully.
IR Professionals in an Age of Empire: From International Experts to Global Public Intellectuals
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

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 space and
operate as another transnational corporation12, and critiqued

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
Interrogating affirmative representations is a pre-requisite to improved policy discussion.
Neta Crawford ,PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ. Argument and Change in World Politics, 2002 p. 19-21
Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are
arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of
prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and
epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before
specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology
and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief
system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in

politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the good are contests over what it is good and right to do, and

even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of good so that we know good when
we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over

representations or frames- about how we out to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a
situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, Argument and debate
occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the worl d. For example, is the war defensive or
aggressive?. Defining and controlling representations and images , or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an
issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within
international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of
what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends

by drawing vivid pictures of the reality through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation. Representations
of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively re-present situations in a way
that makes sense. mimesis is a metaphoric or iconic argumentation of the real. Imitating not the effectivity of events but their
logical structure and meaning. Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely
ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a constraint on
reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge .
The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing how actors see
possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain
courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place. If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart
Thorson argue, politics involves the selective privileging of representations, it may not matter whether one
representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or
inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representation- how frames affect what is seen
or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements
of political argument because an actors arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their
characterization or framing of the situation holds sway . But, as Rodger Payne suggests, No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool
that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling. Hence framing is a meta-argument.