Humanism K

Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 1
Pointer/Yeats/Corrigan Humanism K
THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL HUMANISM

THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL HUMANISM.............................................................................................................1
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LINKS: “THE OTHER”..............................................................................................................................................10
LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (1/5)................................................................................................................11
LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS/ UNIVERSALITY .........................................................................................16
LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS/ AID ...............................................................................................................17
LINKS: AFRICA: INT’L HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO ...............................................................................................18
LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM...............................................................................................................................19
LINKS: AFRICA: MODERNIZATION .....................................................................................................................20
LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM/ DEMO/ “NEUTRALITY” (1/3) .........................................................................21
LINKS: AFRICA: SELF-DETERMINATION ...........................................................................................................24
LINKS: AID/ CHARITY ............................................................................................................................................25
LINKS: PUBLIC HEALTH/ DISEASE ADVS ..........................................................................................................26
LINKS: PUBLIC HEALTH/ DISEASE ADVS ..........................................................................................................27
LINKS: HIV/AIDS TREATMENT.............................................................................................................................28
LINKS: FGM...............................................................................................................................................................29
LINKS: WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1/2) ............................................................................................................................30
LINKS: WOMEN’S RIGHTS (2/2) ............................................................................................................................31
LINKS: EQUALITY/ RACE ......................................................................................................................................32
LINKS: SUDAN .........................................................................................................................................................33
LINKS/ CASE TURN: GENOCIDE PREVENTION/ MONITORING (1/2).............................................................34
LINKS/ CASE TURN: GENOCIDE PREVENTION/ MONITORING (2/2).............................................................35
LINKS: “FIXING” INDECENT SOCIETIES.............................................................................................................36
LINKS: INTERNATIONAL LAW .............................................................................................................................37
LINKS: INTERNATIONAL LAW/ H.R. NORMS ....................................................................................................38
LINKS: HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO/ COSMOPOLITANISM (1/3) ..........................................................................39
LINKS: HEGEMONY ................................................................................................................................................42
LINKS: HEGEMONY/ TRADE .................................................................................................................................44
LINKS: GLOBALIZATION (1/2) ..............................................................................................................................45
LINKS: GLOBALIZATION (2/2) ..............................................................................................................................46
HUMAN RIGHTS/ LIBERALISM BAD ...................................................................................................................47
HUMAN RIGHTS NOT = HUMAN DIGNITY.........................................................................................................48
NEUTRALITY BAD ..................................................................................................................................................49
IMPACTS: INVISIBLE EXCLUSIONS = TOTAL WAR/ ENMITY GOOD ...........................................................50
IMPACTS: CAN’T SOLVE/ NORMS ARE EMPTY ................................................................................................52
IMPACTS: VALUE TO LIFE.....................................................................................................................................54
ALT SOLVENCY: BETTER CONFIGURATION OF RIGHTS ...............................................................................55
ALT SOLVES VIOLENCE ........................................................................................................................................58
A/T: PERMUTATION (1/2) .......................................................................................................................................60
A/T: PERMUTATION (2/2) .......................................................................................................................................61
A/T: KETELS..............................................................................................................................................................62
A/T: WHAT ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST ................................................................................................................63
A/T: SCHMITT WAS A NAZI...................................................................................................................................64
***AFFIRMATIVE ANSWERS*** ..........................................................................................................................65
AFF: HUMAN RIGHTS GOOD.................................................................................................................................66
AFF: GENOCIDE ULTIMATE IMPACT ..................................................................................................................68
AFF: HUMAN RIGHTS PROMO IN AFRICA GOOD .............................................................................................69
AFF: H.R./DEMO PROMO IN AFRICA GOOD .......................................................................................................70
AFF: PERMUTATION ...............................................................................................................................................71
AFF: LIBERALISM/ NEUTRALITY GOOD ............................................................................................................72
AFF: LIBERALISM GOOD/ ALT = TOTALITARIANISM.....................................................................................73
AFF: FRIEND/ENEMY = FASCISM.........................................................................................................................77
AFF: HUMANISM GOOD/ ALT = EXTINCTION ...................................................................................................78
AFF: INTERNATIONAL LAW/ HUMAN RIGHTS NORMS GOOD .....................................................................79
AFF: RESPONSIBILITY TO “OTHER” GOOD .......................................................................................................80
AFF: SCHMITT WAS A NAZI ..................................................................................................................................81
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“Humanity” is evaluative and “neutrality” is a fig leaf to cover more sophisticated modes of
exclusion. The affirmative’s world of friendship is built upon an entirely new category of
enmity; exclusions are inevitable but humanity cannot exclude humans so a category must
be created outside of itself. This embrace of humanity designates an inhuman enemy –
enabling endless wars and violence
RASCH, 2K3.
William, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at India University. “Human Rights as Geopolitics:”
Cultural Critique 54 120-147. p.MUSE. this is the best card in the whole world.
Yes, this passage attests to the antiliberal prejudices of an unregenerate Eurocentric conservative with a pronounced affect for the
counterrevolutionary and Catholic South of Europe. It seems to resonate with the apologetic mid-twentieth-century Spanish reception of Vitoria
that wishes to justify the Spanish civilizing mission in the Americas. But the contrast between Christianity and humanism is not just prejudice; it
is also instructive, because with it, Schmitt tries to grasp something both disturbing and elusive about the modern world—namely, the apparent
the liberal and humanitarian attempt to construct a world of universal friendship produces, as if by
fact that
internal necessity, ever new enemies.
For Schmitt, the Christianity of Vitoria, of Salamanca, Spain, 1539, represents a concrete, spatially imaginable order, centered (still) in Rome
and, ultimately, Jerusalem. This, with its divine revelations, its Greek philosophy, and its Roman language and institutions, is the polis. This is
civilization, and outside its walls lie the barbarians. The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words, a philosophy of
absolute humanity. By virtue of its universality and abstract normativity, it has no localizable polis, no
clear distinction between what is inside and what is outside. Does humanity embrace all humans? Are
there no gates to the city and thus no barbarians outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its
wars? We can understand Schmitt's concerns in the following way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since
nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human, then, is the horizon within which the distinction
between believers and nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is that which makes the distinction
possible. However, once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also becomes that distinction's
positive pole, it needs its negative opposite. If humanity is both the horizon and the positive pole of the distinction
that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something that lies beyond that horizon, can only be
something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole alike—can only, in other words, be inhuman. As
Schmitt says:
Only with the concept of the human in the sense of absolute humanity does there appear as the other side
of this concept a speciWcally new enemy, the inhuman. In the history of the nineteenth century, setting off the inhuman
from the human is followed by an even deeper split, the one between the superhuman and the subhuman. In the same way that the human creates
the inhuman, so in the history of humanity the superhuman brings about with a dialectical necessity the subhuman as its enemy twin.9
This "two-sided aspect of the ideal of humanity" (Schmitt 1988, Der Nomos der Erde, 72) is a theme Schmitt had already developed in his The
Concept of the Political (1976) and his critiques of liberal pluralism (e.g., 1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 151-65). His complaint there is that
liberal pluralism is in fact not in the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an overriding monism, the monism of
humanity. Thus, despite the claims that pluralism allows for the individual's freedom from illegitimate constraint,
Schmitt presses the point home that political opposition to liberalism is itself deemed illegitimate. Indeed, liberal pluralism,
in Schmitt's eyes, reduces
the political to the social and economic and thereby nullifies all truly political
opposition by simply excommunicating its opponents from the High Church of Humanity. After all, only
an unregenerate barbarian could fail to recognize the irrefutable benefits of the liberal order.
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And, the promotion of human rights in sub-Saharan Africa naturalizes the rights-bearing
subject, rendering unacceptable other ways of conceiving of humanity.
Englund, 2K
Harri, Research Fellow at The Nordic Africa Institute. “The Dead Hand of Human Rights: Contrasting christianities
in Post-Transitional Malawi” The Journal of Modern African Studies. Vol. 38. No. 4 Dec. pp.579-603
Although there is certainly cause to celebrate this conspicuous change in many African polities, critical social
analysis cannot take such assertions for granted. To do so would be to regard the claiming of rights as 'natural'.
This article focuses on the practices and discourses in Catholic and pentecostal churches in Malawi in order to
show how such naturalism may be unwarranted. The article shows, in particular, that the 'human rights talk'
(cf. Dembour 1996) can marginalise other ways of conceiving of human dignity and value, and that there
may be different approaches to politics even in the same churches. Accordingly, this article's plea is for an
appreciation of the true pluralism of moral ideas, and for a certain resistance against the apparent naturalism
of individuals and groups as the bearers of rights.
The 'human rights talk' enforces, like a dead hand, a particular understanding of human dignity. It does so
by attributing legitimacy to specific moral notions in the public discourse, thereby defining the contours of
what is not only acceptable but also conceivable. Many African politicians, activists, journalists and religious
leaders eagerly participate in this process of definition, a fact that shows the shallowness of the accusation that the 'human rights talk'
represents an imperialistic agenda by the North to gain moral high ground over the South (see e.g. Hadjor 1998). While it is important to unmask the politics
behind international humanitarianism (Malkki 1997)) it is also the case that human rights have gained such widespread currency that they can scarcely be
associated with a 'Northern' agenda. Indeed, the 'human rights talk' may have had its greatest emancipatory potential during the period of
democratic transition. After it has been widely adopted in society, the disputes over rights often give the state
the depoliticised role of an arbiter (Heller I 992 ;Brown I 995). The 'politics of recognition ' (Taylor I 994)
which accompanies the claiming of rights may have little to say about entrenched power relations. It
merely seeks to codify subjects' identities as sufficient grounds for a share in the ultimately unequal
distribution of welfare.
Responding to the challenge of examining human rights in widely different cultural contexts, anthropologists may unwittingly contribute to the 'dead hand' by
rejecting the tradition of relativism in their discipline (see e.g. Messer 1993 ;Wilson I 997). The current approach prefers dialogue and translation, with a
concomitant shift from the localism of anthropological research to an appreciation of transnational influences in local politics (cf. Comaroff & Comaroff I 997 :
365-404).
An overly legalistic approach to human rights may thus be enriched by anthropological analysis, but, at the same time, the legal framework of
human rights is rarely surpassed. More promising are those studies which are explicit about the need to understand different moral arguments
in a given polity (see e.g. Lemarchand I 992 ;Werbner I 995 ; Dembour 1996; Engelke 1999; Wilson 2000). The focus on morality enables the
analyst to question the apparent naturalism in the idea that individuals and groups are rights-bearing subjects. In a perceptive analysis of the
controversy over gay rights in Zimbabwe, for example, Engelke notes that the misunderstanding may partly derive from the
Shona notion that 'one's humanity is acquired, not given' (I 999 :301). When rights are claimed on the basis
of intrinsic qualities, it becomes hard to appreciate the import which some people attach to the gradual
social maturation and 'growth' of the person. Even if the rights- bearing subject is seen to have a specific
ethnic identity or sexual orientation, the ensuing view of selfhood portrays an abstract and timeless
individual -an individual who is similar to all the other legitimate claimants of the same rights.
Religion is an intriguing domain in which to study further the moral arguments in the 'human rights talk'
and its alternatives. It seems justified both to draw attention to the notions of human rights in many world
religions (Bloom et al. 1997) and to observe that a thriving religious life in sub-Saharan Africa threatens to
make the sub- continent's politics incomprehensible to outsiders (Ellis & ter Haar 1998). In other words, religious beliefs
and practices throw the interplay between universal and specific themes into stark relief, not as a matter of 'syncretism' (Stewart & Shaw 1994), but as a complex
process whereby subjects situationally draw upon different registers of moral argument. This article's focus on two forms of Christianity -Catholicism and
pentecostalism -indicates the extent of such complexity and the challenges it presents to the 'human rights talk'. The focus shows variation as much within as
between these two Christianities, with the participation of the Catholic elite in the 'human rights talk ' contrasting with lay practices among both Catholic and
pentecostal Christians.
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And, this production of the inhuman enables new and unimaginable modes of absolute
annihilation as their universal ideal of what it means to be human is exported throughout
the globe. This cosmopolitan ideal strips the other of their otherness and makes war total
as opposition to the liberal order is not merely fought, but consumed without remainder.
Odysseos, 2K4 (Louiza, Department of Politics and International Studies, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University
of London. “Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on the Line(s) of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror.” Conference on the
International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt. September 9-11. P.18-21)
The second criticism has to do with the imposition of particular kind of monism: despite the lip-service to plurality, ‘liberal pluralism is in fact
not in the least pluralist but reveals itself to be an overriding monism, the monism of humanity.” Similarly, Timothy Brennan traces the same
tendency in current cosmopolitan perspectives in that they show ‘an enthusiasm for customary differences, but as ethical
or aesthetic material for a unified polychromatic culture – a new singularity born of a blending and merging of
multiple local constituents.’ There are two ways in which the discourse of a ‘universal humanity’ has a strong disciplining effect on
peoples and politics. The first, noted by a number of commentators, involves the political refutation of the tolerance witnessed in the cultural or
private sphere; in other words, politically, cosmopolitanism shows little tolerance for what it designates as ‘intolerant’
politics, which is any politics that moves in opposition to its ideals, rendering political opposition to it illegitimate.
Cosmopolitan discourses are also defined by a claim to their own exception and superiority. They naturalise the
historical origins of liberal societies which are no longer regarded as ‘contingency established and historically
conditioned forms of organization’; rather, they
Become the universal standard against which other societies are judged. Those found wanting are
banished, as outlaws, from the civilized world. Ironically, one of the signs of their outlaw status is their
insistence on autonomy, on sovereignty.
The second disciplining effect on the discourse of humanity is seen in the tendency to normalize diverse peoples through ‘individualisation’. The
paramount emphasis placed on legal instruments such as human rights transforms diverse subjectivities into ‘rights-holder’. As Rasch argues
‘the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the universal ideal of what it means to be human’.
The international human rights regime, which cosmopolitanism champions as a pure expression of the centrality of the individual and to
which it is theoretically and ontologically committed, is the exportation of modern subjectivity around the globe. The
discourse of humanity expressed through human rights involves a transformation of the human into the rights-
holder: ‘[o]nce again, we see that the term “human” is not descriptive, but evaluative. To be truly human, one needs
to be corrected.’
Thirdly, ‘humanity is not a political concept, and no political entity corresponds to it. The eighteenth century humanitarian concept of
humanity was a polemical denial of the then existing aristocratic federal system and the privileges accompanying it.’ Outside of this
historical location, where does it find concrete expression? The discourse of humanity finds expression in an
abstract politics of neutrality, usually in the name of an international community which acts, we are assured, in the
interest of humanity. James Brown Scott, a jurist and prominent political figure in the United States in the
beginning of the 20th Century, wrote in the interwar years of the right of the international community to impose its
neutral will:
The “international community,” Scott writes, “is coextensive with humanity – no longer merely with Christianity,” it has become “the
representative of the common humanity rather than of the common religion binding the States. Therefore, the international community
“possesses the inherent right to impose its will…and to punish its violation, not because of a treaty, or a pact or a covenant, but because of an
international need” (283). If in the sixteenth century it was the Christian Church that determined the content of this international need, in the
twentieth century and beyond it must be secularized “church” of “common humanity” that performs this all-important service.
Finally, and most importantly, there is the relation of the concept of humanity to the other, and to war and violence. In its
historical location, the humanity concept had critical purchase against aristocratic prerogatives, but its utilization by liberal discourses in the
individualist tradition, Schmitt feared, could bring about new and unimaginable modes of exclusion. Rasch explains:
The humanism that Schmitt opposes is, in his words, a philosophy of absolute humanity. By virtue of its
universality and abstract normativity, it has no localizable polis, no clear distinction between what is inside
and what is outside. Does humanity embrace all humans? Are there no gates to the city and thus no
barbarians outside? If not, against whom or what does it wage its wars?
‘Humanity as such’ Schmitt noted ‘cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet’. As Ellen
Kennedy notes, humanity ‘is a polemical word that negates its opposite.’ In The Concept of the Political Schmitt argued that humanity ‘excludes
the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being’. In the Nomos, however, it becomes apparent that,
historically examined, the concept of humanity could not allow the notion of justus hostis, of a ‘just enemy’, who is
recognized as someone with whom one can make war but also negotiate peace. Schmitt noted how only when ‘man
appeared to be the embodiment of absolute humanity, did the other side of the concept appear in the form of a new
enemy: the inhuman’ (NE 104). It is worth quoting Rasch’s account at length:
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(… CONTINUED)
We can understand Schmitt's concerns in the following way: Christianity distinguishes between believers and nonbelievers. Since
nonbelievers can become believers, they must be of the same category of being. To be human, [End Page 135] then, is the horizon
within which the distinction between believers and nonbelievers is made. That is, humanity per se is not part of the distinction, but is
that which makes the distinction possible. However, once the term used to describe the horizon of a distinction also
becomes that distinction's positive pole, it needs its negative opposite. If humanity is both the horizon and
the positive pole of the distinction that that horizon enables, then the negative pole can only be something
that lies beyond that horizon, can only be something completely antithetical to horizon and positive pole
alike—can only, in other words, be inhuman.
Without the concept of the just enemy associated with the notion of non-discriminatory war, the enemy had no value and could be exterminated.
The concept of humanity, furthermore, reintroduces substantive causes of war because it shutters the formal concept of Justus hostis, now
designated substantively as an enemy of humanity as such. In Schmitt’s account of the League of Nations in Nomos, he
highlights that compared to the kinds of wars that can be waged on behalf of humanity the
Interstate European wars from 1815 to 1914 in reality were regulated, they were bracketed by the neutral
Great Powers and were completely legal procedures in comparison with the modern and gratuitous police
actions against violators of peace, which can be dreadful acts of annihilation (NE 186).
Enemies of humanity cannot be considered ‘just and equal’ enemies. Moreover, they cannot claim neutrality: one
cannot remain neutral in the call to be for or against humanity or its freedom; one cannot, similarly, claim a right to
resist or defend oneself in the sense we understand this right to have existence in the jus publicum Europeaum. As
will examine below in the context of the war on terror, this denial of self-defence and resistance ‘can presage a
dreadful nihilistic destruction of all law’ (NE 187).
When the enemy is not accorded a formal equality, the notion that peace can be made with him is unacceptable, as
Schmitt detailed through his study of the League of Nations, which had declared the abolition of war, but in rescinding the concept
of neutrality only succeeded in the ‘dissolution of “peace” (NE 246). It is with the dissolution of peace that total
wars of annihilation and destruction becomes possible, where the other cannot be assimilated, or
accommodated, let alone tolerated: the friend/enemy distinction is no longer taking place with a justus hostis
but rather between good and evil, human and inhuman, where ‘the negative pole of the distinction is to be
fully and finally consumed without remainder. With this in mind, I turn to the next section to the war on terror and its relation to
the discourse o humanity and cosmopolitanism.
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The alternative is to affirm the friend/enemy distinction. This affirmation renders power
visible and enables an antagonistic nation-state system grounded in reciprocal violence that
limits the nature and scope of warfare. Enmity and conflict are inevitable. The liberal
attempt to eliminate them renders exclusions invisible making violence and warfare
unlimited and the postmodern hope for ‘new political possibilities’ ushers in new forms of
violence as we sit, paralyzed, waiting for godot.
RASCH, 2K5 (William, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at India University. 'Lines in the Sand:
Enmity as a Structuring Principle', South Atlantic Quarterly, 104:2, 253-262.)
Schmitt, then, starts from the premise of imperfection and acknowledges an ontological priority of
violence. If, he reasons, one starts with the rather biblical notions of sin and guilt, not natural innocence, then
homogeneity, being contingent, historical, and not the least natural, must be predicated on heterogeneity. That is,
citizenship or participation or community must be constructed, not assumed, and can only be local, circumscribed, not global. One
recognizes one’s own in the face of the other and knows the comfort of inclusion only as the necessary result
of exclusion—though in modern, functionally differentiated society, those inclusions and exclusions may be multiple, contradictory, and not
necessarily tied to place. ‘‘An absolute human equality,’’ Schmitt writes in his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, ‘‘would be an equality
without the necessary correlate of inequality and as a result conceptually and practically meaningless, an indifferent equality. . . . Substantive
inequalities would in no way disappear from the world and the state; they would shift into another sphere, perhaps separated from the political
and concentrated in the economic, leaving this area to take on a new, disproportionately decisive importance.’’ 6 This, Schmitt’s, is not a popular
sentiment, even if it echoes somewhat the Marxist distinction between a political and a social democracy, between a formal and
substantial equality. But if one acknowledges that at least within modernity all inclusion requires exclusion, that
inclusions and exclusions in addition to being unavoidable are also contingent and malleable, then rather than
react with dismay, one might see in this ‘‘ logical fact,’’ if fact it is, both the condition for the possibility of
dissent and the condition for the possibility of recognizing in the one who resists and disagrees a fellow human
being and thus legitimate political opponent, not a Lyon or Tyger or other Savage Beast.
For it is not that exclusions are miraculously made absent once distinctions are not formally drawn. On the contrary,
unacknowledged distinctions, and those who are distinguished by them, simply go underground, become
invisible, and grow stronger, more absolute, in their violent and explosive force. When the retrograde and
condemned distinction between the ‘‘Greek’’ and the ‘‘ barbarian’’ becomes a simple, sanguine affirmation of humanity, this
ideal affirmation actually turns out to be nothing other than a distinction drawn between all those who, by their right behavior,
show themselves to be truly ‘‘ human’’ and those who, alas, by their perverse dissent, have revealed themselves to be evildoers,
to be ‘‘inhuman.’’ Deliberate, visible, ‘‘external’’ distinctions that demarcate a space in which a ‘‘we’’ can
recognize its difference from a ‘‘they,’’ preferably without marking that difference in a necessarily asymmetrical
manner, are to be preferred, in Schmitt’s world, to the invisible and unacknowledged distinctions that mark those who are
exemplary humans from those who, by their political dissent, show themselves to be gratuitously perverse. For reasons, then, of
making difference visible, Schmitt favors lines drawn in the sand, or, in the ‘‘mythical language’’ used in The Nomos of
the Earth, ‘‘firm lines’’ in the ‘‘soil,’’ ‘‘whereby definite divisions become apparent,’’ and, above them, on the
‘‘solid ground of the earth,’’ ‘‘fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses, and other constructs,’’ so that the ‘‘orders and
orientations of human social life become apparent’’ and the ‘‘forms of power and domination become visible.’’ 7
In Nomos, Schmitt describes the now much maligned and seldom mourned European nation-state system as ‘‘the highest form of order within the
scope of human power ’’ (187). Historically, the territorial state developed as a response to the religious civil wars of the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. Once thought of as a unity called Christendom, Europe became fractured by the events of the Reformation and Counter-
Reformation. The old asymmetrical distinction between believers and nonbelievers that governed the relationship not only between Christians
and non- Christians, but also between Christian orthodoxy and heresy, now threatened to regulate the distinction between Catholics and
Protestants. Yet, miraculously (one might be tempted to say), with the conclusion of religious warfare in 1648, a symmetrical relationship among
the European nation-states prevailed—in theory, if not always in fact. It is this symmetrical ordering of internally differentiated Europe that
Schmitt highlights. In effect—and Hobbes had already described it in these terms—the war of all individuals against all individuals in the state of
nature, which perennially threatens to resurface within the state as civil discord, is elevated into a war of all states against all states in a second-
order state of nature.
In theory and practice, then, the individual is protected from arbitrary and irrational, because incalculable, violence
by states acting as moral persons living in an unregulated but serendipitously achieved balance of power. We might best
update Schmitt’s description of this order as an ideally anarchic, self-regulating coexistence of antagonistic
powers, an emergent, horizontal self- organization of sovereign systems with no one system serving as sovereign over all the
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(CONTINUED…)
others—a plurality of states that refused to coalesce into one single state but rather achieved relative security
without relinquishing autonomy. The ‘‘medium’’ of this self- organization was violence (war); yet, by virtue of
mechanisms of reciprocity, by virtue, that is, of a similarly emergent self-regulation of violence called international law (the
jus publicum Europaeum of which Schmitt sings his praises), the conduct of warfare among European states was
restrained and controlled. Thus, the nation-state way of organizing early modern Europe served as the katechon,
the political as restrainer, establishing relative stability and peace to stave off chaos and civil war.
How is this possible? Despite its internal self- differentiation, Europe still saw itself as a unity because of a second major distinction, the one be-
tween Europe and the New World, where New World denotes the entire non-European world, but especially the newly ‘‘discovered’’ regions of
the globe following Columbus’s three voyages. This distinction was asymmetrical; on the one side we find Christianity and culture, on the other
only pagan ‘‘ barbarians.’’ How did Europeans mark this difference between a self- differentiated ‘‘us’’ and a homogenous ‘‘them’’? Through
the difference
violence. Only now, violence was regulated hierarchically by the traditional ‘‘just war ’’ doctrine. Schmitt clearly marks
between symmetrical and asymmetrical modes of warfare (thus the difference between warfare ‘‘this side’’ versus
the ‘‘other side’’ of so- called amity lines that separated Old Europe from the New World) as the difference between wars
fought against ‘‘just enemies’’ and those fought for a ‘‘just cause.’’ The former recognize a commonality
among combatants that allows for reciprocity; the latter does not. Wars fought against enemies one
respects as occupiers of the same cultural ‘‘space,’’ no matter how subdivided, allows for the desirable constraints on
the conduct of war. Wars fought against infidels, pagans, and barbarians, whether these barbarians deny the one God,
the laws of nature, the truth of reason, or the higher morality of liberalism, are wars fought against those who are not to
be respected or accorded the rights granted equals.8 To be in possession of truth, no matter how much that truth is debated
internally, allows one to stand over against the other as a conglomerated unity. This self- differentiated unity can assume the restrained and
restraining order of civilization because it has inoculated itself against outbreaks of ‘‘natural’’ and lawless violence by displacing them in the
New World. America, as Hobbes and others imagined it, was the preeminent site of the feared state of nature; thus Europe was spared any
recurrence of the civil wars that had previously ravaged it.
What Schmitt describes as an enviable achievement—that is, the balanced order of restrained violence within Europe—presupposed the
consignment of unrestrained violence to the rest of the world. That is, desired restraint was founded upon sanctioned lack of restraint. If Schmitt,
by concentrating on the development of European international law after the religious civil wars, highlights an admirable local result of a
disagreeable global process, this can be attributed to his explicit Eurocentrism. But even non-Eurocentrics may be dismayed by the twentieth-
century reintroduction of unrestricted violence within Europe itself. The epitome of this return of the repressed may be the
midcentury death camp, as Giorgio Agamben maintains, but its initial breakthrough is the Great War of the century’s second decade.
For how else can one explain that a traditional European power struggle that started in 1914 as a war fought for state interest should end in 1918–
19 as a war fought by ‘‘civilization’’ against its ‘‘ barbarian’’ other? And how else can one explain that we have been so eager to replicate this
distinction in every war we have fought ever since? If, in other words, we are rightly horrified by the distinction between civilized and uncivilized
if we are rightly horrified by the
when it is used to describe the relationship of Old Europe and its colonial subjects, and
distinction between the human and the in- or subhuman when it is used to discriminate against blacks,
Jews, Gypsies, and other so- called undesirables, then why do we persist today in using these very distinctions
when combating our latest enemies? Is it merely ironic or in fact profoundly symptomatic that those who most
vehemently affirm universal symmetry (equality, democracy) are also more often than not the ones who opt for the most
asymmetrical means of locating enemies and conducting war—that is, just wars fought for a just cause?
But how are we to respond? For those who say there is no war and who yet find themselves witnessing daily
bloodshed, Adornoian asceticism (refraining from participating in the nihilism of the political) or Benjaminian
weak, quasi, or other messianism (waiting for the next incarnation of the historical subject [the multitudes?] or the
next proletarian general strike [the event?]) would seem to be the answer. To this, however, those who say
there is a war can respond only with bewilderment. Waiting for a ‘‘completely new politics’’ 10 and completely new political
agents, waiting for the event and the right moment to name it, or waiting for universal ontological redemption feels much like
waiting for the Second Coming, or, more accurately, for Godot. And have we not all grown weary of
waiting? The war we call ‘‘the political,’’ whether nihilist or not, happily goes on while we watch Rome burn.
As Schmitt wrote of the relationship of early Christianity to the Roman Empire, ‘‘ The belief that a restrainer holds back the end
of the world provides the only bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human events and a tremendous
historical monolith like that of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings’’ (60). One does not need to believe in the virtues of
that particular ‘‘ historical monolith’’ to understand the dangers of eschatological paralysis.
But as Max Weber observed firsthand, ascetic quietude leads so often, so quickly, and so effortlessly to the
chiliastic violence that knows no bounds; and as we have lately observed anew, the millennial messianism of imperial
rulers and nomadic partisans alike dominates the contemporary political landscape. The true goal of those who say there is no
war is to eliminate the war that actually exists by eliminating those Lyons and Tygers and other Savage Beasts who say there is a
1NC (7/7)
(CONTINUED…)
war. This war is the truly savage war. It is the war we witness today. No amount of democratization, pacification, or
Americanization will mollify its effects, because democratization, pacification, and Americanization are among the weapons used
by those who say there is no war to wage their war to end all war.
What is to be done? If you are one who says there is a war, and if you say it not because you glory in it but because you
fear it and hate it, then your goal is to limit it and its effects, not eliminate it, which merely intensifies it, but
limit it by drawing clear lines within which it can be fought, and clear lines between those who fight
it and those who don’ t, lines between friends, enemies, and neutrals, lines between combatants and
noncombatants. There are, of course, legitimate doubts about whether those ideal lines could ever be drawn a gain; nevertheless, the
question that we should ask is not how can we establish perpetual peace, but rather a more modest one: Can symmetrical relationships be
guaranteed only by asymmetrical ones? According to Schmitt, historically this has been the case. ‘‘ The traditional Eurocentric order of
international law is foundering today, as is the old nomos of the earth. This order arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new
world, from an unrepeatable historical event. Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence, such as men on their way to the
moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on earth’’
(39). We have since gone to the moon and have found nothing on the way there to exploit. We may soon go to Mars, if current leaders have their
way, but the likelihood of finding exploitable populations seems equally slim. Salvation through spatially delimited asymmetry, even were it to
be desired, is just not on the horizon. And salvation through globalization, that is, through global unity and equality, is equally impossible,
because today’s asymmetry is not so much a localization of the exception as it is an invisible generation of the exception from within that formal
ideal of unity, a generation of the exception as the difference between the human and the inhuman outlaw, the ‘‘Savage Beast, with whom Men
can have no Society nor Security.’’ We are, therefore, thrown back upon ourselves, which is to say, upon those artificial ‘‘moral persons’’ who
act as our collective political identities. They used to be called states. What they will be called in the future remains to be seen. But, if we think to
establish a differentiated unity of discrete political entities that once represented for Schmitt ‘‘the highest form of order within the scope of
we must symmetrically manage the necessary pairing of inclusion and exclusion without
human power,’’ then
denying the ‘‘forms of power and domination’’ that inescapably accompany human ordering. We must
think the possibility of roughly equivalent power relations rather than fantasize the elimination of power
from the political universe. This, conceivably, was also Schmitt’s solution. Whether his idea of the plurality of Großräume could ever
be carried out under contemporary circumstances is, to be sure, more than a little doubtful, given that the United States enjoys a monopoly on
guns, goods, and the Good, in the form of a supremely effective ideology of universal ‘‘democratization.’’ Still, we would do well to devise
vocabularies that do not just emphatically repeat philosophically more sophisticated versions of the liberal ideology of painless, effortless,
universal equality. The space of the political will never be created by a bloodless, Benjaminian divine violence. Nor is it to be confused with
the space of the simply human. To
dream the dreams of universal inclusion may satisfy an irrepressible
human desire, but it may also always produce recurring, asphyxiating political nightmares of
absolute exclusion.
LINKS: “THE OTHER”
Embracing the “other” is delivered as promise but received as a threat; their act of
inclusion strips the other of their otherness as they are forced to coincide with a particular
understanding of what it means to be human
RASCH, 2K3.
Cultural Critique 54 120-147. p.MUSE
In the past, we/they, neighbor/foreigner, friend/enemy polarities were inside/outside distinctions that
produced a plurality of worlds, separated by physical and cultural borders. When these worlds collided, it
was not always a pretty picture, but it was often possible to [End Page 138] maintain the integrity of the
we/they distinction, even to regulate it by distinguishing between domestic and foreign affairs. If "they"
differed, "we" did not always feel ourselves obliged to make "them" into miniature versions of "us," to
Christianize them, to civilize them, to make of them good liberals. Things have changed. With a single-power
global hegemony that is guided by a universalist ideology, all relations have become, or threaten to become,
domestic. The inner/outer distinction has been transformed into a morally and legally determined
acceptable/unacceptable one, and the power exists (or is thought to exist), both spiritually and physically, to
eliminate the unacceptable once and for all and make believers of everyone. The new imperative states: the
other shall be included. Delivered as a promise, it can only be received, by some, as an ominous threat.
In his The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov approaches our relationship to the "other" by way of
three interlocking distinctions, namely, self/other, same/different, and equal/unequal. A simple
superposition of all three distinctions makes of the other someone who is different and therefore unequal.
The problem we have been discussing, however, comes to light when we make of the other someone who is
equal because he is essentially the same. This form of the universalist ideology is assimilationist. It denies
the other by embracing him. Of the famous sixteenth-century defender of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas,
Todorov writes,
[his] declaration of the equality of men is made in the name of a specific religion, Christianity.... Hence, there
is a potential danger of seeing not only the Indians' human nature asserted but also their Christian "nature." "The
natural laws and rules and rights of men," Las Casas said; but who decides what is natural with regard to laws
and rights? Is it not speciWcally the Christian religion? Since Christianity is universalist, it implies an essential
non-difference on the part of all men. We see the danger of the identiWcation in this text of Saint John
Chrysostrom, quoted and defended at Valladolid: "Just as there is no natural difference in the creation of man, so
there is no difference in the call to salvation of all men, barbarous or wise, since God's grace can correct the
minds of barbarians, so that they have a reasonable understanding."12
Once again we see that the term "human" is not descriptive, but evaluative. To be truly human, one needs to
be corrected. Regarding the relationship of difference and equality, Todorov concludes, "If it is [End Page 139]
incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must also admit that the
prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it consists in identifying the other purely and simply with one's
own 'ego ideal' (or with oneself)" (1984, 165). Such identification is not only the essence of Christianity, but
also of the doctrine of human rights preached by enthusiasts like Habermas and Rawls. And such
identification means that the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the universal ideal
of what it means to be human.
LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (1/5)

The appeal to the universality of human rights privileges a particular understanding of the
self in relation to the world, paradoxically de-legitimating sub-Saharan African forms of
life under the guise of neutrality.
Magnarella, 2K1
PaulJ., Professor of Anthropology and Affiliate Professor of Law and African Studies at the University of Florida,
Gainesville “Assessing the concept of Human Rights in Africa.” Center on rights Development. Human
rights and Human Welfare Volume 1:2 – April. P.25-27
Baah begins the book with a summary of the philosophic contributions of Thomas Hobbes, John
Locke, Jean Jacque Rousseau, and David Hume to the conceptualization of human rights and dignity. He argues
that human rights as presented in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) with
its focus on the individual is basically a Western notion that nevertheless has relevance for Africa. He disagrees
with those who claim that African societies historically have had human rights in the UDHR sense. Instead, Baah
sides with R. J. Vincent who holds that in African thought collective rights take precedent over social and
economic rights that, in turn, precede civil and political rights.
Baah argues that the universalistic claim made for the Western conceptualization of human rights in the
UDHR and other UN conventions presents a problem of implementation in non- Western societies, such as
those in Africa. This problem can only be overcome by education, improved living conditions and more democratic
governments. The author believes that many African practices that are contrary to the UDHR result from ignorance, poverty, and unenlightened rulers. He is especially harsh on African
rulers, many of whom have been authoritarian and greedy. He faults the Organization of African Unity for not promoting human rights in a vigorous fashion. The OAU has consistently
failed to criticize major African human rights violators, such as Idi Amin of Uganda.
Against this historic and philosophical background, Baah presents his questionnaires and the Akan responses to them. Sample sizes are generally small, usually under a hundred. The author
explains that “questionnaires [were] constructed from the key tenets of the various human rights instruments, [and] a field survey in five major Akan centers was carried out to determine the
level of understanding and acceptance of these tenets. Another group of respondents, 65 years or older was interviewed in an attempt to establish what the Akan socio-political orientation
was before the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948” (Preface). Unfortunately, the author fails to explain when or exactly how the data were gathered. The reader does not
learn, for example, whether the author himself administered the questionnaires and conducted the interviews or whether he enlisted the help of others.
In general, the Akan respondents agreed strongly with such statements as “Human rights are rights accorded an individual simply for being human” (p. 70). However, they disagreed strongly
with statement that clearly elevated individual rights over group authority. One such statement went as follows: “In matters involving private individual relations such as marriage and private
property disposal, the individual shall have the right to make decisions even at the objections of groups like elders, clan village, etc.” (p. 70). On the bases of his view of African political
asserts that “Africans in general, and Akans in particular do not understand human
history and the questionnaire results, Baah
rights” as it is conceptualized in the West with its elevation of the individual over the kin group or
community (p. 66).
Baah devotes Chapter Seven to “Human Dignity,” the quality that some claim is the justification for universal human rights. However, philosophers and human
rights scholars do not agree on the nature of human dignity. For example, philosopher Herbert Spielgeberg defines human dignity as the intrinsic worth of a person
for his/her own sake. While Rhoda Howard claims it as an extrinsic and relative quality, either granted at birth or earned in adulthood, depending on the society in
question. John Locke claimed that the universal possession of human dignity justified the universal entitlement to human rights, while Jack Donnelly writes that
human rights refers to a particular social practice whose purpose is to realize human dignity.
The search for a universal justification for universal human rights has led many into tautological idealism,
and in some cases a “chicken-and-egg” kind of confusion over which came first: universal human dignity
or universal human rights? Are the legal positivists correct? Could it be that it took thousands of years before a
few good sovereigns decided to grant human rights to their subjects? In part, I believe they are correct. But they do not tell the full story. It is a story best told by anthropologists.
The ultimate source of universal human rights lay in the universal psycho-biological nature of humans, not in the abstract and idealized concept of inherent human dignity—a concept, which
by the way, I personally cherish. Humans universally have magnificent brains that give them the ability to think, create, invent, imagine, manipulate abstract symbols, anticipate the future,
and learn from the past. They have a complex vocal apparatus that enables the brain to express itself orally in the complex, highly developed communication systems we call language. Our
bodies are, in part, self- regulating survival machines. Our nervous system tells us when we need nourishment, water, heat or cooling, rest or exercise. Our bodies naturally recoil from pain.
We are naturally social beings who love others, bond with others, and develop mentally and emotionally through interaction with others.
Because of these natural endowments, humans naturally want and value the freedom to think, to express their thoughts, to bond with others, to be free from torture, to have an adequate diet,
shelter and clothing. We value and want to be free to learn and develop our mental abilities. These universal human wants and values have existed throughout human history. It is only
recently that they have become, for some people, “human rights.”
The process whereby human wants and values were transformed into legalized human rights was a slow one that involved demands made by subjugated peoples against their contemporary
and future rulers. The process involved social and political revolutions. The three documents always mentioned as historic stepping stones to contemporary human rights conventions are: the
Magna Carta (1215), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). All three were associated with political
revolutions. In all three cases, a propertied class of men demanded rights for themselves and imposed corresponding duties on their sovereigns. Because of their shared psycho-biological
nature, people universally do not want be treated unjustly. Consequently, whenever they are in a position to do so, people endeavor to secure rights protections for themselves from their
rulers.
Because human rights, as commonly expressed today, are individual claims against the state, they are often
described as recent creations of Western civilization. This description is correct. I do not mean that human
rights are absent in non-Western cultures. However, the predominant characterization of human rights today
stems from the human experience with Western political systems. This is a conclusion that Baah also reaches.
He reasons that because this historic connection is basically lacking in Sub-Saharan Africa, people there do
not perceive of human rights in the way Western Europeans do.
Consequently, Baah concludes that the claimed universality of human rights is problematic. He warns that
unless this problem is understood and addressed, “human rights will remain a fictitious abstraction based
on Western liberal ideas and aspirations, relying on [a] capitalist ideological framework; imposed on
mankind with no regard for cultural and religious differences or economic and political maturity; and
expected to work in a real world of competition, avarice, and greed” (p.94).

The embrace of ‘human rights’ in sub-Saharan Africa relies on a notion of humanity and
selfhood that excludes religious perspectives
Englund, 2K
By criticising the practice of voting in multiparty elections, pentecostal Christians would seem to attack the
very foundations or democratic governance. Although their views appear incompatible with the struggle for
human rights in a country emerging from a long period of autocratic rule, this article has resisted an easy
dismissal of those views.
Both pentecostal Christians in a township and lay Catholics in a rural parish enter into moral arguments
with notions which are not readily comprehensible within the 'human rights talk'. Crucial to those notions
is the tacit emphasis on humanity and selfhood as a condition which is acquired through specific actions
and experiences. For the pentecostal and Catholic Christians referred to in this article, those experiences are
often spiritual, but their emphasis on 'growth' in the course of a life cycle resonates with observations in other
African ethnographies (see Riesman I 986).
Such a view of humanity will continue to pose problems to those who try to fit it into the human rights
framework. The pentecostal perspective on voting described above, for example, contrasts sharply with the
Catholic elite's understanding of voting as a 'birthright'. Seen from the human rights framework, there is
cause for some alarm when Christians appear to be leaving mainline churches in order to join pentecostal
and other 'faith gospel' denominations (Gifford 1998: 329-33) They seem to undermine the efforts by
mainline churches to promote 'development' through projects in health and education. The Catholic elite, in
particular, may be bewildered to realise that its attempt to move 'closer' to society actually alienates it from lay
Christians' concerns. In the human rights framework, those concerns indicate an undesirable shift from this-
worldly political and economic problems to a preoccupation with spirituality and personal cleansing.
If the current tendency indeed represented a wholesale rejection of the 'human rights talk', this article would add
its voice to those which lament the reversal of democratic achievements. Two observations undermine, however,
such a dramatic conclusion. First, this article has insisted on an appreciation of the true pluralism of moral
ideas in contemporary African settings. The fact that there are different ideas of humanity is compatible with
the possibility that the same person can utilise all of them in different situations. Second, far from entailing
consensus between the elite and the populace in 'patrimonial politics' (see Chabal & Daloz rggg), the ideas of
spiritual and corporeal unity which this article has described contain their own tools for an effective critique of
power. The need to resist the dead hand of human rights can be translated into a call for understanding
complexity. Those who promote more 'civic education' as a response to alternative approaches to politics may
themselves have a lesson to learn.

The universality of tolerance is intolerant of specificity – Human Rights Movements in
Africa pave over religious modes of life
Agberemi, 2002+
Hameed, Emory School of Law. “Nigeria and Global Islamism: Human Rights, Governance and Peace-building.”
No Date Given. www.law.emory.edu/IHR/worddocs/hameed.doc
By placing much greater emphasis on individual rights and civil liberties, the powerful Northern-led global
Human Rights Movement faces a deep crisis of credibility in the South – and eventually everywhere. Our
failure to give the central issue of socio-economic rights its deserving place in the human rights narrative is increasingly untenable. There is an
urgent need to acknowledge that Poverty, more than any other phenomenon, is the greatest threat to the Human Rights of the largest majority
of human beings. The constant suffering caused by Poverty profoundly influences the lives of 3 billion people worldwide, everyday, and
almost totally forecloses the possibility of well being and human dignity. By assuming that the causes of such severe poverty lie entirely in the
poor countries themselves and ignoring how the current global economic order sustains and deepens that poverty, the Human Rights
Movement risks its moral and humane character being eroded. There is everywhere a persistent environment of social injustice and repression
of basic rights, in spite of worldwide awareness of basic rights and near universal demand for them to be respected.
It is inevitable that for many, militant and political religion will seem attractive – either as a shelter or as a tool for accessing certain needs,
even if temporarily. Economic difficulties and socio-political problems often drive people to seek social justice through politicised religion –
which is often marginalized in popular discourse and thus often militant and destructive. Poverty worsens the circumstances.
And poverty is intense and worsening in Nigeria.
There exists a longstanding inherent tension between Human Rights, which are built on a premise of
universality, and Religion, which assumes a specificity of rights and responsibilities for believers only. Yet,
a sincere commitment to finding solutions to human problems must compel the realisation that values steer lives
and social institutions; that Religion is one of the major sources from which people draw values and moral
inspiration; that religious values can serve as anchors in a turbulent rapidly-changing world; and that where
there is the will, values can be used to mobilize people against most of the difficult and sometimes
intractable social problems facing Human Society.
Given the importance of religion for the vast majority of humankind, it is critical that conceptualisations of global civil society facilitate a positive engagement of
religious perspectives. In the wake of the events of September 11th 2001, it is clear that no government or individual can afford to ignore religious
fundamentalism.
Religious faith in the modern world is a political statement.
Leading international human rights scholars are increasingly questioning old assumptions4,10-18. Are all religious fundamentalists fanatics, or terrorists? Do they all
oppress women? Is religious fundamentalism always incompatible with human rights, peace-building and positive social change?
Persuasive and educated analyses for a synergy of Religion and Human Rights are increasingly challenging conceptions of global civil society that are essentially
defined by Western perspectives and experiences4,17,18. These conceptions of global civil society and their implications are being identified as seriously corroding
the true internationality of global civil society. A concept of global civil society built on applying a Western notion as the best representation of global civil
society, is intellectually untenable and increasingly politically unattractive for many non-Westerners. Especially after September 11, 2001, there have been more
educated analyses that aim to conceptualize a more truly global civil society in terms of the actual social conditions of all parts of the world18. Given the reality of
grave inequalities in wealth and in power among different sections of humanity, it is being increasingly argued that any convincing conceptualization of global
civil society, to justify its claim to ‘globality’, must be evaluated on its ability to survive scrutiny into how truly cross-cultural, trans-religious and transnational are
its elements.
Particularly in the case of Islam, secular human rights advocates must go beyond an attitude of guarded tolerance
of Religion to a moral acknowledgment of the legitimacy of religious faith-values. They must overcome the
Western secular bias11,12,24 that inferiorizes the freedom to full religious expression relative to the freedom
not to be religious. In practical terms for instance, secular rights activists at Beijing thought it ethical to publicly
demean religious women as “ignorant” and to admonish them on the “frailty of God”. In that case in point, ‘freedom of belief’ was construed
narrowly in terms of (Muslim) women being free to abandon religion when it should also include the freedom to remain in Islam without any
pressure or disincentives whatsoever.
Yet, so inherent in the peculiar nature of Islam is the reality that Muslim believers cannot conceive of nor
accept a system of rights that excludes religion. Religion for them suffuses every facet of life and no system
of rights that ignores this fundamental axiom is worthy of adoption or enforcement17. As long as the human
rights paradigm is presented as a Western, liberal agenda focusing primarily on civil and political rights,
people in Muslim societies remain profoundly distrustful, given the colonial past and the postcolonial
relationship with the West and given many Western countries’ inconsistent respect for human rights, as shown in willingness to trade human
rights for other interests whenever it's expedient to do so. Learned voices worldwide increasingly admit that the only legitimate and
sustainable discourse that will change attitudes is an internal discourse within Islam itself17–24. When human rights are presented as an internal
rather than ‘foreign’ agenda, and shown to be legitimised by Islam, people will be less resistant.
The question of intervention exposes the impossibility of neutrality in enforcing liberal

humanism in Africa
Woods, 97.
Jeanne M., Associate Professor, Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. 18 Mich. J. Int’l L. 475 p.L/N
In South Africa, however, sovereignty is bifurcated; the white minority regime's sovereignty prevails over
the black majority's self-determination and human rights claims. 256 The "simple monitoring" model is
adopted utilizing the existing domestic structures. 257 International intervention will be visible but not
intrusive. The five international members of the IEC do not even enjoy voting powers. 258 Under the extreme
limitations of this form of intervention, we can only document, not prevent the fraud; we are dependent,
ultimately, upon the good will of the regime. 259
Because neutrality freezes the status quo in place, the timing and extent of intervention can be outcome-
determinative. Therefore, where large-scale human rights deprivations are involved, a model comparable to that
employed in colonial contexts is warranted. 260 Especially because the total disenfranchisement of the African
majority - over seventy percent of the population 261 - was a key aspect of that deprivation, the need for
international control of the process of extending that franchise is heightened.
A hands-off model cannot confront the tremendous obstacles to a democratic transition existing under South
African conditions, characterized by apartheid and racism, extreme State-sponsored violence, 262 [*512]
widespread deprivation and illiteracy, 263 and a territory of vast size and complexity. 264 The Security Council's
decision to adopt such a model reflects the longstanding position of the powerful members of the international
community on South Africa's sovereignty, which has been to treat it gingerly, notwithstanding the fact that
matters of self-determination and racial discrimination are generally regarded as justifying intrusions on
sovereignty. 265
The apartheid regime consistently spurned international human rights norms. At the time of the election,
South Africa was a party to only four of the twenty-five major human rights conventions. 266 "Although [it] is a
signatory to the United Nations Charter, it did not vote for the ... Declaration of Human Rights." 267 The United
Nations General Assembly vigorously and consistently condemned the South African regime for its record
of human rights violations, and declared it illegitimate. 269 Indeed, as Professor Richardson asserts, the
regime had been "adjudged to be virtually bereft of legitimacy under law." 270 Nevertheless, the powerful States
in many respects continued to accord the regime all the deference due to a fully sovereign State. With the
exception of the 1977 arms [*513] embargo, the Security Council resolutions on South African apartheid were
made pursuant to Chapter VI of the Charter, which made their enforcement subject to the sovereign consent of the
regime, 271 notwithstanding the availability of nonconsensual enforcement measures 272 in cases of breaches of
peace or international crimes. 273 Classical peacekeeping between States has become the model for
contemporary U.N. election monitoring. In theory, its two essential tenets, consent and neutrality, obviate
concern about the justice of the intervention, and ensure that a "legal" rather than a "political" solution is
imposed.
Herein lies the paradox: liberalism's premise that neutral intervention is not outcome-determinative
contradicts its own claims about the transformative power of rationality and law. 278 In the context of
election monitoring, the power to declare a transfer of political power "free and fair" carries the
imprimatur of law, and the ability to bestow domestic and international legitimacy upon the results. 279 This is
the epitome of liberal law as "a form of policy that changes the stakes, and often "escalates' the intensity, of
political contests; it is a constraint comparable to force in its effects." 280

Exclusion is not an inherent part of African political ideology, it is imported by the spread
of Western values.
Ambrose in ‘95
BRENDALYN P. AMBROSE, worked in Africa with CUSO (Canadian University Services Overseas), a
nongovernmental organization that works on development and human rights issues n the Third World. She is an
African, born and raised on the island of Antigua, and is a graduate of the University of Ottawa in international
development and cooperation, “Democratization and the Protection of Human Rights in Africa: Problems and
Prospects,” Praeger Publishers, 1995
A marked difference between the African Charter and other human rights treaties is the provision for
"Peoples" rights. The argument is that African customary law places importance on the group or community
in which an individual may express his identity, while exclusion from such groups would be deemed
unacceptable. This is a reflection of the importance placed on the African concept of human rights. The provisions
for peoples' rights include the right of colonized peoples to use any internationally recognized means to free
themselves from domination. It further guarantees peoples the right to prevent the exploitation of their natural
resources by foreigners, and gives them the right to enter into trade agreements and to protect and develop their
wealth. In recognition of the importance of a clean, safe, and sustainable environment, the Charter guarantees
peoples the right to protect their water supply, air space, and land from pollution and environmental
degradation.
LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS/ UNIVERSALITY
The human rights framework homogenizes Africa under its totalizing, universal authority.
Its emphasis on the individual in relation to the state excludes tribal interacts from
“acceptable” forms of life and the embrace of pluralism eradicates minority threats via
their “inclusion.”
Anghie, 2K6
Antony, Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. 41 Tex. Int’l
L.J. 447 p.L/N
It is of course extremely difficult to establish how the adoption or otherwise of a particular human rights regime
affects a particular society. 38 The causes of ethnic conflict is a source of ongoing and intense debate.
Nevertheless, international law, by granting or denying certain entities the right to make claims at the
international level, may affect the character of the relationship between the state and its minorities. Thus, Obiora
Okafor in his important study of the problems confronting African statehood has explored "the extent to which
certain international legal and institutional attitudes have contributed to the problem of internecine strife
and underdevelopment of the African continent." 39 Examining the current human rights regime and the
relative power it allocates to the state and to minorities, particularly with regard to the sociology of ethnic
violence, I would argue the human rights regime currently in place is not only inadequate for the purposes of
protecting minorities but may even facilitate the expansion of the state.
Human rights has this effect in different ways. First, it does so by purporting to outline universal rights
which are held by individuals and by establishing a legal universe in which the only recognizable identities
are those of the individual and the state. The tribe - and it is essentially in terms of the tribe that the
cultural community is understood - is to be disregarded because it also competes for the individual's
alliance. It is given no recognition as a distinctive legal entity. Whatever the relationship between two
members of a tribe, they are understood, legally, merely as two individuals. The individual's status and
rights are governed by the state, not by the community. Collective identities are thus not given legal
expression. Arguably, for example, even the right to association, which seeks to protect collectivities, has the
effect of eroding minority communities. The right to associate not only characterizes relations among members
of a society generally, but also among members of the same cultural community. Thus, relations between the
same tribe, or ethnic group are most decisively shaped, in legal terms, by the individual's right to associations,
whatever the immediacies of blood and kinship ties. As a consequence, these groups are included within the
discourse of rights, but in a form congruent with and subordinate to the decisive, authoritative and indeed
presupposed existence of the state. Within the framework of a right to association, no distinction is made
between a trade union and a minority. The legal equivalence of a minority with all other groups within a society -
trade unions, professional associations and so forth - supports a framework of democratic pluralism. The threat
that minorities pose to the state is dissipated, in this way, by their inclusion within a legal framework in
which their interests have to be considered, not in isolation, but in relation to a number of other
associations and interests which [*462] balance and neutralize the potential threat they present. This
approach is understandable in the context of the peculiar threat posed to the state by minorities. As Geertz argues:
There are many other competing loyalties [competing for the individual's allegiance] ... - ties to class, party,
business, union, profession, or whatever. But groups formed of such ties are virtually never considered as
possible self-standing, maximal social units, as candidates for nationhood ... . Economic or class or intellectual
disaffection threatens revolution, but disaffection based on race, language, or culture, threatens partition,
irredentism, or merger, a redrawing of the very limits of the state, a new definition of its domain. 40
This legal framework supports the operation of Chatterjee's bureaucratic state whose precise task it is to balance
these different interests in striving to achieve the well-being of the whole. This is an entirely legitimate process in
a democratic polity; nevertheless, for a national minority that might resent being a part of a particular state in the
first place, these processes could easily exacerbate tensions, particularly in those cases where the process is
abused by the decision makers. In these different ways, then, the human rights framework creates in the legal
sphere a set of principles that appear to correspond with the project of the postcolonial state to expand into
every sphere of society and establish itself as the single authoritative, universal and encompassing entity.
LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS/ AID

Aiding Africa furthers the grand narrative of human rights that constructs the so-called
third world as barbarianism that must be “corrected.”
Ibhawoh in ‘03
Bonny Ibhawoh, Professor at UNC Ashville, “Human Rights: a political and cultural critique,” questia, Vol. 17 Issue
1, 2003
Mutua draws parallels between the violent Christian colonial conquest of Africa and the "modern human
rights crusade." The same methods, he claims, are at work and similar cultural dispossessions are taking place.
Using the trope of savage-victim-savior, he argues that the grand narrative of human rights constructs a dual
image of Third World actors: they are either "savages"--despotic regimes or traditional authorities
implementing patriarchal and repressive customs--or hapless "victims"--minority or other oppressed groups
such as women. Certain key players in the West thus act as gatekeepers of human rights destined to save
Third World "victims" from Third World "savages." In this regard, the human rights corpus falls into the
historical continuum of the Eurocentric colonial project in which actors are cast into superior and subordinate
positions. The book's insistent conclusion is that the human rights corpus, constructed primarily as the moral
guardian of global capitalism and liberal internationalism, is simply unable to confront in a meaningful way
the deep-seated imbalances of power and privilege that bedevil the world. Thus, rather than being seen as a
final answer, the present human rights corpus should be treated as an experimental paradigm--a work in progress.
What is required is a new theory of internationalism and human rights that responds to diverse cultures and
confronts the inequities of the international order. Although this book does not go on to develop substantively this
multicultural theory, it points out possible directions, such as balancing individual and group rights, giving more
substance to social and economic rights, and relating rights to duties. In the case of Africa, Mutua argues that the
human rights corpus needs to be tempered by specific African cultural experiences that emphasize the group,
duties, social cohesion, and communal solidarity as opposed to rigid individualism.
LINKS: AFRICA: INT’L HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO

Expanding the realm of human rights and democracy to sub-Saharan takes power out of
the hands of local decision-makers and grants the authority to a hegemonic global ideology
to make the decision on humanity as such.
Chandler, 2K3
David, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. “New rights for Old? Cosmopolitan
Citizenship and the Critique of State Sovereignty.” Political Studies: 2003 Vol 51, 332-349
These citizens, of global society rather than the nation state, cannot understand why human rights rules
should not rule (Robertson, 1999, p. 82). Cosmopolitan democrats argue that democracy and accountability
can no longer be equated with sovereignty and non-intervention: ‘democracy must transcend the borders
of single states and assert itself on a global level’ (Archibugi, 2000, p. 144).
To meet the needs of cosmopolitan or global citizens it is necessary to extend democracy beyond the nation-
state. David Beetham argues that in a world of nation-states ‘the demos that is democracy’s subject has come to
be defined almost exclusively in national terms, and the scope of democratic rights has been limited to the bounds
of the nation-state’ (Beetham, 1999, p. 137). He suggests that in the same way that democracy was extended
from the level of the town to that of the state in the eighteenth century it should, in the twenty-first century,
be extended from the nation to humankind as a whole.
The reason for this new and more expansive institutionalisation of democracy is held to be the impact of
globalising processes, which have created a ‘democratic deficit’ at the national level. Daniele Archibugi and
David Held assert that decisions made democratically by citizens of one state or region can no longer be
considered to be truly democratic if they affect the rights of ‘non-citizens’, that is, those outside that
community, without those people having a say. Held argues that, for example, villagers in sub-Saharan
Africa, who live at the margins of some of the central power structures and hierarchies of the global order,
are profoundly affected by the policies made in these inter-state forums (Held, 1998, p. 14). Archibugi
stresses that the inequalities of global power relations mean that decisions democratically restricted to the
nation-state can not be considered democratic from a cosmopolitan perspective:
... few decisions made in one state are autonomous from those made in others. A decision on the interest rate in Germany has significant consequences for
employment in Greece, Portugal and Italy. A state’s decision to use nuclear energy has environmental consequences for the citizens of neighbouring countries.
Immigration policies in the European Union have a significant impact on the economic development of Mediterranean Africa. All this happens without the
affected citizens having a say in the matter (Archibugi, 1998, p. 204).
Cosmopolitans highlight that, for democracy to exist in a globalised world, it is necessary to have the consent of the entire community, which will be affected by a
particular decision. To this end, new political constituencies need to be created to address these questions. These constituencies may be smaller or larger than the
nation-state, depending on the issue at stake. For David Held, in a cosmopolitan democratic system:
People can enjoy membership in the diverse communities which significantly affect them and, accordingly, access to a variety of forms of political participation.
Citizenship would be extended, in principle, to membership in all cross-cutting political communities, from the local to the global (Held, 1995, p. 272).
In order to address this ‘democratic deficit’, cosmopolitans propose replacing the territorially-bounded
political community of the state as the subject of international decision-making with new flexible
frameworks based on the rights of the global citizen, freed from territorial restrictions. To quote Archibugi:
If some global questions are to be handled according to democratic criteria, there must be political representation for citizens in global affairs, independently and
autonomously of their political representation in domestic affairs. The unit should be the individual, although the mechanisms for participation and representation
may vary according to the nature and scope of the issues discussed (1998, p. 212).
Cosmopolitans argue that there is still an important role for the state and for representative democracy, but that these institutions can not have the final say in
decision-making. In certain circumstances, where this is not democratic enough it must be possible for sovereignty to be
overridden by institutions which are ‘autonomous and independent’ and whose legitimacy is derived from
the universal rights of the global citizen, unconstrained by the nation-state framework. Martin Shaw writes:
The crucial issue, then, is to face up to the necessity which enforcing these principles would impose to breach
systematically the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention ... The global society perspective,
therefore, has an ideological significance which is ultimately opposed to that of international society (Shaw,
1994a, pp. 134–5). Ken Booth similarly claims that:
In 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the individual was potentially brought back to the centre. A building block was constructed for the
possible development of a cosmopolitan democracy in a world of post-sovereign states ... This is the hope of progressively leaving behind the politics of the
concentration camp – the ultimate sovereign space – for a cosmopolitan democracy aimed at reinventing global human being – being human globally – based on
the politics of the-I-that-is-an-other, and badged with common humanity (1999, pp. 65–66).
This limitation on state-based mechanisms of democracy and accountability, and on states as the subjects of
international law, relies on the possibility of a ‘higher law’ derived from the individual global citizen as a
new, and prior, subject of international relations. It is at this point that the theoretical underpinnings of the
cosmopolitan project appear fragile. The citizen-subject of international decision- making appears
overburdened with both theoretical and practical problems. The following section raises some theoretical questions about the
essence of the cosmopolitan perspective: the extension of democracy beyond states and the development of the global citizen as a subject of international law.
Further sections will develop the theoretical and practical implications of the cosmopolitan framework for questions of state sovereignty and the relationship
between states and inter-national institutions.
LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM
The liberal notion of the subject is absent in many sub-Saharan African traditions
Englund, 2K
The preoccupation of donors, political leaders, NGOs and churches with human rights has inspired little
analysis as to how the 'human rights talk' may limit our understanding of social and political problems.
Malawi's current liberalism has embraced the discourse of rights with such vigour that it is becoming the
only language persons in public offices are able to speak. The inculcation starts early. Human Rights is
now a module in Malawian primary schools. In everyday public discourse, 'stakeholders' and 'interest
groups' are common designations for rights-bearing subjects in virtually every arena of life.
The new Local Government Bill passed in parliament in Kovember 1998 was one striking example of this language (see e.g. PAC jVew~, 1st
Quarter, 1999). It transformed councils into assemblies and ruled that their members would consist of elected representatives, chiefs, members of parliament and,
curiously, 'interest groups'. It was understood that the latter would grant representation to women, youths and the disabled, among others. By defining such sections of
the population as 'interest groups', the bill indicated an increasing codification of society into discrete rights-bearing
subjects.
Church leaders, key players in introducing the discourse of rights to Malawi, have continued to participate in this process of inculcation, not missing opportunities to
utilise the new language of claims to further their own interests. One example is the leadership of the Zambezi Evangelical Church who claimed ownership of the land
where the state president's Sanjika Palace had been erected in Blantyre in 1967. 'Since the Muluzi administration seems friendly, we might reach some compromise ',
the Church's general secretary commerited in February 1999, pointing out that the Church received no compensation when it was evicted in 1970 (Africa News
Online, 12.2.1999). More comrnon, however, are church leaders' efforts to assist others to utilise the prevailing tolerance for claiming rights. Various projects of civic
education have come to be an important aspect of many mainline Christian churches' work. The Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central African Presbyterian
(CCAP), for example, has launched the Church and Society Programme which has organised workshops to introduce church youths to 'the meaning of democracy,
human rights, community-based development and gender roles in a democratic society' (Bwalo I (5), 1998; Bwalo 2 (I), 1999). Women, another conspicuous 'interest
group' along with youths and children in 'democratic' Malawi, have received the attention of several churches and NGOs, such as in the Christian Service Committee's
effort to inform women leaders of women's and children's rights (The Star, 9.5.1997; The Nation, 11.5.1997).
A critical analysis of this proliferation of human rights projects among churches and NGOs should not be seen as a criticism of the good intentions involved, nor of the
to the pluralism that
tangible results they may yield (see Cammack & Chirwa 1997). Clearly, if nothing more, civic education on human rights contributes
most Malawians seemed to yearn for during the democratic transition. Yet, social analysts should also
examine the Malawian critiques of liberalism after the transition, rather than dismissing their concerns over
excessive ufulu (freedom) as needing more civic education (cf. Kanyongolo 1998).
These critiques can be seen to take two broadly contrasting forms in post-transition Malawi. One is the
critique which confronts the ills of neoliberalism with ideas and interventions which are firmly within the
liberal tradition. Another is achieved in, for example, those religious lives which appear to bear no traces of
liberal notions of the subject. By comparing the leaders and the laity in Catholic and pentecostal churches,
the rest of this article examines the coexistence of these contrasting dispositions even within the same
churches.
LINKS: AFRICA: MODERNIZATION

Secular modernization in sub-Saharan paves over religious understandings of the world
causing alienation and a loss of meaning.
Agberemi, 2002+
Hameed, Emory School of Law. “Nigeria and Global Islamism: Human Rights, Governance and Peace-building.”
No Date Given. www.law.emory.edu/IHR/worddocs/hameed.doc
The increasing social role of Religion in practically all human societies, and the associated trends and dynamics
involved, have totally invalidated the notion that modernisation inevitably brings about secularisation; even
though this had been one of the most resilient of 20th century theories on social development1 - 2.
The idea that nations would inevitably secularise as they modernised arose within a context where
urbanisation, industrialisation and especially scientific and technological progress were seen as bound to
trigger a rationalisation of “non-rational” views – including religious beliefs. The unending wave of
technological advancements that began after World War II was supposed to lead to overall long-term Human
Progress, which would end the perennial social problems of Poverty, Hunger, Injustice, Disease and
Environmental Degradation. These age-long problems persist, and in many cases are worsening with
Globalisation.
Many aspects of Modernisation (including technological developments) have left many people with a feeling
of loss rather than achievement. Western modernisation has undermined value systems, weakened and
sometimes ousted “stable” local traditions, while technological advancement has allocated opportunities in
highly unequal ways, within and amongst nations. Western modernisation gave rise to a global consumerist
culture that revealed (and with increasing Globalisation, has amplified) the relative deprivation of peoples.
Western modernisation produced in non-western societies, a deep sense of alienation and stimulated a
search for an identity that would give life some meaning and purpose. It so happens that the “meaning and
purpose” of life is a central discourse of all Religions.
Globally, states face three key challenges on governance: managing relations with non-state actors; combating
criminal networks; and responding to emerging and dynamic ethnic and religious groups.
In Africa, near-future prospects for governance continue to be dimmed by concerns with problems related to
state repression and corruption, in combination with the longstanding problem of ethnic and religious divisions.
As the atrophy of special relationships between European powers and their former African colonies
continue, international organizations and non-state actors of all types are emerging as the most important
players in influencing developments in sub-Saharan Africa. Now and more so in the near future, profit-
making multinational companies, international non-profit organizations, international crime syndicates and drug
traffickers, foreign mercenaries and international terrorists seeking safe-havens will be joined by transnational
religious movements and institutions in competing for influence in sub-Saharan Africa.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa, ethnic problems will likely continue to predominate as the greatest challenge to
civil governance.
LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM/ DEMO/ “NEUTRALITY” (1/3)

“Neutrality” in African politics is a fig leaf to clothe more insidious forms of power and
inequality – the affirmative’s embrace of liberal values is an excuse to “fix” what they
designate as irrational forms of life.
Woods, 97.
The original position, however, does not entail a totally blank slate; it is "characterized by stipulations that are
widely accepted." 56 These stipulations - individualism, private property, freedom of contract, the
patriarchal family - are the normative values and seemingly immutable institutions of the market state. 57
They are, by definition, neutral. 58 Thus, the original position presupposes that only liberal institutions,
and the prevailing distribution of power therein, are rational, and therefore form the premises upon which
rational men 59 select and order principles of justice.
Indeed, in Rawlsian discourse, justice and rationality are interchangeable. Justice is by definition rational;
60 rationality is intuitive 61 and efficient. 62 The first principle of justice is, therefore, what is rational, intuitive,
and efficient in the context of the widely accepted stipulations of liberalism: equal liberty. 63 The principle of
equal liberty - produced by [*485] rationality and in turn producing justice - is one of the principles rational
men 64 would consent to in a position of procedural equality. 65
If parties are procedurally equal, the law and its implementers must formally profess neutrality. 66 If I am to
be neutral, the veil must block out my Gaborone experience. I must also disavow sympathy with any of the
contending parties - the ANC, Inkatha, the separatist Afrikaner Volksfront - or their ideologies, for
partisanship is irrational, and by definition cannot produce justice; 67 consequently, it is unjust. 68
My task, therefore, is to superimpose rationality through law, in its awesome universality and objectivity,
69 upon irrational politics, to miraculously transform the events that are to transpire. 70 In the hands of the
neutral arbiter, a cacaphonous struggle for power becomes a legal defining moment, law "acting on the
everyday as ... order on chaos," 71 ... as "the metropolis ... mobilized for deployment on the periphery." 72
Law will bestow credibility and legitimacy upon the election and the resulting political order. Once the
political order is legitimated, its decisions will acquire normative force, 73 and an aura of inevitability will
descend upon its social and economic consequences. 74 In this way, the crucial dichotomy between law and
politics will be preserved. 75 [*486]
I am, as well, the bearer of justice. Neutral law will ensure procedural equality among the contenders. It will
place the ruling National Party, the architects of apartheid, and the formerly banned ANC on equal
footing. Law will render the previously disenfranchised blacks equal to the whites; the veil will conceal the
fact that it was only four months before that blacks were given any say in the running of the country. 76
Behind its lacy folds, we are unaware that it was only four months ago that South Africa's white-controlled
parliament voted to restore citizenship to the estimated ten million Africans banished to the barren,
nominally independent, "homelands." 77 But, the incisive words of W.E.B. DuBois penetrate the veil:
Here, at a stroke of a pen was erected a government of millions of men, - and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system
of slavery, centuries old; ... they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former
masters. 78
Nevertheless, liberal law renders the parties procedurally equal, and that means that the process is fair. And
procedural fairness means justice, 79 despite the past and ongoing inequities. 80 The veil of ignorance will
cancel out the advantages gained from differences in wealth, status, military prowess, or racial and gender
oppression. 81 In this way, neutrality constrains naked power. 82 [*487]
And indeed, naked power must be constrained in certain contexts if the law/politics dichotomy, hence the normative power of law, is to be maintained. 83 Power
must be constrained in the judicial arena, the quintessential legal forum, although neutral principles theorists acknowledge that judicial decisionmakers face
"inescapably "political'" choices. 84 In the face of such choices, moral relativism is required, because liberal philosophy deems these choices to be among equally
worthy values, 85 reduced to equally valid legal arguments. 86 Liberal theorists advocate judicial neutrality because the courts are not sovereign - they do not
derive their authority from popular consent - and therefore "are bound to function otherwise than as a naked power organ" when making such choices. 87 But, this
reasoning does not apply to the political arena. The legislature is sovereign, therefore it may behave in an overtly partisan fashion, 88 and any limits imposed on
its authority bear a heavy burden of justification. 89
Likewise, in international law, neutrality does not delimit the State when acting in its sovereign capacity; it
is not imposed or expected when States act to advance their economic, military, or diplomatic self-interests.
It does not apply to terms of trade, territorial defense, its votes in the United Nations, IMF, GATT, or the World
Bank. Neutrality is imposed, however, when States act in a judicial capacity, resolving disputes between
procedural equals. Thus, in the international arena, where it is harder to conceal the influence of naked
power, the veil is even more important. 90 Naked power is irrational, and does not belong in a setting [*488]
where law and justice are the asserted goals. Neutral and objective rules must constrain power and
irrationality, or at least provide a fig-leaf in which to clothe the beast. 91

The exportation of liberal institutions in Africa mimics the logic of colonialism’s attempt to
impose civilization and rationality.
Carey, 2K2
Henry F. (Chip) Carey, assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University, has published essays on East European
politics, international human rights, and democratization. “the Postcolonial State and the Proteciton of Human Rights.”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East – Volume 22, Number1&2 pp.59-75 p.MUSE
First, we consider the socialization impelled by colonial subjugation and hypocrisy. The Earl of Cromer,
quoted in the introductory epigram, ruled British India and then came to Egypt in 1883 where he ruled for
twenty-three years as "Consul General." He controlled the fate of every Egyptian officer, wrote that the
Egyptians could be ready for self-government, if ever, only very far off into the future at the end of his two-plus
decades there. That the Egyptians had ruled themselves on and off for 5,000 years never entered his thinking. He maintained that the British
were there only to help the Egyptians, whose education and irrigation systems were totally dependent on British expertise. He never
mentioned the British interests in the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869 or that the British wanted to develop Egypt as a cotton plantation,
a need that emerged during the US Civil War embargo. Cromer also does not mention that the Egyptians were not permitted to develop their
own cotton factories in Egypt, but were forced to export cotton to Britain and then import clothes manufactured there. Similarly, Kipling, in
the "White Man's Burden," expresses sentiments applied to another superior white race, the whites in the US, who had just conquered the
"brown" people of the Philippines, of the unabashedly proud imperialist. White Americans, or the Anglo-Saxons more generally, are the
superior part of the superior, white race. Of the Filipinos, which would apply to the British colonies equally, Kipling referred in his poem, "the
White Man's Burden," to the colonized as "sloth," "silent," "sullen," "half-child," "half-devil," "the burden,"—all to be civilized. The
British believed that they were high-minded," there to "civilize," to build "roads" and "ports." That the
British, according to Kipling could civilize was self-evident, even though they were relying entirely on
British ideas. This was a continuation of a West European tradition, rooted in Christendom, which in turn
was rooted in the Roman Empire's tradition of imposing civilization.
Kipling's "civilizing mission" implicitly claimed to legitimate British power. Many colonial administrators
thought they were genuinely idealistic in promoting law, sanitation, education, good government, the civil
service, etc., though they may have had material and social advancement motives of their own. Conklin and
Fletcher conclude that the disingenuous "civilizing mission" impelled Western colonialism:
Cultural assumptions, and occasional doubts, about the superior achievements of the white colonizers, and the
ability of Africans and Asians to catch up under European tutelage, affected every policy choice in the colonies—
from building schools, roads and hospitals, to justifying forced labor, selling new commodities, and enforcing
strict segregation of the European and native populations.43
Secondly, colonialism prematurely introduced quasi-liberal institutions, which were generally undeveloped,
whose institutions were designed more for economic exploitation than "civilizing" the population. For
example, most of the Arab world was used as a source of extraction and export of its raw materials and access to
sea lanes. The hypocritical promotion of self-rule under colonialism created an obvious disconnect between
rhetoric and reality for the colonized. How could they really become self-governing if every decision was
subject to veto power by the metropolitan power or some other form of direct or ultimate control? Instead
of being able to criticize colonial policy or advocate different policies, especially independence, those who
exerted free speech were subject to incarceration. One effect of this dubious justification was to create separate
experiences among collaborators, who participated, and oppositional elites and the masses, who did not. Rather
than inspiring or teaching self-government, the hypocrisy often inspired counter-reactions, often violent, from the
local population:
Such ideas, of which the logical conclusion was the ultimate absorption of Arabs on a level of equality into a
new, unified world, were crossed by others: a sense of an unbridgeable difference, of an innate superiority which
conferred the right to rule, and, among the settler groups...a separate nation of settlers.44

The embrace of neutral liberal political categories ushers in a more sophisticated form of
oppression in African politics. The language of neutrality masks the inequalities that
sustain the liberal state.
Woods, 97.
The creation of a black elite will be well under way if Mandela succeeds in implementing his privatization
program. Yet, such an elite can only expect to remain subservient to foreign capital, upon which the South
African economy is so heavily dependent. 317 Will the price of the negotiated political freedom in South
Africa be, as in the rest of Africa, economic slavery? The rash of strikes by the powerful trade unions [*523]
indicates that their struggle is ongoing. 318 The South African people, who endured some of the worst
atrocities known to humanity in the course of that struggle, will no more readily submit to black
domination than to white. Their just aspirations go beyond procedural equality, and their right to
economic self-determination will not whither away because the anachronism of apartheid has been
replaced with a more sophisticated form of oppression.
What does the future hold in store for little Nelson Madiba, as she embarks on her life-journey? With the
demise of apartheid, her condition has lost its international dimension. 319 The veil of ignorance offers her
no protection from the ravages of naked power that are now free to reign - until the next election
momentarily transforms naked power into pin-striped law. Then the veil will once again disguise the forces
that dictate the possibilities of her life. Seen through the veil they will acquire an aura of inevitability,
universality and permanence. Seen through the veil they will not look like the historically determined
contingencies that they are, vulnerable to the countervailing power of the millions who, like her, are not among
the privileged.
I fear that the auspicious promise of "a better life for all" that heralded her arrival will not be realized in her
lifetime. Nevertheless, this slogan - necessitated by postmodern conditions 320 - moves closer to the dream of
real equality than liberalism's promise of equal liberty. And together with eighteenth century slogans of human
rights, 321 twentieth century social and economic rights - to housing, health care, water, food and education -
found their way into the new South African Constitution. Significantly, the Preamble "recognize[s] the injustices
of [the] past." 322
There is hope in this, because liberalism is sometimes forced into concessions and accommodations by its
own ideological rhetoric. The transformative power of ideology, often to the bafflement of its promulgators, is a
result of the attempt of the dispossessed to realize the promises of the rhetoric. 323 To avoid this
transformation, liberal political theory attempts to shape and narrow the permissible discourse by [*524]
compartmentalizing disciplines, sanitizing scholarship of political point of view, and emphasizing lifeless
abstractions. That its idealist vision of equal liberty has no basis in reality is beside the point of the
discourse; that its vision of justice as procedural equality advantages the powerful is the point. 324
Contemporary political theory is dominated by the Enlightenment themes which have been posited as
universal. 325 Through the universalization of the central theme of rationality, "present and future inequalities
were now said to be merited inequalities, the consequences of the presumedly autonomous inner efforts of
individuals." 326 Neutrality masks the fact that the unequal distribution of wealth and poverty, privilege
and hopelessness is not an aberration, but a fundamental and essential component of the market state; that
Crossroads must exist, for it is an integral part of the global economy; 327 that the impoverishment of the
South is a requisite for the prosperity of the North. 328
LINKS: AFRICA: SELF-DETERMINATION

The international attempt to encourage self-determination in Africa in practice results in
the enforcement of the Mandate System of nation-states that is premised not on autonomy
but on achieving a particular type of culture and civilization.
Anghie, 2K6
L.J. 447 p.L/N
The problems that the League attempted to address with innovative techniques continue to play a prominent
part in contemporary international relations. These problems are especially acute in the many postcolonial
states in Africa and Asia which have been overwhelmed by the challenges of achieving national unity in the
midst of ongoing ethnic conflict, on the one hand, and development on the other.
One way of appreciating the significance of the problem of cultural difference is by noting the different doctrines
and technologies that international law develops in an attempt to deal with the problem of nationalities. In
doctrinal terms, the problem of nationalities has resulted in the formulation of a concept of self-
determination which is still being debated and challenged. Crucially, however, something like a switch has taken
place between the League period and the U.N. period. Whereas self-determination was initially understood as
each nation should enjoy its own state, now it is the Mandate System model of what might be termed the
nation-state that prevails. That is, a system in which territorial boundaries are fixed, and all the inhabitants
of the territory, while they may be members of distinctive cultural groupings, are united together as
citizens of the modern, development state. Modernization and development, it was hoped, would create new
identities that would enable and support this modern, development state. To the extent that cultural identity in
itself had any enduring significance in international law, this was to be found in human rights provisions, such as
Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which was devised for the protection of
minorities. Such provisions have provided far less protection than existed in the minority treaty system
which was perceived as encouraging cultural autonomy, and consequently, intense nationalisms.
Subsequent realities, of course, have proved these initially optimistic assessments of the new model of self-determination to be unfounded.
Ethnic conflict remains one of the major problems confronting the international system. Far from undermining traditional [*463] cultural
identities, the development state - and perhaps globalization itself - has intensified them. The question then remains what sorts of protections
international law should provide to cultural minorities within the context of the sovereign nation-state. Emerging norms of democratic
governance and autonomy rights could be seen as attempts to address these problems. Thus for example, it could be argued that if democracy
became a reality in many countries, this would ensure the participation of minorities in the political process and diminish ethnic tensions. But
these norms leave unresolved the issue of whether, for example, minorities should be given special political rights, such as the right to
autonomy, to make such participation effective. In the final analysis, perhaps, it is only through political negotiation together with adherence
to the basic principles of human rights that some sort of settlement may be reached. Despite all these efforts, tragically, ethnic conflict is a
powerful presence in much of contemporary Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. International law continues to struggle
with the problem of how to deal with cultural differences within states, and how to mediate and settle the
conflicts between different national groups within the one state making competing claims to territory and
sovereignty.
The two great experiments in nation-building undertaken by the League suggest two ways of understanding the
relationship between the problem of cultural difference and the emergence of sovereignty. In the case of the
minority treaty system, sovereignty was intended to embody a distinct culture. The existence of different
cultures within one territory required the formulation of a minority protection regime which was at least
nominally intended to preserve the identity of the minority. In the mandate system, by contrast, sovereignty
was based, not on the principle of cultural distinctiveness itself - although many nationalist groups in Africa
and Asia seized on President Wilson's statements to assert their own claims to statehood - but on achieving,
basically, a particular type of culture, modernity or civilization. In more recent times, the problem of cultural
difference has assumed a new form whereby certain states have used the vehicle of sovereignty to express their
own cultural identities - the cultural relativism debate has been the most notable expression of this trend. 41 The
problem of cultural difference, then, in all these different manifestations, continues to present itself in both old
and new versions, and poses formidable challenges to the development of international law and institutions.
LINKS: AID/ CHARITY

Western aid to Africa is embolden to the savage-victim-savior metaphor that plagues
Christianity.
Tampio in ‘03
Jesse Tampio, Staff for the Harvard Human Rights Journal, “Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique,”
Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2003
As the title of the book suggests, Makau Mutua does not direct his critique at the surface expressions of the
human rights movement but at the very core of its ideology. The director of the Human Rights Center at SUNY-
Buffalo Law School, Mutua makes a strong case that the human rights corpus—and by extension the
movement—is not as universal and multicultural as it claims to be. While Mutua repeatedly affirms his respect
for the movement’s noble goals and ideals, he contends that its Eurocentric bias has led to the unwitting
imposition of Western political, economic, and cultural norms on non-Western societies.
Mutua believes that the tension in the movement between the principles of universality and respect for diversity
must be reconciled by a painstaking process of examining local cultures for those values that coincide with
widespread principles of human dignity. He argues that the conception of human rights, far from being a fully
realized concept, needs to be overhauled and transformed into a truly “multicultural, inclusive, and deeply political”
initiative. Rather than propose what a restructured corpus would look like, he offers this book as part of his ongoing
project to stimulate a more nuanced, critical dialogue that leads the movement towards this goal.
In the first chapter, “Human Rights as a Metaphor,” Mutua examines how the Eurocentric nature of the
movement is embedded in the grand narrative of human rights as expressed through the triple metaphor of
“savages-victims-saviors.” The savage, or human rights violator, is typically a non-Western state, but as
states are merely the expression of their cultures, it is really the culture that becomes stigmatized. The
metaphor of the victim is the driving force of the human rights ideology, but by focusing on victimization and
powerlessness in the face of endless atrocities, the movement ends up dehumanizing the individuals in the
oppressed society. Mutua reserves his harshest analysis for the metaphor of the savior, which is invoked by
the actors—the UN, NGOs, Western governments, and charities—when they “rescue” victims from savages.
But as human rights discourse is so often annexed to the advancement of liberal democracy, free markets,
and Western culture, the human rights actor is really the latest in a lineage of European dominance that
includes the colonial administrator and Christian missionary.
LINKS: PUBLIC HEALTH/ DISEASE ADVS

Public Health norms put the cart before the horse, enabling the more important decision
on what constitutes health and who is included in the public. The universality of health
promotion and disease prevention is premised upon racial exclusions.
Choy, 2K3
Catherine Ceniza Choy is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota and is the author of Empire
of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. “The Health of a Nation: Race, Place and the Paradoxes of Public
Health Reform.” American Quarterly – Volume 55, Number 1, March p.MUSE
Critiquing the benefits of Western medicine is difficult work. Although historical studies in the field of science, medicine,
and imperialism have revised the heroic and benevolent depictions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century western medical practices in
primarily colonized areas by linking these practices to racialized violence, subjugation, and control, the pervasive cultural
association of western medical reforms with universal humanitarianism continues to make even
questioning such reforms a risky endeavor. 1 As Reynaldo Ileto observes, "even nationalist writers in the Philippines find it
impossible to interrogate the established notion that among the blessings of American colonial rule was a sanitary regime which saved
countless Filipino lives." 2 Such "gratitude," Ileto points out, is most often expressed in the context of public health reform, and specifically
its focus on the control and prevention of disease. How dare one critique these efforts using the analytical category of
race when disease sees no color and threatens us all?
National Geographic's new series on "challenges for humanity," which debuted in its February 2002 issue and
featured the "war on disease" as humanity's first challenge, powerfully illustrates the persistent [End Page
141] hold that medicine, and specifically public health, has on mainstream conceptualizations of what
counts as universal and humanitarian in more recent times. World maps that chart the frequency of
outbreaks of influenza, HIV/AIDS, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, and measles emphasize that
infectious diseases are our global enemies. Graphic images of a Guatemalan farmer's lesions and a Nigerien man's blind eye
remind us of the casualties of this world-wide war. Photographs of a woman in the United States testing the amount of chlorine in a
swimming-pool water sample and a woman in Bangladesh folding clean and dry sari material that will be placed over a jug before collecting
water convey the international importance of employing specific sanitary measures to prevent disease.
While these striking images effectively communicate that all of humanity has a stake in the battles against disease, Nayan Shah's study of
epidemics and race in San Francisco's Chinatown poignantly reminds us that before we engage in this seemingly universal war
in the new millennium, history has much to teach us. Within the span of almost a century, beginning in the 1850s, discourses
of public health and hygiene informed the changing popular images of San Francisco's Chinese Americans, transforming them from medical
menace into deserving citizens. While this dramatic and seemingly inclusive change might be employed as evidence
of the progressive nature of public health over time, Shah rejects such triumphalist historical narratives. His
exploration of the analytical category of race through the prism of public health reveals the ways in which
public health discourses constructed hygienic norms, which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, racialized Chinese and other Asian Americans as aberrant and inferior, and racialized white
Americans as normal and superior.
Although a contrasting image of Chinese Americans as deserving citizens became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, Shah observes that this
transformation did not encompass the entire Chinese American community in San Francisco. Rather it was dependent on the performance of
hygienic norms by primarily second generation Chinese American activists and achieved at the expense of an older generation of Chinese
American bachelors whose lifestyles did not meet these normative standards. Thus, Shah's book exposes the limits as well as possibilities
of a national citizenship based on hygienic and other related norms. By asking "Whose public?" and "Whose
health?" we [End Page 142] have been referring to when we have formulated public health knowledge and
engaged in public health reform in the not too distant past, Shah deftly critiques the seemingly inextricable
link between public health and universal humanitarianism (251).
Shah makes several multilayered and interrelated arguments that converse with and expand the scholarly fields of
ethnic and colonial studies. In this essay, I will highlight three of, what I believe to be, his major arguments. First,
Shah argues that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the official reports of public health
investigations produced a racial profile that placed Chinese and other Asian bodies under suspicion. Whereas,
in contemporary U.S. society, the notion of racial profiling conjures the image of white police officers pulling over young black males in
motor vehicles for suspected criminal activity, in the early twentieth century public health officials targeted Chinese and Japanese ship
passengers disembarking in San Francisco for inspection and fumigation after a 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague. This profile of racial
difference and medical danger would inform a foundation of "common sense" public health knowledge. Such medicalized and
racialized profiling in turn justified and intensified the expansion of public health knowledge production
and regulation, so that these two historical developments (public health bureaucracy on the one hand and
Chinese racial formation on the other) worked in tandem to further one another. The perceived threat of
Chinese bodies as carriers of disease was most pronounced during epidemic outbreaks, so Chinese bodies became number one suspects in the
occurrence of smallpox outbreaks in San Francisco in 1868, 1876, 1880, and 1887, and Chinese prostitutes and Chinese houseboys were held
responsible for the transmission of syphilis to the white population in the mid-1870s.
LINKS: PUBLIC HEALTH/ DISEASE ADVS

The humanitarian “war on disease” is used to colonize otherness under the guise of
universality. Public health norms domesticate society, racializing and oppressing
“unhealthy” aberrations.
Choy, 2K3
Catherine Ceniza Choy is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota and is the author of Empire
of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. “The Health of a Nation: Race, Place and the Paradoxes of Public
Health Reform.” American Quarterly – Volume 55, Number 1, March p.MUSE
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. and European colonial health officials in India, the
Philippines, and West Africa engaged in similar medical projects that colonized populations also questioned
and challenged through their use of alternative medical knowledges, refusal to engage in Western medical
disciplinary procedures such as vaccination and quarantine, and outright popular violence. Chinese immigrants
engaged in similar modes of resistance. Utilizing the methodologies of subaltern studies, historical epistemology,
and historical genealogy, Shah analyzes non-traditional historical archives such as Chinese rumors in official
accounts and newspaper reports to trace their doubts, fears, and rejections of U.S. medical intervention. When
such historical insights are placed in a global context of dehumanizing racialization and oppressive
militarization, they shed new critical light on the contemporary seemingly universal and humanitarian
"war on disease."
Second, Shah argues that these historical processes of public health expansion and Chinese racial formation
had a spatial dimension that constructed Chinatown as a disease-infested and disease-breeding site. The
methodological use of mapping in the official reports of public health investigations lent a scientific and objective
gloss to the sensationalist knowledge of Chinatown produced by political discourse, travel writing, and
journalism. Shah emphasizes that, while public health did not invent this sensationalist knowledge, it did
organize it in a way that connected the Chinese race to place. The [End Page 144] public health knowledge
that characterized Chinese bodies and behavior in terms of excess—their sheer numbers, numerous health
abnormalities, teeming waste—confirmed these representations with statistical and geographic maps of
Chinatown that highlighted its dens, density, and labyrinths. This visual imagery framed Chinatown as a place
where Chinese immigrants lived like herded animals in a space unfit for human habitation and provided a
"material and representational terrain to explore the extreme contrasts between the 'Chinese race' and the
'American people.'" (42)
The use of such representational terrains (also utilized prominently in the 2002 issue of National Geographic) was especially pernicious because it shaped a racial
myopia under the guise of science that (mis)informed public health investigations—which paid little attention to the Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Mexican, Canadian,
and Anglo Americans who lived and thrived in Chinatown—as well as medical measures to combat epidemic outbreaks, such as the fumigation of every house in
Chinatown during the 1876-1877 smallpox epidemic (regardless of whether disease had been detected or not) and the immediate quarantine of Chinatown in 1900
at the onset of suspicion of bubonic plague. The quarantine of Chinatown by health authorities reflected their belief that "when national barriers failed . . . the
boundaries of racial geography promised containment" (129). Yet these disease control measures were undermined by the ways in which racialized beliefs about
white as well as Chinese bodies enabled white people to leave and enter Chinatown under quarantine and excluded Chinese immigrants suffering from
tuberculosis from receiving medical treatment at the county hospital.
Third, related to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from county hospital services is Shah's provocative point that, in the history of U.S. public health, need
alone did not determine access to medical services. Shah argues that although racial formation through the prism of public health was a dynamic process, enabling
some Chinese Americans to advocate successfully for access to municipal social services in the 1920s and 1930s, such access was dependent on the
adoption of hygienic norms. These hygienic norms were connected to the nineteenth-century formation of
respectable domesticity, which was also racialized and spatialized in the form of the white, middle-class
domestic arrangement of the nuclear family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this notion of
respectable domesticity became [End Page 145] the individual foundation for collective social well-being. The
health of the nation depended upon this particular domestic arrangement.
While it could be adopted by political activists, missionaries, and social workers in multiple, even opposing ways,
hygienic norms rendered other domestic arrangements aberrant. Thus, although, in the 1870s and 1880s, the
views of white American women, such as Dr. Mary Sawtelle and Protestant missionary Emma Cable, on Chinese immigrant women could greatly diverge—with
Sawtelle rigidly stereotyping all Chinese women in America as nothing more than syphilis-bearing prostitutes, while Cable firmly believed that Chinese women
were able to become instruments of social reform—Shah observes, "in both instances white, middle-class household culture was defined in opposition to
perceptions of unreformed Chinese living conditions, behavior, and culture" (105).
Whiteness was historically flexible, but what counted as respectable domesticity was less so. In the late nineteenth century, the predominantly Chinese bachelor
society in San Francisco produced alternative domestic arrangements, which Shah calls "queer domesticity": multiple men living together without wives and
children, and multiple women and children living together without husbands and fathers. These forms of "queer domesticity" constituted the empirical evidence of
"unreformed Chinese living conditions." By the 1950s, although decades of primarily second-generation Chinese American activism led to the opening of Ping
Yuen, the first public housing project exclusively for Chinese Americans, the rewards for this "achievement" were reserved for Chinese American nuclear
families. In his final chapter, "Reforming Chinatown," Shah emphasizes that the bachelors who were evicted to make room for this project "got lost in the frame of
the Ping Yuen dedication ceremonies, when 232 patriotic Chinese American families were accommodated in the new sanitary apartments with the latest modern
appliances" (244). Shah's critical examination of the discursive strategies employed by Chinese American activists in the first half of the twentieth century yields
one of his most compelling analytical insights on what is at stake when hygienic norms that privilege nuclear family
domesticity become the rigid terms of national assimilation: "the resilience of exclusionary strategies in the
modern liberal state" (15).
LINKS: HIV/AIDS TREATMENT

The spread of ARV’s renders implicitly delegitimizes traditional medicine and healers
Curtis Abraham, Staff Writer for The Nation, “Africa: Africa’s Insight- It’s Time We Accepted Africa’s
Traditional Healer,” June 8, 2007, http://allafrica.com/stories/200706080181.html
Simply dishing out ARVs is not enough. PLWHAs in Africa need appropriate social counselling and "pyschic"
support and indigenous healers can provide the appropriate emotional, psychological, spiritual counselling. For
example, such counselling would deal with reducing social stigmatization (something that even PLWHAs in the
West continue to experience but is offered little help from Western biomedicine and social services.
However, despite their knowledge and popularity, traditional healers are given a raw deal by Western medical
experts. Usually they are invited to week-long workshops or seminars where they exchange views and information
with health educators, researchers, nurses and doctors. However, the information flow is one-way- the scientific
view is promoted by the "trainers" with little real input for these Africa specialists.
True collaboration, however, requires a measure of respect for indigenous medicine and African culture generally. It
also requires the shedding of stereotypes of African traditional healers. Most important of all, say experts, is the
search for a common ground between western biomedicine and traditional healers and building upon that common
ground. Combining forces with healers to combat HIV and Aids and promote public health makes good sense
LINKS: FGM
Anti-FGC discourse creates a wrongly universalizing image of the body that relegates those
who deviate as inhuman.
Wairimu Ngaruiya Njambi, “Dualisms and female bodies in representations of African female circumcision: A
feminist critique”, Feminist Theory 2004 5: 281-303.
The contentious topic of female circumcision brings together medical science, women’s health activism,
media, and national and international policy-making in pursuit of the common goal of eradicating such
practices. Referring to these diverse and heterogeneous practices as ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM),
eradicators have then condemned them as ‘barbaric’ and medically harmful to female bodies and
sexuality. In presuming that bodies can be separated from their cultural contexts, the anti-FGM discourse
not only replicates a nature/culture dualism that has been roundly questioned by feminists in science studies
and cultural studies, but has also perpetuated a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular
western image of a ‘normal’ body and sexuality in its quest to liberate women and girls. I use my own
story as a circumcised woman to highlight the entanglements of body and culture as presented in these
feminist theories of female bodies.
The anti-FGM movement is marked by utter intolerance and an emphasis on eliminating

visible inequality.
The Guardian, “Anti-FGM rally to mark Zero Tolerance Day”, February 4, 2006,
http://www.ippmedia.com/ipp/guardian/2006/02/04/59282.html
The commemoration of Zero Tolerance Day this year will be marked on Monday with the launch of a
campaign declaring Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) a national calamity, according to the Tanzania
Women Media Association (TAMWA). A TAMWA statement issued in Dar es Salaam yesterday and signed
by the association’s executive director, Ananilea Nkya, says the National Coalition Against Female Genital
Mutilation (NCAFGM) will hold a peaceful rally in Same, Kilimanjaro Region, to commemorate Zero
Tolerance Day. The day, marked in the African continent since 2003 is an initiative aimed at renewing
commitment to protect women from FGM, a cultural practice which violate women dignity and their right to
health. The National Coalition Against FGM constitutes Legal and Human Rights Centre (L&HRC),
Dodoma InterAfrican Committee Tanzania (DIAC-T), Women Wake Up (WOWAP), Tanzania Women
Lawyers Association (TAWLA), Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Network (AFNET), World Vision-
Tanzania and Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA). This year, Zero Tolerance Day will be
marked by launching a campaign declaring FGM as a national crisis with the aim of sensitizing the
government, law enforcers and the public in general on the need to enforce and uphold the law to eliminate
the practice in the country, says the statement. In 1998 the government enacted the Sexual Offences Special
Provision Act (SOSPA), which criminalized the practice of FGM but the coalition is concerned that the
enforcement of the law in safeguarding the rights of women against the practice leaves a lot to be desired.
Tanzania has also signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as the African Charter on Human and
Peoples Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women.
These instruments embody provisions ensuring everyone has the right to be treated equally and be
protected under the law.
LINKS: WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1/2)

Their appeal to equality paves over difference in the name of the same – securing a
masculine ontology as the neutral standard of sameness
BROWN, 95. (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, “States of Injury,” Princeton Univ. Press. P.132-33)
The consequences for gender justice of a formulation of equality as sameness and gender as difference are significant: If
difference (gender) is the conceptual opposite of universal human sameness (liberal humanism), then gender difference
– that is, female sexual difference – is the conceptual opposite of the liberal human being, and equality as sameness is
the conceptual opposite of gender as difference. Consider that for the last decade, feminist theory classes, feminist legal theorists,
and popular science journals have obsessed relentlessly over a single question: “How do women differ from men?” this question arises not
because it is intrinsically an interesting or good question but because our discourse of equality is sameness and our anxiety about
gender equality pertains to gender difference. Put the other way around, equality as sameness is the term that
maintains difference as a problem for women (and other “others” of liberal humanism). Equality as sameness is a
gendered formulation of equality, because it secures gender privilege through naming woman as different and men as the
neutral standard of the same.
Women must comply with culture and traditions in order to be considered human under
the human rights regime.
Sapana Pradhan Malla, Women’s Rights Advocate, “Inclusion of Women’s Human Rights and Politics of
Exclusion,” 2001, http://www.fwld.org/pdf_files/Inclusion_women.pdf
The Supreme Court has recognized treaty jurisprudence interpreting international human rights instruments
as a national law in Reena Bajrachray’s case3 and also declared existing discriminatory policy of Royal Nepal
Airlines Corporation ultra-vires. This significant step taken by the Supreme Court was encouraged by the
concerns raised in the Concluding Comments of the CEDAW Committee4 on the views expressed by Supreme
Court while interpreting discriminatory laws against women, which stated that any laws that do not confirm
with culture and tradition of the society shall be disrupted. Important power and responsibility lies in the hands
of the judiciary for the inclusion of women’s human right.5
Women without human rights are considered inhuman- the affirmative props up this
regieme by attempting to spread rights to women who are “inhuman.”
The Court also said if a woman is human; they are also entitled to all rights that a human being is entitled. A
marriage does not mean that a woman needs to be a slave. To say that a husband can have intercourse with
his wife without the wife's consent is to deny independent existence, right to live with self-respect and right to
self-determination. Any act which results in non-existence of women, adversely affects on self-respect of women,
infringes upon right of women to independent decision making or which makes women slaves or an object or
property.
LINKS: WOMEN’S RIGHTS (2/2)

Governments that do not properly prosecute rapists are excluded from the political order.
In this case the Supreme Court said rape is one of the major offences amongst the criminal offences of grave nature.
Rape is an inhuman act that violates women's human rights and directly causes serious impact on individual
liberty and right to self-determination. It also causes adverse impact on physical, mental, family and spiritual
life of a victim woman. Unlike consensual sexual intercourse in which both persons willingly participate in the
intercourse, rape involves use of force and threat by the rapist. Therefore, in a civilized society, rape is taken as a
heinous criminal offence without exception. Rape being a heinous criminal offence and since it has not been
categorically immune by law, interpretation of No. 1 of the Chapter on Rape has to be reformed reflecting
international treaties, instruments, and principles of law.
LINKS: EQUALITY/ RACE

Their protest against exclusion promotes the fiction of the universal humanist ideal that
inscribes white masculine power into the law
BROWN, 95. (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, “States of Injury,” Princeton Univ. Press. P.64-65)
Contemporary politicized identity in the United States contests the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it challenges liberalism’s universal “we”
as a strategic fiction of historically hegemonic groups and asserts liberalism’s “I” as social – both relational and constructed by power – rather
than contingent, private, or autarkic. Yet it reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified “I” that is
disenfranchised by an exclusive “we.” Indeed, I have suggested that politicized identity emerges and obtains its unifying
coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion; a
protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that thus reinstalls the humanist ideal
– and a specific white, middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal – insofar as it premises itself upon
exclusion from it. Put the other way around, politicized identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies,
insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as well as their exclusion from it,
for their own continuing existence as identities.
LINKS: SUDAN
The government of Sudan is framed as Human Rights abusers in order to justify their
exclusion.
Human Rights Watch, Activist Organization for the Promotion of Human Rights, “Sudan: Human Rights
Developments,” 2001, http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/africa/sudan.html
The government of Sudan remained a gross human rights abuser, while rebel groups committed their share
of violations. In the seemingly endless seventeen-year civil war, the government stepped up its brutal expulsions of
southern villagers from the oil production areas and trumpeted its resolve to use the oil income for more weapons.
Under the leadership of President (Lt. Gen.) Omar El Bashir, the government intensified its bombing of civilian
targets in the war, denied relief food to needy civilians, and abused children's rights, particularly through its
military and logistical support for the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which held an estimated 6,000
Ugandan children captive on government-controlled Sudanese territory. As for the Sudan People's Liberation
Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the principal armed movement of the south and of all Sudan, its forces continued to
loot food (including relief provisions) from the population, sometimes with civilian casualties, recruit child soldiers,
and commit rape. On both sides, impunity was the rule.
Sudan's human rights record of gross abuses was one factor in the General Assembly vote in October that
denied a Security Council to Sudan, nominated by the Organization of African Unity, and instead granted the
African seat to Mauritius.
The treatment of women and people with diseases in Sudan is considered a violation of
Human Rights, and causes the international community to vilify them.
Human Rights Watch, Activist Organization for the Promotion of Human Rights, “Sudan: Human Rights
Developments,” 2001, http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/africa/sudan.html
Conditions in Omdurman Women's Prison remained shocking: chronic overcrowding, lack of sanitation,
diseases, and death from epidemics among children who lived with their mothers. The government annually
pardoned women, temporarily easing overcrowding before bringing in the next batch of prisoners; in 2000, the
government pardoned more than 700 women. These included more than 500 mostly poverty-stricken, illiterate
southerners convicted of brewing and selling alcohol to help their families survive.
Public Order Police frequently harassed women and monitored women's dress according to the government's
stereotype of Islamic correctness. Public Order Courts remained the state's primary weapon against women
striving for freedom and equality; women received summary justice in these courts, often followed
immediately by flogging, without effective right to appeal
LINKS/ CASE TURN: GENOCIDE PREVENTION/ MONITORING (1/2)

Rwanda illustrates that human rights standards are impossible and that western attempts
to create justice in Africa just destroy it.
Uvin and Mironko in ‘03
Peter Uvin , Charles Mironko, Henry Leir Chair of International Humanitarian Studies at the Fletcher School at
Tufts University, and a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and
associate director of Yale's Genocide Studies Program, “Western and Local Approaches to Justice in Rwanda,”
2003, questia
The case of Rwanda is a dramatic illustration of the dictum that in the aftermath of mass violence, full justice and
complete adherence to human rights standards can be literally unattainable. This is all the more the case when
justice mechanisms are being constructed for the first time rather than reconstructed. The task is enormous: to
construct, in a short time, against a backdrop of extreme social polarization and economic destruction, a
system capable of providing impartial justice for crimes of an unimaginable magnitude. And yet the challenge
must be faced, for without a practice and perception of justice, peace and reconciliation are impossible.
Western-inspired systems have shown themselves incapable of addressing the needs of Rwanda. Much too
slow, socially (and in the case of the ICTR, geographically) remote, subject to pressure and the temptations of
corruption, burdened by administrative bottlenecks, and financially costly, they have produced remarkably
little justice for Rwandans. Improvements are possible, to be sure. The ICTR could have had more resources and
less bureaucracy from the outset, while the domestic justice system could undoubtedly be organized and managed
better.
LINKS/ CASE TURN: GENOCIDE PREVENTION/ MONITORING (2/2)

Development and international aid assistance have narrowly defined missions, with
technocratic approaches that causes racism and oppression, Rwandan genocide proves.
Farmer in ‘03
Paul Farmer; Professor @ University of California, 2003, “Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the
New War on the Poor.”
This is also a book about the dynamics of rights violations. The struggle to develop a human rights paradigm is one
thing; a searching analysis of the mechanisms and conditions that generate these violations is quite another. Without
understanding power and connections, how do we understand why rights are abused, and when and where
such events are likely to occur? Often enough, identifying victims and aggressors is the easy part—and leads to no
real understanding. It's not that things are “not so black and white, ” as academics and pundits are wont to say,
usually dismissively. They are plenty black and white. But they are also gray, and every shade of gray, so that
strange and often veiled alliances form a bridge between aggressors and victims.
Take, for example, the case of Rwanda. In a study titled Aiding Violence, Peter Uvin argues that development
and humanitarian aid to Rwanda in the years prior to the genocide helped to set the stage for what was to
occur: “the process of development and the international aid given to promote it interacted with the forces of
exclusion, inequality, pauperization, racism, and oppression that laid the groundwork for the 1994 genocide. ”
21 Of course, the development enterprise, like the human rights community, has defined its mission narrowly.
The technocratic approach to development aid has mandated that some issues are brought to the fore while
others are ignored. As Uvin, commenting on his own and others' blindness, notes:
Like almost all other players in the development community, I did not have any idea of the destruction that was to
come. The pauperization was omnipresent, the racist discourse loud; fear was visible in people's eyes, and a
militarization was evident, but that was none of my business, for I was there for another Rwanda, the development
model. 22
How, one wonders incredulously, could anyone working on behalf of the Rwandan poor have failed to
anticipate the oncoming cataclysm? But such blinkered analyses are common in most settings in which massive
human rights violations are about to occur. As Uvin suggests, these visualfield defects stem in part from the
disciplinary division of labor so important in our times. The social fields in which human rights are violated are
complex beyond the understanding of any one view or discipline. These contexts are also laden with symbolic
complexities, and actions taken within them are often undergirded by baroque ideological justifications—in short,
this is the stuff of conventional anthropological interest. But if I have persuaded you that human rights discourse
might be examined profitably by an anthropologist, it is important to add that anthropologists have also neglected to
examine structural violence and the abuses it inevitably breeds. In a now classic essay, Orin Starn deplores the
failure of his fellow Andeanists to consider the terrible suffering all around them, even though a guerrilla war was
soon to wrack Peru for a decade:
Ethnographers usually did little more than mention the terrible infant mortality, minuscule incomes, low life
expectancy, inadequate diets, and abysmal health care that remained so routine. To be sure, peasant life was full of
joys, expertise, and pleasures. But the figures that led other observers to label Ayacucho a region of “Fourth World”
poverty would come as a surprise to someone who knew the area only through the ethnography of Isbell, Skar, or
Zuidema. They gave us detailed pictures of ceremonial exchanges, Saint's Day rituals, weddings, baptisms, and
work parties. Another kind of scene, just as common in the Andes, almost never appeared: a girl with an abscess and
no doctor, the woman bleeding to death in childbirth, a couple in their dark adobe house crying over an infant's
sudden death. 23 As one might expect, Starn's essay provoked fairly heated riposte. Umbrage was taken. In
meetings and subsequent articles, anthropologists protested that they had written of such conditions. 24 But almost a
decade later, Linda Green, in her compelling study of Mayan widows in the western highlands of Guatemala, still
complains of “anthropology's diverted gaze”—diverted, of course, from structural violence Systematic inquiry
into human rights violations remained elusive. Despite an alarming rise in the most blatant forms of
transgressions, repression, and state terrorism, the topic has not captured the anthropological imagination
until recently. Overwhelming empirical evidence demonstrates that state-sponsored violence has been
standard operating procedure in numerous contemporary societies where anthropologists have conducted
fieldwork for the past three decades. 25
LINKS: “FIXING” INDECENT SOCIETIES

( ) The indecent societies that violate human rights do not have the ability to fight against
the democratic regime that determined them indecent.
Rasch 03’
William Rasch, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University. “Human Rights as
Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy”
http://oboler.isu.edu:2110/journals/cultural_critique/v054/54.1rasch.html
And yet, despite—indeed, because of—the all-encompassing embrace, the detested other is never allowed to
leave the stage altogether. Even as we seem on the verge of actualizing Kant's dream, as Habermas puts it, of "a
cosmopolitan order" that unites all peoples and abolishes war under the auspices of "the states of the First World"
who "can afford to harmonize their national interests to a certain extent with the norms that define the halfhearted
cosmopolitan aspirations of the UN" (1998, 165, 184), it is still fascinating to see how the barbarians make their
functionally necessary presence felt. John Rawls, in his The Law of Peoples (1999), conveniently divides the
world into well-ordered peoples and those who are not well ordered. Among the former are the "reasonable
liberal peoples" and the "decent hierarchical peoples" (4). Opposed to them are the "outlaw states" and other
"burdened" peoples who are not worthy of respect. Liberal peoples, who, by virtue of their history, possess
superior institutions, culture, and moral character (23-25), have not only the right to deny non-well-
ordered peoples respect, but the duty to extend what Vitoria called "brotherly correction" and Habermas
"gentle compulsion" (Habermas 1997, 133). 13 That is, Rawls believes that the "refusal to tolerate" those
states deemed to be outlaw states "is a consequence of liberalism and decency." Why? Because outlaw
states violate human rights. What are human rights? "What I call human rights," Rawls states, "are ... a
proper subset of the rights possessed by citizens in a liberal constitutional democratic regime, or of the
rights of the members of a decent hierarchical society" (Rawls 1999, 81). Because of their violation of these
liberal rights, nonliberal, nondecent societies do not even have the right "to protest their condemnation by
the world society" (38), and decent peoples have the right, if necessary, to wage just wars against them.
Thus, [End Page 140] liberal societies are not merely contingently established and historically conditioned forms
of organization; they become the universal standard against which other societies are judged. Those found
wanting are banished, as outlaws, from the civilized world. Ironically, one of the signs of their outlaw status is
their insistence on autonomy, on sovereignty. As Rawls states, "Human rights are a class of rights that play a
special role in a reasonable Law of Peoples: they restrict the justifying reasons for war and its conduct, and they
specify limits to a regime's internal autonomy. In this way they reflect the two basic and historically profound
changes in how the powers of sovereignty have been conceived since World War II" (79). Yet, what Rawls sees
as a postwar development in the notion of sovereignty—that is, its restriction—could not, in fact, have occurred
had it not been for the unrestricted sovereign powers of the victors of that war, especially, of course, the supreme
power of the United States. The limitation of (others') sovereignty is an imposed limitation, imposed by a
sovereign state that has never relinquished its own sovereign power. What for Vitoria was the sovereignty of
Christendom and for Scott the sovereignty of humanity becomes for Rawls the simple but uncontested
sovereignty of liberalism itself. 14
LINKS: INTERNATIONAL LAW
International Law decides on the status of humanity as such – the breakdown of national
sovereignty exposes all life to the sovereign ban.
CALDWELL, 2K4. (anne, Prof of poltiical science at the University of Louisville. “Bio-sovereignty and the emergence of
humanity.” Theory and Event. 7:2 p.MUSE)
A sovereign power that acts in the name of and for a life defined solely by its belonging to humanity is a
power that has become global. To take these emerging global dimensions of sovereignty and life as
straightforward indications of an all-inclusive humanity would be a mistake. New forms of global
sovereignty and global human life remain defined by the categories of natural life, political life and homo
sacer defining the Western tradition. In the classical world and the modern world, natural and political life once
included and excluded one another to constitute local or national forms of being. Today, those same patterns
reappear in global relationships between national life and international life, which constitute and exclude one another as the
ground of the sovereign exception. In an international world, the ground of the sovereign decision is
humanity as such. And what sovereignty decides is the status of that humanity.
The equivocal status of a humanity dependent on the sovereign decision increases as national
sovereignty breaks down without wholly disappearing, and without being clearly integrated into a new form of
supranational sovereignty. As the boundaries of the nation state become more porous, sovereignty as the
power to determine boundaries becomes more pervasive. The status of life, in a parallel manner,
becomes increasingly precarious. More and more, life across the globe exists in a state of crisis, caught
within and subject to a sovereign power itself indeterminate. This indeterminate sovereignty increasingly
ranges over all territories and all peoples: over humanity as such.
LINKS: INTERNATIONAL LAW/ H.R. NORMS

International human rights norms operate according to the principle of bio-sovereignty.
the politicization of humanity turns it into a value – serving as the foundation for the
sovereign production of bare life that internationalization attempts to limit.
Caldwell, 2K4. (anne, Prof of poltiical science at the University of Louisville. “Bio-sovereignty and the emergence
of humanity.” Theory and Event. 7:2 p.MUSE)
Since World War II, human rights have undergone an extraordinary expansion. We can now recognize an
international rights regime formed by international rights declarations; regional and international courts; NGOs and
other groups who monitor rights; and new norms of state behavior giving human rights greater weight. The proliferation of references to human
rights in and of itself implies the presence of the bearer of such rights -- the human being, or 'man,' (Douzinas 1996: 122). That referent, however,
has become more than a discursive object. At least since the end of the Cold War, humanity has emerged as a material
political group in the same manner that the "people" became a concrete group with the rise of the representative
nation-state.2
What political power represents humanity is less apparent. The United Nations, as the closest thing to an
international political organization, appears such a power. But the decisions of the U.N., as well as its capacity to act, remain wholly
circumscribed by the nation-states composing the U.N. Global or world civil society is also often treated as the political voice of the human. Such
groups do indeed wield political influence on the actions of states. But they lack the power to enforce human rights. That task
falls ultimately to the existent sovereign powers. As those powers become increasingly involved with humanity, they
can no longer be fully captured by the concept of a nation-state sovereignty committed to particular peoples. Given
the novelty of this emerging form of sovereignty and of humanity, we have few tools for understanding the meaning
of each term, or the relations between them.
Indeed, that such a relationship could exist between humanity and political power has long been doubted. Since
the French Revolution, the sheer breadth and presumed anonymity of humanity has resulted in skepticism about its political effectiveness. Arendt,
who had a profound investment in the possibility of universal rights, found herself compelled to acknowledge that whether or not humanity could
guarantee the rights of individuals belonging to it "is by no means certain" (p. 298). Such hesitations have been less evident since the end of the
Cold War. Nearly by default, the main explorers of the emerging international rights regimes have been Kantian inspired cosmpolitanists. Those
scholars have been readily inclined to treat international human rights as a globalization of the rights and dignities accorded by liberal
democracies and as a limitation of sovereign power. Yet how the globalization of rights which emerged out of the
modern sovereign state should limit the very power they owe their existence to is far from obvious.
Standing against Kantian visions of a cosmopolitan humanity is the profound skepticism of Carl Schmitt.
Expanding his scathing critique of liberalism to the international field, Schmitt insisted any political formation of
humanity would prove impossible (1996: 55). For Schmitt, the characteristics of humanity would undermine the
features defining politics: the role of the sovereign exception and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt was clearly
wrong to insist humanity could constitute no political group. At the same time, he astutely foresaw such a world
would risk turning life into an indifferent value.
The nature of this relationship between humanity and sovereignty has been the subject of the recent work of the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben's depiction of sovereign power and bare life can be read as an
account of how sovereignty and humanity operate in tandem in international politics today. Asserting those who still
use the terminology of modern liberalism, such as "sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will
by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate -- and those
who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about," Agamben offers a
forbidding analysis of human rights (Agamben 2000: 109.0). His own focus is primarily on national sovereignty and
citizenship. But the liminal concepts of sovereignty and homo sacer he portrays can also be understood as accounts
of international entities. They point to a more qualified assessment of the relation between rights and power than
cosmopolitanism. Humanity, rather than serving as a limit on sovereignty, appears as its medium and product.
Expanding the analyses of Foucault, we might say that much as early modern states addressed themselves to an
equal, free, rational individual while producing a docile trained body, contemporary claims to enforce human rights
grounded in individual dignity instead produce and depend upon a "raw spectacle of humanity" (Malkki 1996: 390).
To understand this alliance we must separate sovereignty from the liberal vision of power as formed of consent and
limited by law and rights. As sovereignty expands beyond the nation state form, it increasingly operates as bio-
sovereignty: a form of sovereignty operating according to the logic of the exception rather than law, applied to
material life rather than juridical life, and moving within a global terrain now almost exclusively biopolitical.
LINKS: HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO/ COSMOPOLITANISM (1/3)

The expansion of human rights regimes is premised upon the principle of intervention.
Global subjects lose their indigenous claims to rights as they become subject to a
hegemonic vision of global citizenship.
Chandler, 2K3
Cosmopolitan theorists have highlighted a crucial need for the extension of democracy to the international
sphere. This is of particular importance in the post-Cold War world where it appears that the new ‘duties’ created
by ‘globalised interconnectedness’ necessitate a new framework by which international institutions can be held
accountable for their actions (and inaction). Beetham (1999, pp. 138–9) stresses the ‘duties to strangers that we
all owe’ arguing that global interdependence means we must ‘expand our definition of the stranger who
merits our concern’. Kaldor (1999, p. 118) takes the point to its logical conclusion, stating that ‘there is no
such thing as non-intervention’. We are so interconnected that we have a duty to take responsibility for events
which affect citizens in any country in the world: ‘The failure to protect the victims is a kind of tacit intervention on
the side of those who are inflicting humanitarian or human rights abuses’. In these circumstances the gap between
power and accountability at the international level becomes an ever more pressing problem.
By bringing the need for new forms of democracy to the fore, the cosmopolitan thesis has highlighted important
institutional barriers to the extension of democracy from the level of the nation-state to that of the international. It
appears that it will not be possible to extend the liberal democratic framework of citizenship rights as long as the
rights of democratic accountability remain tied to the institutional framework of the nation-state. While global
citizenship remains a positive aspiration, it is only an inherent possibility without the development of a globally-
institutionalised framework of political and legal equality. Attempts to posit cosmopolitan rights of citizenship in the
absence of such a framework have, in fact, taken the cosmopolitan argument full circle. Their starting point was that
democracy was too restrictive because it excluded non-citizens who would be affected by decisions of foreign
national governments. While this is undoubtedly a limitation, it is clear that short-cutting the process of creating
new institutional frameworks, by allowing more lee-way for international institutions to act on behalf of
global subjects, has merely allowed the affairs of these non-citizens to be brought more directly under the
control of powerful foreign powers. While the non-citizens have gained no more power to influence the
policy-making of the major Western states they have lost the right to hold their own governments to account.
Rather than furthering democracy, the premature declaration of a framework of universal cosmopolitan
rights can, in fact, result in rights that people did have being further restricted.

The cosmopolitan international rights framework fosters dependency instead of
empowerment
Chandler, 2K3
Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan democracy

and global governance, in which for the first time there is the possibility of global issues being addressed on the
basis of new forms of democracy, derived from the universal rights of global citizens. They suggest that, rather
than focus attention on the territorially limited rights of the citizen at the level of the nation-state, more emphasis
should be placed on extending democracy and human rights to the international sphere. This paper raises
problems with extending the concept of rights beyond the bounds of the sovereign state, without a
mechanism of making these new rights accountable to their subject. The emerging gap, between holders of
cosmopolitan rights and those with duties, tends to create dependency rather than to empower. So while
the new rights remain tenuous, there is a danger that the cosmopolitan framework can legitimise the
abrogation of the existing rights of democracy and self-government preserved in the UN Charter
framework.

Cosmopolitan ethics lead to exclusion of those who are deemed as rejecting the society of
those who are deemed as foreign
(YEOH 04) Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Associate Professor and Researcher and Co-Director of the
Research at the Barcelona forum, Cosmopolitanism and its Exclusions in Singapore, Nov2004,
Vol. 41 Issue 12, p2431-2445, 15p
A city is a place where people can learn to live with strangers, to enter into the experiences and interests of unfamiliar lives. Sameness stultifies
the mind; diversity stimulates and expands it. The city can allow people to develop a richer, more complex sense of themselves. They are not just
bankers or roadsweepers, Afro- Caribbeans or Anglo-Saxons, speakers of English or Spanish, bourgeois or proletarian; they can be some or all of
these things, and more. They are not subject to a fixed scheme of identity ... That is the power of strangeness: freedom from arbitrary definition
and identification (Sennett, 2001). Taking the cue from Harvey (2000). I argue that a starting-point to Singapore-style cosmopolitanism must
begin with thinking about the real geographical world we actually in habit, and its prejudices and oppressions. Then we can contemplate that
which cosmopolitanism has to confront and defeat. Meaningful cosmopolitanism must involve an emancipatory political
project which gets under the skin of society, not just rhetorical gestures and visionary pronouncements which
fail to relate to everyday life and places in the city. Transposed into the Singapore context, there are at least two dilemmas that
the globalising city needs to come firmly to grips with. First, it is unclear how notions of global cosmopolitan living,
heterogeneity and hybridity can be balanced with the hegemonic meta-narratives of ethnicity and race which
have been the mainstay of nation-building in the globalising yet interventionist milieu of ethnically diverse
Singapore. Despite—or perhaps because of-—the subscription to the doctrine of the '4Ms' (multiracialism.
multiculturalism, multilingualism and multireligiosity), Singapore's approach to the management of ethnic relations assumes
and requires individuals to have a declared, unambiguous and unchanging ethnic identity. This is surely problematic in the face of
the cosmopolitan dream, for new challenges emerge, not least given the need to dissolve essentialised
differences and destabilise racialised spaces in order to translate 'contact zones' into 'comfort zones' between
increasingly mobile individuals, whether citizens or non-citizens. While the racial arithmetic of the city has not been
destabilised by transnational mobilities and the city is unlikely to become less 'Asian','* 'race' has become inflected by differences in 'nationality',
"history' and 'culture', rendering the politics of sameness and difference within each 'race' more complex. The Singaporean project of developing
national identity based on the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) model of multiculturalism is therefore likely to become untenable, for the
category 'Chinese' or 'Indian' will become even less homogeneous, while the already unsatisfactory term 'Others' will become more problematic.
The fluidity of the cosmopolitan ethnoscape provides compelling reasons for recognising and allowing for
complex forms of identifications and ascriptions beyond the straightjacket of disciplinary ethnic
categorisations. Secondly, the influx of foreign talent has stimulated a wide range of debates which have
dominated the public agenda, from whether Singapore needs foreign talent, citizen versus non-citizen
entitlements and responsibilities, increased competition for jobs and resources between locals and foreigners,
to the way the foreign influx reconfigures the nation's racial arithmetic and multicultural logic. Much of the
attention—for example, has been focused on building bridges across the gap between locals and foreign talent. A public survey indicating that 58
per cent of 10 000 Singaporean youths felt threatened by foreign talent prompted recommendations for more grassroots activities involving both
groups to encourage integration (The Straits Times, 17 November 2002). While such anxieties are indicative of a certain kind of difficulty in state
projects to forge the national 'self in the crucible of cosmopolitanism, it is more instructive to realise where the areas of omission have been in
these discourses and visions. Proponents of non-universalist versions of cosmopolitanism have indicated its emancipatory potential. For Conley
(2002, p. 129), "cosmopolis" must surely mean "the world as city where inhabitants can assert their differences and negotiate them in a
productive and affirmative way". Law (2002, p. 1642) writes of cosmopolitanism in terms of "a complicated political sphere variously inhabited
by hybrid identities, transnationalism, exile, immigration, colonial history and a host of other issues to do with ... a post-nation condition", while
to Robbins (1998, p. 1), "actually existing cosmopolitanism" includes "merchant sailors, Caribbean au pairs in the United States. Egyptian guest
workers in Iraq land] Japanese women who take gaijin lovers". The cosmopolis. as erected in state visions and pronouncements in Singapore,
however, provides little room^both conceptual and material—for the majority of migrant others called "foreign workers' COSMOPOLITANISM
IN SINGAPORE 2443 whose marginalisation is made even more stark given the zealous overtures to include that minority of migrant others
called 'foreign talent'. 'Forgetting' the large majority of migrant others in the cosmopolis is not a benignly accidental or ignorant act but a
"stnictural necessity" (Devan, 1999, p. 22) to render them Invisible and transient, as .somehow less-than-workers and certainly far from being
legitimate social and political subjects of the cosmopolitan nation. In turn, if Singaporean attitude.s towards strangers in their midst follow the
fixed, bifurcated lines of 'looking up to the skilled foreign talent" and "looking down on the less - skilled foreign worker" (and in both instances
laced with fear of the stranger) as implicated in government policies, discourses and visions, they are unlikely to be productive of a cosmopolis
which is truly vibrant, emancipatory and where we can be free from 'arbitrary definition and identification'. For a global city to develop a truly
cosmopolitan urban ethic, its crowded streets need to be "places of self-knowledge, not fear" (Sennett, 2(X)1). For its many places and sites to
encourage the "neighbourliness of strangers" (Sennett, 2001), those who plan and live in the city must, at least at the level of dis- "• course, begin
to include an integral place for all who constitute its fiuid, multifaceted urbanism.
LINKS: HEGEMONY
The geopolitical order the aff relies on is founded in a crusade for universal goodness.
Paul Gottfried, Professor of Humanities @ Elizabethtown College, “A Forgotten Thinker On Nation-State vs.
Empire,” November 7, 2001
There are two ideas raised in Schmitt's corpus that deserve attention in our elite-decreed multicultural society. In
The Concept of the Political (a tract that first appeared in 1927 and was then published in English in 1976 by
Rutgers University) Schmitt explains that the friend/enemy distinction is a necessary feature of all political
communities. Indeed what defines the "political" as opposed to other human activities is the intensity of
feeling toward friends and enemies, or toward one's own and those perceived as hostile outsiders.
This feeling does not cease to exist in the absence of nation-states. Schmitt argued that friend/enemy distinctions
had characterized ancient communities and would likely persist in the more and more ideological environment in
which nation-states had grown weaker. The European state system, beginning with the end of the Thirty Years War,
had in fact provided the immense service of taming the "political."
The subsequent assaults on that system of nation-states, with their specific and limited geopolitical interests,
made the Western world a more feverishly political one, a point that Schmitt develops in his postwar magnum
opus Nomos der Erde (now being translated for Telos Press by Gary Ulmen). From the French Revolution on, wars
were being increasingly fought over moral doctrines - most recently over claims to be representing "human
rights." Such a tendency has replicated the mistakes of the Age of Religious Wars. It turned armed force from a
means to achieve limited territorial goals, when diplomatic resources fail, to a crusade for universal goodness
against a demonized enemy.
A related idea treated by Schmitt is the tendency toward a universal state (a “New World Order”?). Such a
tendency seemed closely linked to Anglo-American hegemony, a theme that Schmitt took up in his commentaries
during and after the Second World War.
American expansionism is an insidious political theology designed codified in the Monroe

Doctrine and the claim to a right to a sphere of influence. This silences the voices of all
inside that sphere.
Nikolai von Kreitor, Professor of History, 1991, “THE CONCEPT OF GROSSRAUM IN CARL SCHMITTS
JURISPRUDENCE,” http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/grossraum.html
In so doing he subjected the political theology of American expansionism, the American state-policy and
objectives of world domination formulated and codified in the Monroe Doctrine and its various extension, to
a demystifying and critical analysis showing that the essence of Wilsonian universalism before, during and
after the World War II was in fact an insidious ideology to equate American national interest, American
expansionism and the principles of the Monroe Doctrine with the interest of mankind(3). Discussing emerging
political realities , Schmitt noted that Germany needed to formulate her own Grossraum and to conceptualize the
nature of international law as a relationship between different Grossräume, rejecting thereby the universalistic
claims of the United States.
The center of Carl Schmitt’s discussion was the geopolitical and the ideological substance of the Monroe
Doctrine, especially the series of ideas articulated prior to Theodore Roosevelt’s reinterpretation of it justifying a
"capitalist imperialism"(4) and Woodrow Wilson’s reinterpretation that sough to justify a "kind of pan-
interventionist world ideology"(5) , i.e. to justify the principles of the Monroe Doctrine and the new international
law it created in the Western Hemisphere to principles valid for the whole world. The substance of the new
American international law, created by the Monroe Doctrine, was in fact an absence of international law, understood
traditionally as law of nations created by mutual consent of those nations, in the Western Hemisphere, since the
Monroe Doctrine postulated that the only source of the new international law was the will of the United States.
According to Schmitt the Monroe Doctrine, historically seen, was the vehicle of American subjugation of the Latin
American countries and transformation of those countries into virtual American protectorates.
American hegemony attempts to create an impossibly total inclusion, making exclusions

dangerously invisible.
William Rasch, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, “Human Rights as
Geopolitics”, Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 120-147
We will return to the issue of a "completely new politics" later. 3 For now I wish to investigate a second trajectory that the sovereign ban
traces, one that Agamben hints at, but does not examine. Agamben focuses on the localization of the state of exception and its apotheosis
in the camp. If the first successful modern localization of the sovereign exception is represented by the distinction between Europe and
the New World, then its culmination as the internment, labor, concentration, and death camps of the twentieth century can be seen as a
type of reintroduction of the initial distinction within Europe itself—and, of course, within the now "civilized" Western Hemisphere as
well. One thereby replaces the civilized/uncivilized distinction with Aryan/non-Aryan, white/black, native/immigrant, or—and though
Agamben does not mention this possibility, some surely would—woman/fetus. There is, however, a parallel if reverse way of dealing
with exclusion, and the remainder of this study will focus not on localization but on the invisibilization of the exception in the abstract
moral and legal norm that informs the liberal rule of law and its extension as universal human rights. With Europe divested of its
moral and political authority and integrated into a larger, potentially global order, the new American
hegemony challenges us to imagine a total, exceptionless inclusion of sovereign peoples (Rawls 1999) or
sovereign individuals (Habermas) with no enabling exclusion. Schmitt postulated that whether one likes it
or not, the norm rests on an exception, inclusion on an exclusion. Schmitt would therefore ask: can one
think of the entire globe as a differentiated unity without an outside? The purpose of his much-maligned
friend/enemy distinction was neither to glorify war nor to justify the extermination of the heterogeneous, but
to show that a total or global "inclusion of the other," to use Habermas's threatening phrase (1998), could
only occur if the otherness of the other, that which makes him what he is, is excluded from the world
community. One cannot help but draw the friend/enemy distinction, then, when one recognizes in the
handshake of the purported friend the surreptitious continuation of warfare by other means. Thus, the
question we need to ask is: on what exclusion is the ostensive universal extension of human rights based? To
repeat: it was Schmitt's contention that America's greatest achievement involved making this new
exclusion invisible. If that is the case, then our task is to bring that exclusion back to light.
American hegemony creates invisible exclusions and constructs threats to it as enemies of

humanity.
William Rasch, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, “Human Rights as
Geopolitics”, Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 120-147
The only power to emerge from the twentieth-century's first world war fresh and at the top of its game was the United States. [End Page 121] Although it took another
seventy years to subdue fully all its rivals, it was already clear then that this, the twentieth, was to be the American century, perhaps the first of many such centuries.
recognized in 1932 (Schmitt
Not only was the United States a new power, but there was also something distinctly new about its power. As Schmitt
1988, Positionen und Begriffe, 184-203), America's legal mode of economic expansion and control of Europe—
and, by extension or ambition, the rest of the globe—was qualitatively different from previous forms of
imperialism. Whereas, for example, Spain in the sixteenth century and Great Britain in the nineteenth justified their
imperial conquests by asserting religious and/or cultural superiority, America simply denied that its conquests
were conquests. By being predominantly economic—and using, as Schmitt says, the creditor/debtor distinction
rather than the more traditional Christian/non-Christian or civilized/uncivilized ones (186)—America's
expropriations were deemed to be peaceful and apolitical. Furthermore, they were legal, or rather they
presented themselves as the promotion and extension of universally binding legality per se. Because law ruled
the United States, the rule of the United States was first and foremost the rule of law. For Schmitt, this widely
accepted self-representation was neither merely "ideological" nor simply propagandistic. It was in truth an
intellectual achievement, deserving respect, precisely because it was so difficult to oppose. As the American
geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski has more recently concluded: "The American emphasis on political democracy and economic
development ... combines to convey a simple ideological message that appeals to many: the quest for individual success enhances freedom while generating wealth.
The resulting blend of idealism and egoism is a potent combination. Individual self-fulfillment is said to be a God-given right that at the same time can benefit others
by setting an example and by generating wealth." He goes on to say: "As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial
setting for the exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony involves a
complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power and influence" (Brzezinski 1997, 26-
27). To sum up, Brzezinski notes that "the very multinational and exceptional character of American [End Page 122] society has made it easier for America to
universalize its hegemony without letting it appear to be a strictly national one" (210). It seems, then, that to
oppose American global hegemony is to oppose the universally good and common interests of all of humanity.
This—the equation of particular economic and political interests with universally binding moral norms—this is the intellectual achievement Schmitt could not help but
admire, even as he continuously embarked on his disastrous attempts at fighting his elusive, because nonlocalizable, enemy, which proved to be mere shadowboxing
in the end.
LINKS: HEGEMONY/ TRADE

Export of American goods, values and power projection is all based on human rights
crusades.
But while Schmitt falls back, at least indirectly, on this already belabored comparison, he also brings up the more
telling point: Americans aspire to a world state because they make universal claims for their way of life. They
view "liberal democracy" as something they are morally bound to export. They are pushed by ideology, as
well as by the nature of their power, toward a universal friend/enemy distinction.
Although in the forties and fifties Schmitt hoped that the devastated nation-state system would be replaced by a
new "political pluralism," the creation of spheres of control by regional powers, he also doubted this would
work. The post-World War II period brought with it polarization between the Communist bloc and the anti-
Communists, led by the U.S. Schmitt clearly feared and detested the Communists. But he also distrusted the
American side for personal and analytic reasons. From September 1945 until May 1947, Schmitt had been a prisoner
of the American occupational forces in Germany. Though released on the grounds that he played no significant role
as a Nazi ideologue, he was traumatized by the experience. Throughout the internment he had been asked to give
evidence of his belief in liberal democracy. Unlike the Soviets, in whose zone of occupation he had resided for a
while, the Americans seemed to be ideologically driven and not merely vengeful conquerors.
Schmitt came to dread American globalism more deeply than its Soviet form, which he thought to be
primitive military despotism allied with Western intellectual faddishness. In the end, he welcomed the
"bipolarity" of the Cold War, seeing in Soviet power a means of limiting American "human rights" crusades.
A learned critic of American expansionists, Schmitt did perceive the by-now inescapably ideological character
of American politics.
In the post-Cold War era, despite the irritation he arouses among American imperialists, his commentaries seem
fresher and more relevant than ever before.
LINKS: GLOBALIZATION (1/2)

The view of Liberal society as good for all has fueled the civilizing mission of the West,
masking power relations and spreading global institutions of capital no matter what the
cost to other peoples
Lander in 2k2 (Edgardo, Neplanta: Views From The South, Eurocentrism, Modern Knowledges, and the
Natural Order of Global Capital, professor of social sciences at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in
Caracas, accessed via project muse)
The view of liberal society as the natural, most advanced form of human experience has been an
inseparable part of modern world history for the past three centuries. This view has been the legitimizing
basis of the civilizing mission of the colonial/imperial system; in more recent times, since the end of the
Second World War, it has acquired renewed vigor with the “colonization of reality by the discourse of
development” (Escobar 1995, 22). Along with the development imaginary, the process of conquest of the
rest of the planet intensified and accelerated, by way of a dense global institutional network that defined
(using the diagnosis provided by the social sciences) the vast majority of the planet's population as
lacking, poor, and backward, justifying a massive intervention to rescue it from such a pitiful condition.
A type of development was promoted which conformed to the ideas and expectations of the affluent
West, to what the Western countries judged to be a normal course of evolution and progress . . . . by
conceptualizing progress in such terms, this development strategy became a powerful instrument for
normalizing the world. (ibid., 26)
Behind the humanitarian concern and the positive outlook of the new strategy, new forms of power and
control, more subtle and refined, were put in operation. Poor people's ability to define and take care of
their own lives was eroded in a deeper manner than perhaps ever before. The poor became the target of
more sophisticated practices, of a variety of programs that seemed inescapable. From the new
institutions of power in the United States and Europe; the offices of the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development and the United Nations; from North American and European campuses,
research centers, and foundations; and from the new planning offices in the big capitals of the
underdeveloped world, this was the type of [End Page 248] development that was actively promoted and
that in a few years was to extend its reach to all aspects of society. (85)
The organizing premise was the belief in the role of modernization as the only force capable of destroying
archaic superstitions and relations, at whatever social, cultural, and political cost. Industrialization and
urbanization were seen as the inevitable and necessarily progressive routes to modernization. (86)
LINKS: GLOBALIZATION (2/2)

The globalization of law perpetuates the myth of East and West-this perpetuates abusive
power relationships and will culminate in new forms of imperialism/colonialism
Darian-Smith in 2k2 (Eve, Director of the Program in Law and Society and Associate Professor of
Anthropology @ Univ of California Santa Barbara, Relocating Postcolonialism)
This essay is concerned with the endurance of myths of “East” and “West” and the role national and
international law plays in affirming and legitimizing these myths.’ Despite the current rhetoric of legal and
cultural globalization used by many politicians, economists, and academics that promotes a sense of
harmony, homogeneity, open communication, and equal power relations between people and places, I
suggest that much of the rhetoric of globalization is still based on stereotypical images of East and West
that perpetuate colonial hierarchies and asymmetric power relations. My argument is that at stake in this
enduring mythology is the emergence of new forms of imperialism and new forms of colonialization as
transnational corporations — legitimized and endorsed through so-called global legal practices — seek
cheap labor pools, technological resources, and new commercial markets in a global political economy.
The rule of law plays a central role in perpetuating and endorsing myths of East and West. I suggest that
by recovering the historical, political, and economic dimensions of law itself we can begin to understand
the ways in which polarized images of East and West continue to distort and limit our understanding of
legal globalization in postcolonial contexts (see Darian-Smith and
Fitzpatrick 1999). I use the case of intellectual property law in Hong Kong to show how literature on legal
globalization persists in oversimplifying what law is, how it operates, and the degree to which different
cultures understand the concept in the same way. My underlying concern is that when we as scholars
idealize processes of legal globalization we depoliticize sociolegal practices in a late-capitalist world. By
discussing legal globalization as a process separate from neocolonialism, for example when we speak
triumphantly of the spread of the Western concept of “civilized” human rights, we perpetuate a dichotomy
that implies oriental legal barbarism and authoritarianism on the one hand, and occidental progress and
democracy on the other (see Mahmud 1999). While there never have been clearly defined borders
containing East or West legal categories, ideologies, and philosophies, nonetheless the power of
believing in the moral superiority of one perspective over the other essentializes legal understandings and
makes it impossible to envision and analyze counterhegemonic legal impulses issuing from the
rearticulation of legal systems across international and transnational terrains.
<p294-295>
HUMAN RIGHTS/ LIBERALISM BAD

( ) American exportation of liberal values across the globe renders invisible the violent
underside of hegemonic power. It is our task to show exclusion and bring it back from the
invisible.
Rasch 03’
We will return to the issue of a "completely new politics" later. 3 For now I wish to investigate a second
trajectory that the sovereign ban traces, one that Agamben hints at, but does not examine. Agamben focuses on
the localization of the state of exception and its apotheosis in the camp. If the first successful modern
localization of the sovereign exception is represented by the distinction between Europe and the New
World, then its culmination as the internment, labor, concentration, and death camps of the twentieth
century can be seen as a type of reintroduction of the initial distinction within Europe itself—and, of
course, within the now "civilized" Western Hemisphere as well. One thereby replaces the
civilized/uncivilized distinction with Aryan/non-Aryan, white/black, native/immigrant, or—and though
Agamben does not mention this possibility, some surely would—woman/fetus. There is, however, a parallel if
reverse way of dealing with exclusion, and the remainder of this study will focus not on localization but on the
invisibilization of the exception in the abstract moral and legal norm that informs the liberal rule of law and its
extension as universal human rights. With Europe divested of its moral and political authority and integrated
into a larger, potentially global order, the new American hegemony challenges us to imagine a total,
exceptionless inclusion of sovereign peoples (Rawls 1999) or sovereign individuals (Habermas) with no
enabling exclusion. Schmitt postulated that whether one likes it or not, the norm rests on an exception,
inclusion on an exclusion. Schmitt would therefore ask: can one think of the entire globe as a
differentiated unity without an outside? The purpose of his much-maligned friend/enemy distinction was
neither to glorify war nor to justify the extermination of the heterogeneous, but to show that a total or
global "inclusion of the other," to use Habermas's threatening phrase (1998), could only occur if the otherness
of the other, that which makes him what he is, is excluded from the world community. One cannot help but draw
the friend/enemy distinction, then, when one recognizes in the handshake of the purported friend the surreptitious
continuation of warfare by other means. Thus, the question we need to ask is: on what exclusion is the ostensive
universal extension of human rights based? To repeat: it was Schmitt's contention that America's greatest
achievement involved making this new exclusion invisible. If that is the case, then our task is to bring that
exclusion back to light. [End Page 130]
( ) By creating a rubric of human rights violations, we are imposing the very

individualized moral beliefs we tried to outlaw.
Rasch 03’
This, it would seem, is also the question implied in the following passage by Geuss: "A 'human right' is an
inherently vacuous conception, and to speak of 'human rights' is a kind of puffery or white magic.... 'Group
X has a natural right to Y' in contemporary political discourse, then, usually means that they do not have a (legal)
right to Y but we think they ought to. To be sure, such things as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
are intended to establish a mechanism which would in fact bring it about that there were reliable
consequences of suppressing free speech, preventing self-determination, incarcerating without cause, and
so forth. However, it is important to realize that even if (and it is a cyclopean 'if') it were to be or come to be
the case that such Declarations had more than rhetorical effect, they would constitute not so much a
vindication of the doctrine of human rights as a transformation of individual components of someone's
moral beliefs into a system of positive rights. We would merely have begun to invent and impose on the
nations of the world a new layer of positive (international) law" (2001, 144).
HUMAN RIGHTS NOT = HUMAN DIGNITY

Even if all humans should have dignity upheld, human rights are part of a liberal regime to
achieve that goal and will ultimately fail
Goodhart in 2k3 (Michael, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of
Pittsburgh, Human Rights Quarterly, Origins and Universality in the Human Rights Debates, accessed via
project muse)
According to Donnelly, human rights emerged "in response to the social disruptions of modernity,"
primarily the advent of capitalism and the rise of the modern state. 27 "Capitalism and industrialism bring
in their wake natural or human rights," he argues. 28 "Society, which once protected a person's dignity and
provided a place in the world, now appears in the form of the modern state, the modern economy, and the
modern city, as an oppressive, alien power that assaults people's dignity. 29 In Donnelly's view, the appeal
and promise of human rights is a function of the response they provide to the threats posed by capitalism
(and by modernity more generally). The universality of human rights follows from the similarity of the
threats facing all modern human beings in a global capitalist economy. 30 Donnelly and Howard view
attempts at culturally grounding human rights as a misguided enterprise premised on a confusion
between human rights and human dignity. 31 Human dignity is a universal value, but human rights
originated in the West and require a liberal regime for their realization. For them, human rights are not
equivalent with human dignity but are rather a means to the end of protecting human dignity. 32 [End
Page 943]
NEUTRALITY BAD
The concept of neutrality in liberal politics gives cover to more insidious modes of
oppression that operate under supposedly neutral principles
Woods, 97.
The theory of neutrality plays a key role in maintaining the credibility of the existing liberal order. It is the
guarantor of the social contract, [*477] the undisputed sine qua non of fairness and justice. Derived from
the Latin neuter, meaning "neither," neutrality connotes restraint from choice between competing values. It is
Rousseau's concept of law: general and abstract rules. Under this conception, privileges, and class distinctions
are legitimate so long as they do not expressly identify particular individuals subject to them. 8
Neutrality is one of many conceptual fictions of liberal discourse. 9 A legal fiction is "contrived by the law" to
facilitate adjudication of issues. 10 Such fictions may serve as symbols, to make abstract concepts tangible 11 or,
they may be myths designed to promote some normative principle or goal. 12 The problem arises when these
fictions cease to be recognized as inventions, or as "presumptions about reality," 13 and are believed to
have an independent existence in reality. Then, they "purport to provide us with an objective and impersonal
criterion, but they do not." 14 According to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, a fiction is "a pseudo-concept
available for a variety of ideological uses ... Hence, when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always
necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use." 15 For example, Professor Derrick
Bell argues that racially neutral anti-discrimination law disguises continued bias, and creates a tendency for
self-blame because of the difficulty of identifying more subtle forms of oppression. 16 Similarly, in
employment law, the enforcement of a neutral right to contract ignores the imbalance of power between worker
and employer. 17
Neutrality is not just another fiction, however; it is central to "the whole liberal world view of (private)
rights and (public) sovereignty mediated by the rule of law ... [and] is only an attractive mirage masking
the reality of economic and political power." 18 The supposed [*478] neutrality of the liberal legal order
supports other fictions that comprise the constitutive pillars of that order. For example: that individuals consent to
the social contract; that because of this consent liberalism preserves individual autonomy; and that because the
liberal order is premised on individual autonomy and consent, its social and economic
IMPACTS: INVISIBLE EXCLUSIONS = TOTAL WAR/ ENMITY GOOD

They replace the friend/enemy distinction with order/choas enabling new and unlimited
modes of warfare. the friend/enemy distinction must be reclaimed as the foundation for
politics – making power visible and holding it within boundaries. Only this
acknowledgement can make possible a dialogue with the enemy “other’ that liberal
humanism denies.
THORUP, 2K6. (Mikkel, a lecturer in the History of Philosophy Department at Aarhus University. 'Delinquents,
troublemakers, pirates and gangsters': new wars in the postpolitical borderland. Theoria. August 1.)
For Schmitt the precondition of the pacification and depoliticization of both the European state internally and its
inter-state relations was the projection of enmity beyond the line. It was a sort of safety valve for aggression and state
competition (1981: 71-5; 1991a: 68-72). Unconventional enmity exists beyond the line of Europe's borders in the colonial
frontierland. This is the colonial enmity, where rules of law, civility and reciprocity are not thought to apply,
as the opponent is 'an other' in such a profound sense that one recognizes nothing of oneself in the other.
Achille Mbembe says very precisely that the 'colonies are similar to the frontiers. They are inhabited by "savages". The
colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a
distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies' (2003: 24). This non-European form is understood as
barbaric, savage, against whom one is free to use tactics and weaponry outlawed and morally inconceivable in Europe.
Whereas the conventional enmity is a right of order against order, the unconventional enmity is one of
order against disorder. This is, as Reinhart Koselleck demonstrates in an article on three asymmetrical historical-political
opposition pairs: Greek vs. barbarian, Christian versus heathen, human versus inhuman, not a new division. In the Greek
context a distinction was made between war as stasis--civil war among Greeks, and war as polemos--war against the barbarians, who, as Aristotle said, were slaves by
nature (Koselleck 1979: 220).
In Frontiers and Ghettos, James Ron notes the remarkable differences between violent state practices within a state's territory. In some areas the residents are (heavily)
policed in the ghettos, while in others, in the frontiers, they are expelled or killed. This shows a doubling of the unconventional enmity within the state. There can also
be areas beyond the line inside states: 'frontiers are precariously perched on the edge of the dominant polity, whereas ghettos are situated squarely within it. Frontier
residents can be expelled or killed, but ghetto residents can only be harshly policed' (Ron 2003: 18). Ghettos are incorporated into the polity; they are repressed but
included. They are objects of policing not extermination. Ghettos are more heavily institutionalized than frontiers; there is high infrastructural power, which helps
explain the 'softer' police approach. In the frontierland the institutionalization and infrastructural power is weak and sporadic, which triggers despotic use of
indiscriminate power to exert control and dominance (Mann 1984). Its use of force is often 'contracted' out to paramilitary freelancers, such as Arkan in Bosnia or the
British East India Company. Ron explains the difference with reference to the American experience:
When the frontier was open and indigenous populations were unincorporated into the U.S. polity, they were targeted for dispossession and massacre. Once the frontier
was subject to central state regulation, by contrast, aboriginals were locked in reservations, where they were policed and oppressed, but not killed outright. They had
lost their freedom and land, but their new institutional setting shielded them from the final act of physical destruction. By passing from frontier to reservation,
surviving Native Americans were spared utter liquidation (2003: 16-7).
This shows that the line, which marks out conventional from unconventional enmity, may not always be identical with nominal state borders. Weak states tend to
unconventional or internal enemy. The
duplicate the line inside their territory; and strong states are often those who have successfully eliminated the
paradigmatic form of the unconventional enmity is the colony-grabbing war or the turning of the frontier into
'domesticated' land but some of its characteristics are also, as shown above, present in humanitarian interventions and the war
on terror.
The liberal-humanitarian discourse becomes the language of intervention; in 'thinking their interventions
benign or neutral, they intervene more often than they otherwise might' (Kennedy 2004: 23), and often in areas
and ways which do not help the intended 'victims'. This is not to deny the need for intervention of various kinds, and it
is certainly not questioning humanitarian motives. The ideology critique of this text is not to seek the real, hard reason behind the
soft-spoken words but to take the humanitarian language and motivation seriously and then to look critically at the implications
of good intentions. It is my thesis that a significant part of the problem lies in an insufficient understanding of power. David
Kennedy says that humanitarian blindness 'often begins at the moment the humanitarian averts his eyes from
his own power' (2004: 329, my italics). Humanitarians and liberal opinion-makers wield enormous power, also
military power, but this goes unnoticed in and through the liberal-humanist discourse, which consistently
casts off any appearance of its own power, naming power as evil and the problem to be overcome.
Following Ron and Kennedy we could perhaps speculate that the NGO community and the liberal-humanitarian theorists
may be serving the re-establishment of power's distinctions. They may involuntarily be what we could call
'paratheoretical freelancers', turning the new borderland into postpolitical globalist land. What cosmopolitanism and
liberal globalism generally may be doing is loosening those distinctions which held state power within
some boundaries.
They could be the state philosophies for a boundless world, albeit one a lot less benign than imagined.
Commenting on Schmitt's Grossraum-theory, we can agree with Ola Tunander, who says that the universalist approach
replaces the bipolar friend/enemy differentiation with a unipolar cosmos/chaos divide: 'Paradoxically,
however, thisrecognition of difference also implies a possible dialogue between these identities. By
contrast, the universalist view denies the Other such a dialogue, because from this perspective the Other
does not exist as fundamentally different, with its own identity and its own Cosmos' (1997: 25). And this is the choice
Schmitt asks us to make: Friend/enemy or cosmos/chaos. He is, of course, dishonest because the conventional
friend/enemy distinction presupposes, according to his own theory, the distinction between a European cosmos and a non-European chaos.
What is true in his theory, however, is the apparent shift from an international friend/enemy system organized in nation-states to a globalist
cosmos/chaos system organized in post-nation-states versus the others. Chantal Mouffe says:
It is high time to wake up from the dream of Westernization and to realize that the enforced universalization of the Western model, instead of
bringing peace and prosperity, will lead to ever bloodier reactions on the part of those whose cultures and ways of life are being destroyed by this
process (2005: 87).
Schmitt's insistence on the political as conflictual, and the attention to its possible returns, serve as a reminder to call war, and especially
humanitarian war, by its proper name and to look for the ways in which the enemies of the new order are being named and dealt with. Schmitt's
work on the enemy and the international may serve us as a forecast. That is very much the purpose of this text, which agrees with the modest,
perhaps even amoral, goals of William Rasch:
What is to be done? If you are one who says there is a war, and if you say it not because you glory in it but because
you fear it and hate it, then your
goal is to limit it and its effects, not eliminate it, which merely intensifies it,
but limit by drawing clear lines within which it can be fought, and clear lines between those who fight it and those
who don't, lines between friends, enemies, and neutrals, lines between combatants and non-combatants (2005: 260).
This is something other than fantasizing about the end of enmity and war altogether. But given the perspective and thesis of the
text it may be all one can hope for. The hope for more may actually make matters worse as the 'war to end
all wars' become a perpetual series of 'police operations', where humanitarian violence is projected as the
continuation of democratic peace with other means.
Conclusion: The Humanitarian Sovereign
We are now in a situation where state sovereignty is apparently generally and universally questioned. But in actual fact only the weak states are
having their sovereignty weakened and questioned. The postmodern or postnational Western states are strengthening their effective agency by
sharing sovereignty whereas modern states like China, India and Brazil maintain their 'classic' claim to national sovereignty. What we are
witnessing is an institutionalization of sovereign inequality (Chandler 2002:139-151). The classical state system operated in principle (though not
in practice) with a sovereign equality, which secured all states, even the weakest, a certain measure of protection from outside interference. Today
the move from international politics to globalist moralism expresses a redistribution of sovereignty which systematically favours some states (the
interventionist ones) and disfavours others (the intervened ones).
The new global system hands to the strong a new legitimacy used to control the weaker by redescribing
their control as humanitarianism, the protection of human rights and the like: a repression of the borderland. The
new moralist discourse depoliticizes the inherent inequality in the system and hides the fact that not all states or actors can
authorize the moral or humanitarian discourse. Weaker states are reduced to play the role of perpetrators or victims, both of
which 'invite' interventionism. Stronger, western states are given, or rather have taken upon themselves, the role of judge, jury
and executioner. The weaker states are submitted to a rigid control regime characterized by liberal anti-
pluralism, which accepts only the liberal-democratic-capitalist regime as legitimate. The pluralism turns out to
be a liberal monism. The degrees of freedom for the weaker states are getting progressively smaller. They are not allowed
transgressions of codified or moral laws, as non-liberal states are presumed guilty. The humanist-moralist discourse allows the
stronger Western states to violate the same laws, the codified international law (as in the Kosovo-war) and moral law (high
altitude bombing, cluster bombs, etc.) because they have what Danilo Zolo calls 'the presumption of humanitarian innocence'
(2002:109-114).
Schmitt directs our attention to the important question of who can invoke the humanitarian discourse: 'The question is: Who
actually determines what peace is? Who decides if a given situation is tolerable or not; if peace is
threatened or not?' (Schmitt 2005c: 342). There is, as already mentioned, a systematic inequality surrounding who
can convincingly and legitimately invoke humanity. This is an inequality aggravated by the new post-sovereign
discourse. Western states can safely rely on the verdict of the international society as it is by and large defined and constituted by
them. Just like 'humanity', the concept of 'international society' is an empty one until filled with content by
interested parties; content which may be humanitarily formulated and motivated but which is also highly and inescapably
political and therefore principally open for critique and debate. But this conflictual open-endedness is covered up by the humanist
rhetoric, which makes every critique illegitimate. Schmitt says: 'With every decisive political concept the important
thing is, who interprets, defines and uses it; who, through a concrete decision, says what is to count as
peace and disarmament, what intervention, public peace and security is' (1994c: 202). It is the return of the
political in the postpolitical borderland. Here it is decided whether a given situation is a breach of the peace, a violation of human
rights; here friend and enemy are determined. The allegedly post-sovereign state cashes in on the 'sovereign price' by taking the
very real power to name and shame violaters, criminals and enemies of humanity. To paraphrase Schmitt's dictum that 'sovereign
is he, who decides on the exception' (1934: 11), we can say that the humanitarian sovereign is he who decides on the
global exception and thereby the enemy of humanity.
IMPACTS: CAN’T SOLVE/ NORMS ARE EMPTY

Universal humanitarian norms mean nothing – the truly important question is who
decides? These supposedly neutral categories present societies with the choice between
cultural and physical extermination.
RASCH, 2K3.
Cultural Critique 54 120-147. p.MUSE
For Schmitt, to assume that one can derive morally correct political institutions from abstract, universal
norms is to put the cart before the horse. The truly important question remains: who decides? 15 What
political power representing which political order defines terms like human rights and public reason,
defines, in fact, what it means to be properly human? What political power distinguishes [End Page 141]
between the decent and the indecent, between those who police the world and those who are outlawed from
it? Indeed, what political power decides what is and what is not political? Habermas's contention that
normative legality neutralizes the moral and the political and that therefore Schmitt "suppresses" the "decisive
point," namely, "the legal preconditions of an impartial judicial authority and a neutral system of criminal
punishment" (1998, 200), is enough to make even an incurable skeptic a bit nostalgic for the old Frankfurt School
distinction between affirmative and critical theory. One could observe, for instance, that the "universality" of
human rights has a very particular base. As Habermas says:
Asiatic societies cannot participate in capitalistic modernization without taking advantage of the
achievements of an individualistic legal order. One cannot desire the one and reject the other. From the
perspective of Asian countries, the question is not whether human rights, as part of an individualistic legal order,
are compatible with the transmission of one's own culture. Rather, the question is whether the traditional
forms of political and societal integration can be reasserted against—or must instead be adapted to—the
hard-to-resist imperatives of an economic modernization that has won approval on the whole. (2001, 124)
Thus, despite his emphasis on procedure and the universality of his so-called discourse principle, the choice that
confronts Asiatic societies or any other people is a choice between cultural identity and economic survival,
between, in other words, cultural and physical extermination. As Schmitt said, the old Christian and civilizing
distinction between believers and nonbelievers (Gläubigern and Nicht-Gläubigern) has become the modern,
economic distinction between "creditors and debtors" (Gläubigern and Schuldnern).
IMPACTS: VALUE TO LIFE

( ) The liberal attempt to shield the political robs life of meaning
Thorup 06’
Mikkel Thorup, Associate Professor University of Copenhagen, “In Defense of Enmity- Critiques of Liberal
Globalism”. January 2006.
Real politics is first and foremost foreign politics, that is, war and the preparation for war (and secondly, internal
peace). He understands ordinary politics as centrifugal, as dangerously weakening the state by allowing
'total parties' to over-politicize the internal and make everything into politics which, in turn, weakens the
genuinely political. Opposed to this, Schmitt emphasized (to the point of the disappearance of everything
else) 'high politics'. The true political nation state had, prior to its liberal dissolution, pushed the political
to the foreign domain: "Politics in an elevated sense, great politics, was back then only foreign politics"
(1996d: 11). In contrast to everyday trivial politics, he insists that "the grand moments of high politics are
... the moments when the enemy is viewed in concrete clarity as the enemy" (1996a: 67). We could call it
the front line battle moment of the political. Unwillingness to face up to this moment of clarity (and action)
is a 'symptom of the end of the political' (1996a: 67). The loss of the death sacrifice is the clearest example
of a disenchanted and empty world (Palaver 1995). The modern is the post-heroic age, where the death sacrifice
isn't demanded or offered. Life, the purely quantitative continuation of life, is the highest standard. Life, for
Schmitt and the Counter-Enlightenment, is without meaning, if it doesn't contain anything more precious,
more sublime, than the mere continuation of the individual existence. The political, for Schmitt, is the
attempt at reinstating moral seriousness (Strauss 1988: 119; Norris 1998: 71, 78). Schmitt might not have
said it quite like that, but he would agree with the main thrust of Helmuth Moltke, when he said: "Without war
the world would deteriorate into materialism" (quoted from Gat 2001: 327). The real only exists in its relation to
the possibility of death: "The existential core of the political is the real possibility of being robbed of one's
own being by the enemy" (Nielsen 2003: 86). This is what gives the political its distinct character and it
explains Schmitt's repeated warnings, that those who deny the political loose their independence (1982:
228; 1996a: 54): "The concepts of friend, enemy and battle only gain their real meaning because they have and
always will have a special relation to the real possibility of physical killing"; "War is also today the serious case
IlErnstfalll" (1996a: 33 & 25).
ALT SOLVENCY: BETTER CONFIGURATION OF RIGHTS
We can reconfigure rights based in resistance; in agonism instead of friendship and conflict
instead of passivity. Freedom does not originate in principles; it arises out of the abyss of
them. The way the 1ac frames emancipation locks subordination into place and paves the
road to the most insidious forms of tyranny done in democracy’s name.
HATAB, 2K2. (Lawrence J. Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University 2002 Prospects for a Democratic
Agon Why We can still be Nietzscheans: The Journal of Nietzsche p.MUSE)
If political respect implies inclusiveness and an open regard for the rightful participation of others, an agonistic
model of politics can underwrite respect without the need for substantive conceptions of equality or even something like
"equal regard." I have already mentioned that agonistics can be seen as a fundamentally social phenomenon. Since the self is formed in
and through tensional relations with others, then any annulment of my Other would be an annulment of myself. Radical agonistics,
then, discounts the idea of sheer autonomy and self-constitution. Such a tensional sociality can much more readily affirm the place
of the Other in social relations than can modern models of subject-based freedom.
Moreover, the structure of an agon conceived as a contest can readily underwrite political principles of fairness. Not only do I need an Other to
prompt my own achievement, but the significance of any "victory" I might achieve demands an able opponent. As in athletics, defeating an
incapable or incapacitated competitor winds up being meaningless. So I should not only will the presence of others in an agon, I
should also want that they be able adversaries, that they have opportunities and capacities to succeed in the contest.
And I should be able to honor the winner of a fair contest. Such is the logic of competition that contains a host of normative features, which might
even include active provisions for helping people in political contests become more able participants. 25 In addition, agonistic respect need
not be associated with something like positive regard or equal worth, a dissociation that can go further in facing up
to actual political conditions and problematic connotations that can attach to liberal dispositions. Again allow me to
quote my previous work.
Democratic respect forbids exclusion, it demands inclusion; but respect for the Other as other can avoid a vapid
sense of "tolerance," a sloppy "relativism," or a misplaced spirit of "neutrality." Agonistic respect allows us to
simultaneously affirm our beliefs and affirm our opponents as worthy competitors [End Page 142] in public
discourse. Here we can speak of respect without ignoring the fact that politics involves perpetual disagreement, and
we have an adequate answer to the question "Why should I respect a view that I do not agree with?" In this way beliefs about what is
best (aristos) can be coordinated with an openness to other beliefs and a willingness to accept the outcome of an open competition among the full
citizenry (demos). Democratic respect, therefore, is a dialogical mixture of affirmation and negation, a political bearing that entails giving all
beliefs a hearing, refusing any belief an ultimate warrant, and perceiving one's own viewpoint as agonistically implicated with opposing
viewpoints. In sum, we can combine 1) the historical tendency of democratic movements to promote free expression, pluralism, and liberation
from traditional constraints, and 2) a Nietzschean perspectivism and agonistic respect, to arrive at a postmodern model of democracy that
provides both a nonfoundational openness and an atmosphere of civil political discourse. 26
An agonistic politics construed as competitive fairness can sustain a robust conception of political rights, not as
something "natural" possessed by an original self, but as an epiphenomenal, procedural notion conferred upon citizens in order to
sustain viable political practice. Constraints on speech, association, access, and so on, simply insure lopsided political contests. We can avoid
metaphysical models of rights and construe them as simply social and political phenomena: social in the sense of entailing reciprocal recognition
and obligation; political in the sense of being guaranteed and enforced by the state. We can even defend so-called positive rights, such as a right
to an adequate education, as requisite for fair competition in political discourse.
Rights themselves can be understood as agonistic in that a right-holder has a claim against some treatment by others
or for some provision that might be denied by others. In this way rights can be construed as balancing power relations in social milieus, as a
partial recession of one's own power on behalf of the power of others—which in fact is precisely how Nietzsche in an early work described
fairness and rights (D 112). And, as is well known, the array of rights often issues conflicts of different and differing rights, and political life
must engage in the ongoing balancing act of negotiating these tensions, a negotiation facilitated by precisely not
defining rights as discrete entities inviolably possessed by an originating self.
Beyond political rights, a broader conception of rights, often designated as human rights as distinct from political practice, can also be defended
by way of the kind of nonfoundational, negative sense of selfhood inspired by Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the self is a temporal openness infused
with tragic limits, rather than some metaphysical essence, stable substance, or eternal entity. A via negativa can be utilized to account
for rights as stemming not from what we are but from what we are not. So much of abusive or exclusionary
treatment is animated by confident designations and reductions as to "natures" having to do with race,
gender, class, role, character, and so on. [End Page 143] Nonfoundational challenges to "identity" may seem
unsettling, but if we consider how identities figure in injustices, a good deal of work can be done to reconfigure
rights as based in resistance. It is difficult to find some positive condition that can justify rights and do so without
excluding or suppressing some other conditions. But a look at human history and experience can more readily
understand rights and freedom as emerging out of the irrepressible tendency of human beings to resist and deny the
adequacy of external attributions as to what or who they "are." It may be sufficient to defend rights simply in
terms of the human capacity to say No.
Appel insists that a radical agonistics is a significant threat to democratic ideals and principles. Although he does little to develop how and why
this may be so, the charge raises important questions facing postmodern, and particularly Nietzschean, approaches to democratic politics. In my
work I have tried to face this question, admit the difficulty, and suggest a "tragic" model of democratic openness, to borrow from Nietzsche's
interest in tragedy. 27 Many democratic theorists insist that politics must be grounded in secure principles, which
themselves are incontestable, so as to rule out anti-democratic voices from having their day and possibly undermining
democratic procedures or results. A radically agonistic, open conception of democracy that simply invites any and all parties to compete for favor
seems utterly decisionist, with no justification beyond its contingent enactment. But from a historical perspective, despite
metaphysical pretenses in some quarters, democratic foundings have in fact emerged out of the "abyss" of
conventions and decisional moments. 28 And with the prospect of a constitutional convention in our system, it is
evident from a performative standpoint that any results are actually possible in a democracy, even anti-democratic
outcomes (not likely, but surely possible). The "tragedy" is that democracy could die at its own hands. Foundationalists
would call such an outcome contradictory, but a tragic conception would see it as a possibility intrinsic to the openness of democratic practice.
Can there be more than a simply negative register in such a tragic conception? I think so. Just as, for Nietzsche, the tragic allows us to be
sensitized and energized for the fragile meanings of existence, thus enhancing life, a tragic politics could wean us from false
comforts in foundations and open us to the urgent finite conditions of political life in an enhanced way. And even if one
conceded the existence of foundational self-evident political principles, would the force of such principles by themselves necessarily be able to
prevent non-democratic outcomes? If not, the force of such principles [End Page 144] would be restricted to the solace of intellectual rectitude
that can comfort theorists while the walls are coming down. The nonexistence of foundational guarantees surely does not prevent one from living
and fighting for democratic ideals. What is to be said of someone who, in the absence of a guarantee, would hesitate to act or be obstructed from
acting or see action as tainted or less than authentic? Nietzsche would take this as weakness. The most profound element in Nietzsche's
conceptions of will to power, agonistics, and eternal recurrence, in my view, can be put in the following way. For Nietzsche, to act in the world is
always to act in the midst of otherness, of resistances or obstacles. Hence to dream of action without otherness is to annul action. To affirm one's
Other as necessarily constitutive of oneself is not only to affirm the full field of action (which is the sense of eternal recurrence), but also to
affirm action as action, that is to say, a real move in life amidst real resistances, as opposed to the fantasy of self-sufficient, fully free, uncontested
occurrences born in Western conceptions of divine perfection and continued in various philosophical models of demonstrative certainty and
theoretical governance. The irony of a tragically open, agonistic politics is that it need not "infect" political life but in fact spur it toward the
existential environment of it enactment. And as radically open, an agonistic politics has the virtue of precluding the
silencing of any voice, something especially important when even purportedly democratic dispositions are
comfortable with exclusions (frustrated by citizens who will not come around to being impartial enough, rational
enough, secular enough, deliberative enough, communal enough, virtuous enough, and so on), thereby becoming
susceptible to the most ironic and insidious form of tyranny done in democracy's name.
ALT: HATAB
ALT SOLVES VIOLENCE

Violence is not the result of conflict, it is the result of the drive to abolish it. The
alternative’s embrace of agonism rules out violence at its origin.
HATAB, 2K2. (Lawrence J. Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University 2002 Prospects for a
Democratic Agon Why We can still be Nietzscheans: The Journal of Nietzsche p.MUSE)
How can we begin to apply the notion of agonistics to politics in general and democracy in particular? First of all,
contestation and competition can be seen as fundamental to self-development and as an intrinsically social phenomenon.
Agonistics helps us articulate the social and political ramifications of Nietzsche's concept of will to power. As Nietzsche put it in
an 1887 note, "will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it seeks that which resists it" (KSA 12, p.424). Power,
therefore, is not simply an individual possession or a goal of action; it is more a global, interactive conception. For Nietzsche,
every advance in life is an overcoming of some obstacle or counterforce, so that conflict is a mutual co-
constitution of contending forces. Opposition generates development. The human self is not formed in some internal
sphere and then secondarily exposed to external relations and conflicts. The self is constituted in and through what it
opposes and what opposes it; in other words, the self is formed through agonistic relations. Therefore, any
annulment of one's Other would be an annulment of one's self in this sense. Competition can be understood as a
shared activity for the sake of fostering high achievement and self-development, and therefore as an intrinsically social activity. 10
In the light of Nietzsche's appropriation of the two forms of Eris, it is necessary to distinguish between agonistic
conflict and sheer violence. A radical agonistics rules out violence, because violence is actually an
impulse to eliminate conflict by annihilating or incapacitating an opponent, bringing the agon to an
end. 11 In a later work Nietzsche discusses the "spiritualization of hostility (Feindschaft)," wherein one must affirm both the
presence and the power of one's opponents as implicated in one's own posture (TI "Morality as Antinature," 3). And in this
passage Nietzsche specifically applies such a notion to the political realm. What this implies is that the category of the
social need not be confined to something like peace or harmony. Agonistic relations, therefore, do not connote
a deterioration of a social disposition and can thus be extended to political relations.
How can democracy in general terms be understood as an agonistic activity? Allow me to quote from my previous work.
Political judgments are not preordained or dictated; outcomes depend upon a contest of speeches where one
view wins and other views lose in a tabulation of votes; since the results are binding and backed by the coercive power of
the government, democratic elections and procedures establish temporary control and subordination—which, however, can
always be altered or reversed because of the succession of periodic political contests. . . . Democratic elections allow for, and
depend upon, peaceful exchanges and transitions of power. . . . [L]anguage is the weapon in democratic contests. The binding
results, however, produce tangible effects of gain and loss that make political exchanges more than just talk or a game. . . . The
urgency of such political contests is that losers must yield to, and live under, the policies of the winner; we
notice, therefore, specific configurations of power, of domination and submission in democratic politics.
A/T: PERMUTATION (1/2)

( ) The emphasis on human rights is eroding the principle of self-determination and non-
interference. Doing both would be impossible.
Rasch 03’
But while affirmative theorists like Habermas and Rawls are busy constructing the ideological scaffolding that
supports the structure of the status quo, what role is there for the "critical" theorist to play? Despite the sanguine
hopes of Hardt and Negri (2000) that "Empire" will all but spontaneously combust as a result of the irrepressible
ur-desire of the multitude, can we seriously place our faith in some utopian grand alternative anymore, or in
some revolutionary or therapeutic result based on the truth of critique that would allow us all, in the end,
to sing in the sunshine and laugh everyday? Do, in fact, such utopian fantasies not lead to the moralizing hubris
of a [End Page 142] Rawls or a Habermas? 16 In short, it is one thing to recognize the concealed, particular
interests that govern the discourse and politics of human rights and quite another to think seriously about
how things could be different, to imagine an international system that respected both the equality and the
difference of states and/or peoples. Is it possible—and this is Todorov's question—to value Vitoria's principle
of the "free circulation of men, ideas, and goods" and still also "cherish another principle, that of self-
determination and noninterference" (Todorov 1984, 177)? The entire "Vitorian" tradition, from Scott to
Habermas and Rawls, thinks not. Habermas, for instance, emphatically endorses the fact that "the erosion
of the principle of nonintervention in recent decades has been due primarily to the politics of human
rights" (1998, 147), a "normative" achievement that is not so incidentally correlated with a positive, economic
fact: "In view of the subversive forces and imperatives of the world market and of the increasing density of
worldwide networks of communication and commerce, the external sovereignty of states, however it may be
grounded, is by now in any case an anachronism" (150). And opposition to this development is not merely
anachronistic; it is illegitimate, not to be tolerated. So, for those who sincerely believe in American institutional,
cultural, and moral superiority, the times could not be rosier. After all, when push comes to shove, "we" decide—
not only about which societies are decent and which ones are not, but also about which acts of violence are
"terrorist" and which compose the "gentle compulsion" of a "just war."
A/T: PERMUTATION (2/2)

The permutation loosens the distinctions that hold power within boundaries.
Thorup, 2K6. (Mikkel, a lecturer in the History of Philosophy Department at Aarhus University. 'Delinquents,
troublemakers, pirates and gangsters': new wars in the postpolitical borderland. Theoria. August 1.)
Following Ron and Kennedy we could perhaps speculate that the NGO community and the liberal-humanitarian
theorists may be serving the re-establishment of power's distinctions. They may involuntarily be what we could call
'paratheoretical freelancers', turning the new borderland into postpolitical globalist land. What cosmopolitanism and
liberal globalism generally may be doing is loosening those distinctions which held state power within some
boundaries.
They could be the state philosophies for a boundless world, albeit one a lot less benign than imagined.
Commenting on Schmitt's Grossraum-theory, we can agree with Ola Tunander, who says that the universalist
approach replaces the bipolar friend/enemy differentiation with a unipolar cosmos/chaos divide: 'Paradoxically,
however, this recognition of difference also implies a possible dialogue between these identities. By contrast, the
universalist view denies the Other such a dialogue, because from this perspective the Other does not exist as
fundamentally different, with its own identity and its own Cosmos' (1997: 25). And this is the choice Schmitt asks
us to make: Friend/enemy or cosmos/chaos. He is, of course, dishonest because the conventional friend/enemy
distinction presupposes, according to his own theory, the distinction between a European cosmos and a non-European chaos. What is true in his
theory, however, is the apparent shift from an international friend/enemy system organized in nation-states to a globalist cosmos/chaos system
organized in post-nation-states versus the others. Chantal Mouffe says:
It is high time to wake up from the dream of Westernization and to realize that the enforced universalization of the Western model, instead of
bringing peace and prosperity, will lead to ever bloodier reactions on the part of those whose cultures and ways of life are being destroyed by this
process (2005: 87).
Schmitt's insistence on the political as conflictual, and the attention to its possible returns, serve as a reminder to call war, and especially
humanitarian war, by its proper name and to look for the ways in which the enemies of the new order are being named and dealt with. Schmitt's
work on the enemy and the international may serve us as a forecast. That is very much the purpose of this text, which agrees with the modest,
perhaps even amoral, goals of William Rasch:
What is to be done? If you are one who says there is a war, and if you say it not because you glory in it but because
you fear it and hate it, then your goal is to limit it and its effects, not eliminate it, which merely intensifies it, but
limit by drawing clear lines within which it can be fought, and clear lines between those who fight it and those who
don't, lines between friends, enemies, and neutrals, lines between combatants and non-combatants (2005: 260).
This is something other than fantasizing about the end of enmity and war altogether. But given the perspective and
thesis of the text it may be all one can hope for. The hope for more may actually make matters worse as the 'war to
end all wars' become a perpetual series of 'police operations', where humanitarian violence is projected as the
continuation of democratic peace with other means.
We should draw firm lines between us and them – the permutation renders exclusions
invisible and hence more violent.
Rasch, 2K5 (William, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at India University. 'Lines in the Sand:
Enmity as a Structuring Principle', South Atlantic Quarterly, 104:2, 253-262.)
For it is not that exclusions are miraculously made absent once distinctions are not formally drawn. On the contrary,
unacknowledged distinctions, and those who are distinguished by them, simply go underground, become invisible,
and grow stronger, more absolute, in their violent and explosive force. When the retrograde and condemned
distinction between the ‘‘Greek’’ and the ‘‘ barbarian’’ becomes a simple, sanguine affirmation of humanity, this
ideal affirmation actually turns out to be nothing other than a distinction drawn between all those who, by their right
behavior, show themselves to be truly ‘‘ human’’ and those who, alas, by their perverse dissent, have revealed
themselves to be evildoers, to be ‘‘inhuman.’’ Deliberate, visible, ‘‘external’’ distinctions that demarcate a space in
which a ‘‘we’’ can recognize its difference from a ‘‘they,’’ preferably without marking that difference in a
necessarily asymmetrical manner, are to be preferred, in Schmitt’s world, to the invisible and unacknowledged
distinctions that mark those who are exemplary humans from those who, by their political dissent, show themselves
to be gratuitously perverse. For reasons, then, of making difference visible, Schmitt favors lines drawn in the sand,
or, in the ‘‘mythical language’’ used in The Nomos of the Earth, ‘‘firm lines’’ in the ‘‘soil,’’ ‘‘whereby definite
divisions become apparent,’’ and, above them, on the ‘‘solid ground of the earth,’’ ‘‘fences, enclosures, boundaries,
walls, houses, and other constructs,’’ so that the ‘‘orders and orientations of human social life become apparent’’
and the ‘‘forms of power and domination become visible.’’ 7
A/T: KETELS
This backlash against postmodernism is a symptom of political paralysis – do not succumb
to moral indignation – it flattens life, evincing the nihilist evil it seeks to oppose.
BROWN, 2K1. (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. “Politics out of History.” Princeton Univ.
Press. p.29)
Despite its righteous insistence on knowing what is True, Valuable or Important, moralism as a hegemonic form of
political expression, a dominant political sensibility, actually marks both analytic impotence and political
aimlessness – a misrecognition of the political logics now organizing the world, a concomitant failure to discern any
direction for action, and the loss of a clear object of political desire. In particular, the moralizing injunction to act,
the contemporary academic formation of political action as an imperative, might be read as a symptom of political
paralysis in the face of radical political disorientation and as a kind of hysterical mask for the despair that attends
such paralysis. This is the very dynamic Nietzsche denoted as issuing from the “instinct for freedom forcibly made
latent.” However tendentious the language of instinct, what remains compelling in Nietzsche’s understanding of the
dynamic in which a desire for freedom or the will to power is turned back on itself is the idea that a life force
flattened into a passive or paralyzed stance toward the world turns against life as it turns against itself; it turns
against that which incites the subject to overcome itself. Indeed, paralysis of this sort leads to far more than an
experience of mere frustration: it paradoxically evinces precisely the nihilism, the antilife bearing, that it moralizes
against in its nemesis - whether that nemesis is called conservatism, the forces of reaction, racism, postmodernism,
or theory.
We should be French intellectuals that play word games – Ketels is a totalitarian bitch.
FOUCAULT, 80. (Michel, French Theorist, “Question of Method,” Published in Michel Foucault: Power ed. James D. Faubion, p.235-236)
But paralysis isn't the same thing as anesthesia—on the contrary. It's in so far as there's been an awakening to a whole
series of problems that the difficulty of doing anything comes to be felt. Not that this effect is an end in itself. But it seems to me that 'what is
to be done' ought not to be determined from above by reformers, be they prophetic or legislative, but by a long work
of comings and goings, of exchanges, reflections, trials, different analyses. If the social workers you are talking
about don't know which way to turn, this just goes to show that they're looking, and hence are not anaesthetized or
sterilized at all—on the contrary. And it's because of the need not to tie them down or immobilize them that there can be
no question for me of trying to tell 'what is to be done'. If the questions posed by the social workers you spoke of are
going to assume their full amplitude, the most important thing is not to bury them under the weight of prescriptive,
prophetic discourse. The necessity of reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit,
reduce or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell
one: 'Don't criticize, since you're not capable of carrying out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn't
have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an
instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and
confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the law for the law. It isn't a stage in a programming. It is a
challenge directed to what is.
The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts—the subject of action through which the real is transformed. If prisons and punitive
mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform has found its way into the heads of the social
workers; it will be when those who have to do with that penal reality, all those people, have come into collision with
each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and
confrontations; when critique has been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas
A/T: WHAT ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

Stop using the holocaust to prove we should do stuff. It is not your compass
NOVICK, 99. (Peter, prominent jewish political thinker. “The Holocaust in American Life.” P.12-14)
Whatever its origin, the public rationale for Americans’ “confronting” the Holocaust – and I don’t’ doubt that it is sincerely
argued and sincerely accepted – is that the Holocaust is the bearer of important lessons that we all ignore at our peril.
Where once it was said that the life of Jews would be “a light unto the nations” – the bearer of universal lessons –
now it is the “darkness unto the nations” of the death of Jews that is said to carry universal lessons. There is a good
deal of confusion, and sometimes acrimonious dispute, over what these lessons are, but that has in no way diminished
confidence that the lessons are urgent. Individuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons
they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test.
The right has invoked the Holocaust in support of anti-Communist interventions abroad: the agent of the Holocaust was not
Nazi Germany but a generic totalitarianism, embodied after 1945 in the Soviet bloc, with which there could be no compromise. On a
philosophical level, the Holocaust has been used by conservatives to demonstrate the sinfulness of man. It has provided
confirmation of a tragic woldview, revealing the fatuousness of any transformative – or even seriously ameliorative – politics. For
other segments of the rights, the Holocaust revealed the inevitable consequence of the breakdown of religion and
family values in Germany. And, as is well known, the “abortion holocaust” figures prominently in American debate on
that question.
For leftist, the claim that American elites abandoned European Jewry during the war has been used to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of the
establishment, including liberal icons like FDR. For liberals, the Holocaust became the local of “lessons” that teach the evils of
immigration restriction and homophobia, of nuclear weapons and the Vietnam war. Holocaust curricula, increasingly
mandated in public schools, frequently link the Holocaust to much of the liberal agenda – a source of irritation to American right-wingers,
including Jewish right-wingers like the late Lucy Dawidowicz.
For the political center – on some level for all Americans – the Holocaust has become a moral reference point. As, over
the past generation, ethical and ideological divergence and disarray in the United States advanced to the point where
Americans could agree on nothing else, all could join together in deploring the Holocaust – a low moral consensus, but
perhaps better than none at all. (This banal consensus is indeed so broad that, in a backhanded way, it even includes that tiny
band of malicious or deluded fruitcakes who deny that the Holocaust took place. “If it happened,” they say in effect,
“we would deplore it as much as anyone else. But it didn’t, so the question doesn’t arise.”) And in the United States
the Holocaust is explicitly used for the purpose of national self-congratulation: the “Americanization” of the Holocaust has
involved using it to demonstrate the difference between the Old World and the new, and to celebrate, by showing its negation, the
American way of life.
The idea of “lessons of the Holocaust” seems to me dubious on several grounds, of which I’ll here mention only two. One might
be called, for lack of a better word, pedagogic. If there are, in fact, lessons to be drawn from history, the Holocaust would
seem an unlikely source, not because of its alleged uniqueness, but because of its extremity. Lessons for dealing
with the sorts of issues that confront us in ordinary life, public or private, or not likely to be found in this most
extraordinary of events. There are, in my view, more important lessons about how easily we become victimizers to
be drawn from the behavior of normal Americans in normal times than from the behavior of the SS in wartime. In any case,
the typical “confrontation” with the Holocaust for visitors to the American Holocaust museums, and in burgeoning curricula, does
not incline us toward thinking of ourselves as potential victimizers – rather the opposite. It is an article of faith in
these encounters that one should “identify with the victims,” thus acquiring the warm glow of virtue that such a
vicarious identification brings. (Handing our “victim identity cards” to museum visitors is the most dramatic example of this, but not the only
one.) And it is accepted as a matter of faith, beyond discussion, that the mere act of walking through a Holocaust museum, or viewing a
Holocaust movie, is going to be morally therapeutuic, that multiplying such encounters will make one a better person. The notion that lessons
derived from such encounters are likely to have any effect on everyday personal or political conduct seems to me extremely dubious on
pedagogic grounds. We appear to be following the principle Thomas de Quincey advanced in 1839: “If once a man indulges himself in murder,
very soon he comes to think of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and
procrastination.”
Another ground on which I find the lessons of the Holocaust questionable can be called pragmatic: what is the payoff? The principal lesson
of the Holocaust, it is frequently said, is not that it provides a set of maxims, or a rule book for conduct, but rather that it sensitizes
us to oppression and atrocity. In principle it might, and I don’t’ doubt that sometimes it does. But making it the benchmark of
oppression and atrocity works in precisely the opposite direction, trivializing crimes of lesser magnitude. It does this
not just in principle, but in practice. American debate on the bloody Bosnian conflict of the 1990s focused on whether what
was going on was “truly holocaustal or merely genocidal”; “truly genocidal or merely atrocious.” A truly disgusted and not
merely distasteful mode of speaking and of decision-making, but one we are led to when the Holocaust becomes the
touch-stone of moral and political discourse.
A/T: SCHMITT WAS A NAZI

( ) Schmitt’s actions during the Nazi-era do not agree with his politics and that the two
concepts should never overlap.
Thorup 06’
Mikkel Thorup, Associate Professor University of Copenhagen, “In Defense of Enmity- Critiques of Liberal
Globalism”. January 2006.
Carl Schmitt is both an enigmatic and controversial figure. One is often mandated an explanation and a
'democratic oath' of ideological distance, when dealing with his work. This is, so we are told, no innocent or
harmless preoccupation. Without rebuffing this as true and without ignoring the often well-founded critiques and
warnings, in the following we'll limit our comments on his commitments and actions during the Nazi-era to the
absolute minimum, concentrating on his critiques and conceptualizations. Hopefully, it is clear from the text,
that it doesn't share his politics and that the incorporation of his work in the overall critical theory of the
text is painstakingly alerted to the possible dangers lurking in his concepts. In the following, we'll zoom in
on a few key themes in his work useful for our further investigations. Instead of a systematic presentation
and discussion of Schmitt's thoughts, we'll present a more focused exploration highlighting features
and themes in his work not commonly discussed together. The main absence in this exploration is
his Nomos der Erde from 1950, which are fast becoming the main work of the Schmitt-reception. I've chosen
to disregard the work in order to concentrate on his numerous smaller pre-war and war writings on international
politics, which hasn't received quite the same amount of attention as the Nomos-book; and we'll se a bit closer
than usual on his concept(s) of enmity.
Schmitt’s record of pressure proves that he was a member of the Nazi Party
opportunistically.
Schmitt is properly criticized for having joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. But he clearly did so for
opportunistic reasons. Attempts to draw a straight line between his association with the Party and his writings of the
twenties and early thirties, when he was closely associated with the Catholic Center Party, a predecessor of the
Christian Democrats, ignore certain inconvenient facts. In 1931 and 1932, Schmitt urged Weimar president Paul
von Hindenburg to suppress the Nazi Party and to jail its leaders. He sharply opposed those in the Center
Party who thought the Nazis could be tamed if they were forced to form a coalition government. While an
authoritarian of the Right, who later had kind words about the caretaker regime of Franco, he never quite made
himself into a plausible Nazi. From 1935 on, the SS kept Schmitt under continuing surveillance.
***AFFIRMATIVE ANSWERS***
AFF: HUMAN RIGHTS GOOD
Human rights originate from the powerless. They are not an expropriation of a western
neo-liberal ideology but instead the only means by which to check its worst aspects.
Promoting human rights is crucial to limiting the authority of the state and preventing the
emergence of genocidal politics.
Michael Ignatieff April 4-7, 2000. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton Univ.
http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/Ignatieff_01.pdf
Progress may be a contested concept, but we make progress to the degree that we act upon the moral
intuition that Dr. Pannwitz was wrong: our species is one and each of the individuals who compose it is
entitled to equal moral consideration. Human rights is the language that systematically embodies this
intuition, and to the degree that this intuition gains influence over the conduct of individuals and states, we
can say that we are making moral progress. Richard Rorty’s definition of progress applies here: “an increase in our ability to
see more and more differences among people as morally irrelevant.”2 We think of the global diffusion of this idea as progress for two reasons:
because if we live by it, we treat more human beings as we would wish to be treated ourselves and in so doing help to reduce the amount of
unmerited cruelty and suffering in the world. Our grounds for believing that the spread of human rights represents
moral progress, in other words, are pragmatic and historical. We know from historical experience that when
human beings have defensible rights—when their agency as individuals is protected and enhanced—they
are less likely to be abused and oppressed. On these grounds, we count the diffusion of human rights
instruments as progress even if there remains an unconscionable gap between the instruments and the actual
practices of states charged to comply with them.
Calling the global diffusion of Western human rights a sign of moral progress may seem Eurocentric. Yet
the human rights instruments created after 1945 were not a triumphant expression of European imperial
self-confidence but a realization on European nihilism and its consequences, at the end of a catastrophic
world war in which European civilization very nearly destroyed itself. Human rights was a response to Dr.
Pannwitz, to the discovery of the abomination that could occur when the Westphalian state was accorded
unlimited sovereignty, when citizens of that state lacked criteria in international law that could oblige them to disobey legal but
immoral orders. The Universal Declaration represented a return by the European tradition to its natural law heritage, a return intended to
restore agency,to give individuals the juridical resources to stand up when the state ordered them to do wrong.
2. The Juridical, Advocacy, and Enforcement Revolutions
Historically speaking, the Universal Declaration is part of a wider reordering of the normative order of postwar international relations, de-
signed to create fire-walls against barbarism. The juridical revolution included the UN Charter of 1945, outlawing aggressive war between
states; the Genocide Convention of 1948, protecting religious, racial, and ethnic groups against extermination; the revision of the Geneva
Conventions of 1949, strengthening noncombatant immunity; and finally the international convention on asylum of 1951 to protect the rights
of refugees.
Before the Second World War, only states had rights in international law. With the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights of 1948, the rights of individuals received international legal recognition.3For the
S rst time, individuals—regardless of race, creed, gender, age, or any other status—were granted rights
that they could use to challenge unjust state law or oppressive customary practice.
The juridical revolution should not be seen apart from the struggle for self-determination and national independence among the colonies of Europe’s empires and,
just as important, the battle for full civil rights by black Americans, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1965.4The international rights revolution was not led by
states that already practiced what they preached. America and the European nations had not completed the juridical emancipation of their own citizens or subject
peoples. Indeed, many of the states that contributed to the drafting of the Universal Declaration saw no apparent contradiction between endorsing international
norms abroad and continuing oppression at home.
They thought that the Universal Declaration would remain a pious set of clichés more practiced in the breach than in the observance. Yet once articulated as
international norms, rights language ignited both the colonial revolutions abroad and the civil rights revolution at home.
Fifty years on, most modern states have ratiS ed the international human rights conventions and some countries have incorporated their rights and remedies into
the structure of their constitutions. The European Court of Human Rights, established in 1953, now affords citizens of European states the capacity to appeal
against injustices in civil and state administration to the European Court in Strasbourg.5European states, including Britain, now accept that decisions taken by their
courts or administrative bodies can be overturned by a human rights court independent of their national parliament and court systems.6
New nations seeking entry into the European Union accept that they must align their domestic law in accordance with the European Convention, even jettisoning
capital punishment, since it falls foul of European human rights standards.
In the developing world, ratifying international human rights covenants has become a condition of entry for
new states joining the family of nations. Even oppressive states feel obliged to engage in rhetorical deference
toward human rights instruments. While genuflection toward human rights is the homage that vice pays to virtue,
the fact that wicked regimes feel so obliged means that vice can now be shamed and even controlled in
ways that were unavailable before 1945.
The worldwide spread of human rights norms is often seen as a moral consequence of economic
globalization. The U.S. State Department’s annual report for 1999 on human rights practice around the world
describes human rights and democracy—along with “money and the Internet”—as one of the three universal
languages of globalization.7This implies too easily that human rights is a style of moral individualism that
has some elective affinity with the economic individualism of the global market, and that both advance hand in
hand. Actually, the relation between human rights and money, between moral and economic globalization, is
more antagonistic, as can be seen, for example, in the campaigns by human rights activists against the
labor and environmental practices of the large global corporations.8Human rights has gone global not
because it serves the interests of the powerful but primarily because it has advanced the interests of the powerless.
Human rights has gone global by going local, imbedding itself in the soil of cultures and world views
independent of the West, in order to sustain ordinary people’s struggles against unjust states and
oppressive social practices.
AFF: GENOCIDE ULTIMATE IMPACT
Genocide is the ultimate impact – it destroys cultural identity, making life and death
meaningless
Claudia Card 2003 – Hypatia. Vol 18, Iss. 1 2003 Genocide and Social Death
Yet such atrocities, it may be argued, are already war crimes, if conducted during wartime, and they can
otherwise or also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Why, then, add the specific crime of genocide?
What, if anything, is not already captured by laws that prohibit such things as the rape, enslavement, torture,
forced deportation, and the degradation of individuals? Is any ethically distinct harm done to members of the
targeted group that would not have been done had they been targeted simply as individuals rather than because of
their group membership? This is the question that I find central in arguing that genocide is not simply reducible
to mass death, to any of the other war crimes, or to the crimes against humanity just enumerated. I believe
the answer is affirmative: the harm is ethically distinct, although on the question of whether it is worse, I
wish only to question the assumption that it is not.
Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group
membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of the group.
When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may
even lose their intergenerational connections. To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may
become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass along and build
upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations (1982,
5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social death can
even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual, social
connections, and social contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's death
meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it
does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its
termination. This view, however, is controversial. [End Page 73]
AFF: HUMAN RIGHTS PROMO IN AFRICA GOOD

Need this
The henry F. Carey article from muse – human rights abuses product of postcolonialism -
obligation of colonial society to undo this damage.
Despite myriad challenges, a strong commitment to political negotiations and expanding

the human rights framework is critical to navigating through and mediating the conflicts
inherent in rights protections in Africa.
Anghie, 2K6
L.J. 447 p.L/N
Subsequent realities, of course, have proved these initially optimistic assessments of the new model of self-
determination to be unfounded. Ethnic conflict remains one of the major problems confronting the
international system. Far from undermining traditional [*463] cultural identities, the development state -
and perhaps globalization itself - has intensified them. The question then remains what sorts of protections
international law should provide to cultural minorities within the context of the sovereign nation-state.
Emerging norms of democratic governance and autonomy rights could be seen as attempts to address these
problems. Thus for example, it could be argued that if democracy became a reality in many countries, this would
ensure the participation of minorities in the political process and diminish ethnic tensions. But these norms leave
unresolved the issue of whether, for example, minorities should be given special political rights, such as the
right to autonomy, to make such participation effective. In the final analysis, perhaps, it is only through
political negotiation together with adherence to the basic principles of human rights that some sort of
settlement may be reached. Despite all these efforts, tragically, ethnic conflict is a powerful presence in
much of contemporary Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. International law continues to struggle with the
problem of how to deal with cultural differences within states, and how to mediate and settle the conflicts
between different national groups within the one state making competing claims to territory and sovereignty.
AFF: H.R./DEMO PROMO IN AFRICA GOOD

The introduction of inclusive liberal political pluralism in sub-Saharan has unequivocally
enabled the assertion of rights by silenced groups
Englund, 2K
Of all the reforms and innovations which the liberalisation of politics and economy in sub-Saharan Africa
has sought to achieve, one appears to have rooted itself in society with particular success. It is the willingness
and ability to claim rights. In most countries which experienced the 'second liberation ' in the early I ggos,
individuals and interest groups continue to feel entitled to assert themselves as bearers of rights, from the
most inclusive human rights to more specific group rights. The claims may be made in courts or in the other
arenas of the public sphere, such as the mass media, but the fact that they are made flies in the face of the
view that little has changed. The extent to which silence and the fear of persecution seem to have disappeared
from the public sphere may give pause to those who lament the poor prospects for the 'consolidation' of
democracy in Africa.' 'The assertions of rights -some vociferous, others more subtle -appear as the most
indisputable fruits of political pluralism.
AFF: PERMUTATION
The permutation solves best – within the context of Africa we should examine the critique
of liberal human rights movements but not at the expense of progressive reforms
Englund, 2K
A critical analysis of this proliferation of human rights projects among churches and NGOs should not be seen
as a criticism of the good intentions involved, nor of the tangible results they may yield (see Cammack &
Chirwa 1997). Clearly, if nothing more, civic education on human rights contributes to the pluralism that
most Malawians seemed to yearn for during the democratic transition. Yet, social analysts should also
examine the Malawian critiques of liberalism after the transition, rather than dismissing their concerns over
excessive ufulu (freedom) as needing more civic education (cf. Kanyongolo 1998).
.
The postmodern challenge to liberal humanism must be combined with a commitment to
the expansion of rights; the endpoint of the critique is the progressive transformation of
liberal politics which a totalizing rejection of rights discourse forecloses.
Woods, 97.
There is hope in this, because liberalism is sometimes forced into concessions and accommodations by its
own ideological rhetoric. The transformative power of ideology, often to the bafflement of its
promulgators, is a result of the attempt of the dispossessed to realize the promises of the rhetoric. 323 To
avoid this transformation, liberal political theory attempts to shape and narrow the permissible discourse by
[*524] compartmentalizing disciplines, sanitizing scholarship of political point of view, and emphasizing lifeless
abstractions. That its idealist vision of equal liberty has no basis in reality is beside the point of the discourse; that
its vision of justice as procedural equality advantages the powerful is the point. 324
Contemporary political theory is dominated by the Enlightenment themes which have been posited as universal.
325 Through the universalization of the central theme of rationality, "present and future inequalities were now
said to be merited inequalities, the consequences of the presumedly autonomous inner efforts of individuals." 326
Neutrality masks the fact that the unequal distribution of wealth and poverty, privilege and hopelessness is not
an aberration, but a fundamental and essential component of the market state; that Crossroads must exist, for it is
an integral part of the global economy; 327 that the impoverishment of the South is a requisite for the prosperity
of the North. 328
The obliteration of history is the chronic obsession of liberalism; in this way it is able to successfully characterize
historic injustices as too remote in time to be of significance. 329 "From the standpoint of individualism ... the
self is detachable from its social and historical roles and statuses." 330 We are therefore obliged to view history
through the filmy veil: as fantasy and myth, glorifications of the past and its progeny. 331 [*525]
But for me, growing up in New Orleans during the era of American apartheid, the interdependence of law
and history has never been merely an abstract concept. Facing the challenges of life today, in the second post-
Reconstruction era, 332 I have disavowed the myth of law as liberator. Yet, I embrace the postmodernist
challenge to liberalism's postulates, rejecting ahistorical neutrality, ideologically imposed limitations on
solutions, and the presumed illegitimacy of partisanship. 333 And I remain convinced that the discourse of
rights that has matured through these decades of struggle remains a powerful weapon in the hands of those
of us who, like Nelson Madiba Lakay, must yet set themselves free
AFF: LIBERALISM/ NEUTRALITY GOOD

Liberalism is neutral in its approach to facilitating the peaceful co-pursuit of conflicting
interests. The charge that it fails to be more neutral is not a feasible alternative.
Randy E. Barnett, Professor of Law at Georgetown, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law, 1998,
Oxford University Press, p.303-4
So for all these reasons, perhaps liberalism is not so neutral as between visions of the good as some pretend. Of
course, the liberal conception of justice and the rule of law can be said to be neutral towards the resulting shape of
society in the significant sense that one who favors it need not intend that society take one particular form or
another. Nor is the liberal conception of justice and the rule of law justified on the ground that it facilitates or
inhibits particular visions of the good. Whether a musical culture dominated by symphonies, rock, or Muzak (I leave
it to the reader to judge which is good and which is bad) results from the free choices of individuals and associations
is something about which liberalism has nothing to say. (That this degree of neutrality is itself objectionable is a
criticism I shall consider in the next section.) If neutrality is the willingness to accept any society that results from
the free choices of each of its members constrained by the boundaries established by rights, whether or not one
morally approves of them, then liberalism can be said to be genuinely neutral.
Moreover, the restrictions that the liberal conception of justice places on the means by which the good may be
pursued operate "neutrally" to restrict both the pursuit of some ends that may be morally reprehensible along with
some that may be morally praiseworthy. Those who believe that the good life requires them to have sexual
intercourse with unwilling partners are prohibited from doing so, just as are those who believe the good life requires
that they take from the rich to give to the poor. In this sense, even the restrictions that the liberal conception of
justice places on the pursuit of the good are neutral as to ends. It restricts any and all activities that require for their
exercise means that violate justice, regardless of the virtue of the ends.
These responses will scarcely satisfy the critic who will merely reply that although liberalism may appear neutral in
its form, some ends—whether aggregate or individual—are effectively prevented by the constraints justice and the
rule of law place on means by which ends may be achieved. Because this restriction on means may effectively
preclude the achievement of certain ends, liberalism in its substance is not truly neutral as to ends.
Yet I am not aware of any critic who makes this argument because he or she favors greater neutrality than is possible
within a liberal conception of justice. To the contrary, this objection is invariably made to reveal the alleged
hypocrisy of the liberal claim of neutrality and, thereby, to legitimate less neutrality than the liberal fusion of justice
and the rule of law would permit. In other words, this argument is used by those who wish to strip away liberalism's
allegedly false veneer of neutrality so as to permit the pursuit of a particular vision of the good that is barred by
liberalism. The aim is to permit the forcible imposition of some particular and decidedly nonneutral vision of either
personal or social life.
The charge of hypocrisy does not, therefore, take us very far. Given that those who criticize the genuine neutrality of
liberalism favor less rather than more neutrality, their objection fails to challenge the precise degree of neutrality
entailed by the liberal conception of justice. That is, since the critic offers no argument in favor of a more perfect
neutrality (something the critic rejects), it must be shown that something is wrong with the degree of neutrality
actually required by liberalism. The criticism that liberalism is not perfectly neutral, or neutral in every sense of the
word, in no way assists this inquiry.
Perhaps most importantly, any criticism of the precise degree of neutrality entailed by liberalism is particularly
difficult in light of the analysis presented in the previous chapters. Nowhere was neutrality presented as a desired
end of the liberal conception of justice and the rule of law. Neutrality has played no role in the analysis whatsoever.
Rather, some degree of neutrality towards visions of the good is an unavoidable consequence of adopting a
conception of justice and the rule of law that is needed to solve the pervasive problems of knowledge, interest, and
power. These problems require a conception of justice and the rule of law that places restrictions on the use of
certain means—for example, on force and fraud—but otherwise places no restrictions on ends. To this degree
then—no more, no less—the liberal conception is neutral as to the ends that can justly be pursued.
Those who claim that liberalism is "too much" because it excludes certain social or personal visions of the good
must show how these problems are to be addressed by any system that requires either more or less neutrality than
does the liberal fusion of justice and the rule of law. Assuming the social problems of knowledge, interest and,
especially, the problems of power must somehow be solved, the burden falls to the critic to show exactly how a
more or less neutral system can accomplish this. Perhaps it can be done. At least it would be an interesting debate.
My only point here is that simply accusing liberalism of being incompletely neutral does not satisfy this burden.
AFF: LIBERALISM GOOD/ ALT = TOTALITARIANISM

Illiberalism breeds totalitarianism and social conflict, as these philosophies lack the liberal
structures that incorporate tacit and local knowledge, harness self-interest for mutual
benefit, and tackle the problems of power.
Randy E. Barnett, Professor of Law at Georgetown, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law, 1998,
Oxford University Press, p.306-8
Indeed, without the liberal conception of justice the pursuit of a good society is hopeless. A well-functioning society
is a necessary precondition for achieving a good society; and adherence to the liberal fusion of justice and the rule of
law is a price that simply must be paid if we are to have a well-functioning society. Therefore, like it or not,
adherence to the liberal fusion of justice and the rule of law is the price that must be paid to achieve a good society
as well.
Let us be frank. The only alternative to pursuing virtue voluntarily within the framework provided by justice and the
rule of law is to enforce a morality of aspiration as we enforce a morality of duty. The analysis presented in this
book strongly suggests that any such attempt will ultimately undermine both projects—the medicine will be worse
than the disease. Those who favor imposing a morality of aspiration face intractable problems of knowledge,
interest, and power. They must somehow settle on the one right conception of “the good” to be enforced on all. They
must gather the information necessary to assess who is acting “well” and who is acting “badly.” They must solve the
problem of communicating knowledge of the good in advance of persons acting. The system they develop to make
these assessments must somehow avoid the problems of partiality and incentives. Perhaps most importantly, such a
system must also take seriously and somehow come to grips with the problems of enforcement error and abuse.
Hand waving won't do. We have seen how the twin problems of power are sufficiently grave to warrant some limits
on using power even to assure compliance with the liberal conception of justice that constitutes the morality of duty.
The problem of enforcement error is much greater with the far more situation-dependent judgment required by a
morality of aspiration.
Moreover, since people so often fail to live up to the demands of a morality of aspiration, the opportunity for making
erroneous judgments is greatly increased. Further, punishing bad behavior or coercively mandating good behavior
substantially raises the cost of enforcement error—witness the ghastly effects of alcohol or drug prohibition on those
3
whom these policies are purporting to help. Finally, the incompatibility of a morality of aspiration with either the
formal requirements of the rule of law or a decentralized legal order makes the risk of enforcement abuse simply
intolerable.
If we have learned nothing else from the millions of killings we have witnessed in the twentieth century we have
learned that the problems of power are only magnified when force is used to assure compliance with a vision of “the
good.” One purpose for recognizing and respecting rights is to avoid the occurrence of such devastations without
resorting to social experimentation. In this regard, the most important contribution of this book is the identification
of the social problems that are addressed by the liberal fusion of justice and the rule of law.
Those who reject this conception in favor of enforcing a morality of aspiration must take these pervasive social
problems seriously if they expect us to take seriously their proposed alternative. This is a task that few critics of
liberalism have been willing even to attempt. Critics of liberalism either ignore these problems altogether or describe
how they would deal with them in far too cursory a fashion. Yet neither theory nor historical experience gives us any
reason to suspect that a system that attempted to impose coercively a morality of aspiration upon everyone could
possibly handle the problems of knowledge, interest, and power.
If a morality of aspiration ought not be enforced by a coercive monopoly, then what kinds of institutions can
promote it voluntarily? In a society that rigorously adhered to the liberal conception of justice, the most important
institution for inculcating a morality of aspiration is the family. Given the knowledge that immediate family
members have of the facts of time and place, they seem uniquely qualified to handle this responsibility and also
uniquely interested as well. Although families may sometimes fail miserably at this task, we are speaking now of
comparative competence based on the knowledge that such a task requires. And when families fail, their failure is
compartmentalized—its breadth far more limited then when coercive regimes fail.
In addition, so-called “intermediate” institutions that have traditionally bridged the gap between individuals, their
families, and the larger community—schools, theaters, publishers, clubs, neighborhood groups, charities, religious
and fraternal groups, and other voluntary associations—all serve a vital function of developing and inculcating
values. As a practical matter, our values come not from coercion but from the exhortations and examples set by
countless individuals and groups. In a completely free society, all these institutions could pursue a morality of
aspiration unburdened by the forcible interference of third parties that is now made possible by the Single Power
Principle.
To some this all may sound a bit trite, even hackneyed. But it is no coincidence that totalitarian regimes invariably
strive to regulate, co-opt, subvert, and ultimately annihilate these institutions at every turn. And is it not exceedingly
odd that the same critics of liberalism who view the impact of “economic” choices in a market as powerful enough
to invariably obliterate any conception of a good society that stands in the way, at the same time so seriously
underestimate and deprecate the social institutions created by the free “moral” choices that liberalism also makes
possible? Perhaps there is an element of the expedient in such arguments.
Of course, there is no enforceable guarantee that such voluntary institutions will be “enough” to ensure that a
morality of aspiration will be achieved. But, as by now should be apparent, a system that uses a Single Power
Principle to impose a morality of aspiration offers no such guarantees either, or cannot honor any guarantees its
proponents may issue. Even an ideally wielded coercive monopoly of power is only as “good” as the persons
wielding the power. But power to coercively impose morality invariably corrupts those who wield it, and virtue is its
first victim.
Then there is the perennial question of which conception of the good will turn out to be mandated? What are the
chances that the “correct” one will be “guaranteed” by the coercive monopoly of power? Despite their denials,
advocates of imposing a particular morality of aspiration invariably assume that theirs will win out or that the
struggle will continue indefinitely, but what if the wrong morality is coercively imposed upon them instead? True, if
given a choice, most of us would want to see our moral vision prevail. But if they cannot get their own way, which
would most people prefer: the amorality of the liberal conception of justice or the immorality of their rivals? Given
the risks that, in a conflict among competing moralities, we will be subjected to someone else's morality, the liberal
conception of justice becomes nearly everyone's second-best outcome. And this turns out to be its greatest strength.
AFF: FRIEND/ENEMY = FASCISM
Basing politics in Friend-enemy relationship creates fascist relationships, refusing the

simple logic of friend-enemy generates a responsible politics.
Adorno 51’
Theodor Adorno 47., Minima Moralia, p. 131-132. 1951.
Muster. – Whoever is engaged in praxis, as it is called, is pursuing interests, is realizing plans, automatically turns
the human beings they come into contact with into friends and enemies. By looking at them as if deciding how
they fit into their intentions, one reduces them in advance, as it were, to objects: those ones are useful, the
others are not. Every divergent opinion appears to the reference-system of predetermined purposes,
without which no praxis could manage, as burdensome resistance, sabotage, intrigue; every agreement, even
if it came from the most despicable interest, turns into support, something of use, a testimony of alliance. Thus
impoverishment appears in relation to other human beings: the capacity to perceive the other as such and not as a
function of one’s own will, above all however that of fruitful opposition, the possibility of going beyond oneself
through the imbrication [Einbegreifen] of what contradicts, withers away. It is replaced by a judgmental
knowledge of human beings, for which even the best are ultimately the lesser evil, and the worst, are not
the greatest. This manner of reaction however, the schema of all administration and “personnel policy,”
already tends, before any political formation of will and commitment of exclusive political tickets, towards
fascism. Whoever has once made it their business to judge acceptability, views the person being judged, to
a certain extent out of technological necessity, as an insider or outsider, one of one’s own people or a
foreigner, accomplice or victim. The stiffly scrutinizing, ensorceled and ensorceling gaze, which is typical of all
leaders of horror, has its model in the appraising one of the manager, who tells the applicant to take a seat and
illuminating the latter’s face, so that it pitilessly disintegrates into the light of usefulness and the dark of what is
objectionable or unqualified. The end is the medical investigation, according to the alternatives: assignment in the
labor-force or liquidation. The New Testament sentence, “Whoever is not for me, is against me” was from time
immemorial spoken from the heart of anti-Semitism. It is a fundamental feature of domination, that everyone who
does not identify with such, is relegated for the sake of mere difference to the enemy camp: it is not for nothing
that Catholicism is merely the Greek word for the Latin totality, which the Nazis have realized. It means the
equalization of what is different, whether “deviation” or another race, with the enemy. Nazism has therein
achieved the historical consciousness of itself: Carl Schmitt defined the essence of the political precisely by
the categories of enemy and friend. Progress to such consciousness makes the regression to the child’s mode of
behavior – children either like things, or are afraid – to its own. The a priori reduction to the friend-enemy
relationship is one of the Ur-phenomena of recent anthropology. Freedom would not be choosing between
black and white, but stepping out of such a proscriptive choice.
AFF: HUMANISM GOOD/ ALT = EXTINCTION

Questioning humanistic values ensures the repitition of the holocaust and the annihilation
of the planet
Ketels 96’
Violet B. Ketels, associate professor of English at Temple University, where she formerly directed the Intellectual
Heritage Program, “REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word”.
November 1996.
Even though, as Americans, we have not experienced "by fire, hunger and the sword" 19 the terrible disasters
in war overtaking other human beings on their home ground, we know the consequences of human
hospitality to evil. We know about human perfidy: the chasm that separates proclaiming virtue from acting
decently. Even those of us trained to linguistic skepticism and the relativity of moral judgment can grasp the
verity in the stark warning, "If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere." 20 That the dreadful
something warned against continues to exist anywhere should fill us with an inextinguishable yearning to do
something. Our impotence to action against the brutality of mass slaughter shames us. We have the historical
record to ransack for precedent and corollaries--letters, documents, testaments, books--written words that
would even "preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death." 21 The truths
gleanable from the record of totalitarian barbarism cited in them may be common knowledge; they are by
no means commonly acknowledged. 22 They appear in print upon many a page; they have not yet--still not
yet--sufficiently penetrated human consciousness. Herein lies the supreme lesson for intellectuals, those who
have the projective power to grasp what is not yet evident to the general human consciousness: it is possible to
bring down totalitarian regimes either by violence or by a gradual transformation of human consciousness;
it is not possible to bring them down "if we ignore them, make excuses for them, yield to them or accept
their way of playing the game" 23 in order to avoid violence. The history of the gentle revolutions of Poland,
Hungary, and [*51] Czechoslovakia suggests that those revolutions would not have happened at all, and
certainly not bloodlessly, without the moral engagement and political activism of intellectuals in those besieged
cultures. Hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and peasants joined in the final efforts to defeat the
totalitarian regimes that collapsed in 1989. Still, it was the intellectuals, during decades when they repeatedly
risked careers, freedom, and their very lives, often in dangerous solitary challenges to power, who formed the
unifying consensus, developed the liberating philosophy, wrote the rallying cries, framed the politics, mobilized
the will and energies of disparate groups, and literally took to the streets to lead nonviolent protests that became
revolutions. The most profound insights into this process that gradually penetrated social consciousness
sufficiently to make revolution possible can be read in the role Vaclav Havel played before and during
Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. As George Steiner reflects, while "the mystery of creative and analytic
genius . . . is given to the very few," others can be "woken to its presence and exposed to its demands." 24 Havel
possesses that rare creative and analytic genius. We see it in the spaciousness of his moral vision for the future,
distilled from the crucible of personal suffering and observation; in his poet's ability to translate both experience
and vision into language that comes as close as possible to truth and survives translation across cultures; in the
compelling force of his personal heroism. Characteristically, Havel raises local experience to universal relevance.
"If today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival," he begins, "that hope lies chiefly in what we
understand as the human spirit." He continues: If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious
or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of
hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate
ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go desperately
hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in the global greenhouse
we are heating up for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the
ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we
cannot survive; if, in short, we don't wish any of this to happen, then we must--as humanity, as people, as
conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility--somehow come to our senses. 25 Somehow we
must come together in "a kind of general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and
spirit, human responsibility, human reason." 26
AFF: INTERNATIONAL LAW/ HUMAN RIGHTS NORMS GOOD
The liberating potential of the international human rights regime lies precisely in its
emptiness – the inability to ground international law leaves open the question of authority
preventing the emergence of totalizing “final solution” politics.
Orford 05’
Anne Orford, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne, 2005, German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 34-
37
To take a recent example, both the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the US military responses to those
attacks have been experienced by international lawyers, and by many others, as a reminder of that which cannot
be enclosed, of that which escapes the law.[9] In much international legal scholarship, Iraq stands for what
lies outside international law or beyond the UN Charter – a world in which international institutions have
proved unable to challenge the pragmatists of the new American empire, or proved incapable of acting as
the sovereign enforcer of the law. Yet this sense of a crisis of legal authority is not novel for international
law – rather, it pervades the discipline.[10] The inability to find a single authority to ground or guarantee the
wholeness of the law is a condition of late modernity. Most modern law works by burying the knowledge of this
lack at its foundation. For international lawyers, however, knowledge of this lack of ground for the law is
inescapable. There is no nation-state or ultimate sovereign that can act as a "guarantor of right,"[11] and
thus do away with the uneasiness or anxiety caused by an inability to ground international law.
International lawyers are thus always "before the law" in the sense that Derrida describes – in the "situation both
ordinary and terrible of the man who cannot manage to see or above all to touch, to catch up to the law."[12] Yet
to paraphrase Derrida, this is not necessarily bad news.[13] The persistent crisis of authority experienced by
international law is at the heart of the relation that the tradition "maintains with itself, with the archive of
its own demon."[14] International law preserves within it the recognition of the open question of authority
that confronted European international lawyers attempting to manage state formation, modernization and
imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary international legal debates
about the use of force, human rights, terrorism and development are sites where the emptiness that founds
the modern relationship to authority and law is again encountered. Perhaps this is one of the functions of
international law as a discipline. A question, and a silence about its answer, is transferred through the constitution
and inheritance of the discipline of international law. This secret is transferred across generations because
there is something "better left asleep" here,[15] that which calls up the legal responses justifying the wars
on terror as defensive self-preservation. Often international law responds to the sense of a lack of mastery over
its subject matter by acting out, attempting to reassert sovereign control or imagining itself on a journey towards
the creation of a powerful world community. However, in reading critical histories of international law, we find
moments when international law manages to live with this unresolved, and unresolvable, crisis of authority.[16]
At such moments, it may be best able to avoid the temptation to secure the grounds of law through a final
solution in which those who are believed to threaten the health, security, emotional well-being or morality
of the international community are violently sacrificed for the good of the whole.
AFF: RESPONSIBILITY TO “OTHER” GOOD

Our responsibility to the Other is the foundation of subjectivity, preceding questions of
ontology– responsibility to the Other transcends all other impacts and obligations.
Pinchevski 01’
Amit Pinchevski, PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University, Montreal,
Diacritics 31.2, Summer 2001, p. 77
In order to reencounter the Other's side of the freedom to speak, it is necessary to recognize that the ontological
structure of being-with is precisely what overshadows the Other's side of this practice. Levinas's contention is
radical: one is first in relation with the Other and only later a self. Subjectivity is essentially response-able,
or as Buber contends, the first word one says is "You" rather than "Me." The Other appears before the
rise of the self, before its history, before the self is its own- the Other is "prehistori- cal," before the origin of
the self. And before here does not merely refer to temporality. As Richard Cohen suggests, this ethical
relation is better than being, better than ontology [8], better because it does not meet social structures,
power, calculations, and reason on the same plane; it transcends and precedes them. The culs-de-sac to
which the ontological situation of being-with the Other leads confront one with the realization that ethical
relation comes before knowledge of what is: "The grounds for ethics cannot be found in the self's being; neither
can they be found in the self's knowledge . . . [ethics] is secondary to nothing: neither to being, nor to the
knowledge of being. It resides before and outside them" [Bauman, Effacing the Face 161. I am therefore always
already in communication with the Other; I am concerned with the Other before I am concerned with myself, I
am a tympanum before I am a speaker, I am for-the-Other before I am for-myself. Thus, subjectivity is ethical:
I am responsible not despite the fact that I have emerged as a self, but because I am a self. Responsibility
for the Other- always as the ability to respond to his or her call-is the fundamental structure of sub-
jectivity. Ethics comes second to nothing, not even to freedom, for I cannot will the freedom of the Other
from my own freedom. If ethics, as described by Levinas, is indeed "First Philosophy," I am first responsible
and only later free: The freedom of another could never begin in my ffeedom, that is, abide in the same present,
be contemporary, be representable to me. The responsibility for the other cannot have begun with my
commitment, in my decision. The unlimited responsibility in which I jnd myself comes from the hither side of my
freedom, from a "prior to every memory." . . .The responsibility for the other is the null-site of subjectivity,
where the privilege of the question "WhereP" no longer holds. The time of the said and of essence there lets the
pre-original saying be heard, answers to transcendence. [OBBE 101 The realm of ethical discourse is in
the~for-the-Other,in a realm beyond ontology, from which discourse reaches out to the Other. The realm of
being for-the-Other is where speech breaks from its Ulyssian circle-it does not return to its origin; instead, it
leaves its sender and is forbidden from returning and reinstating it. Speech here is already a response, an address
free from rhetoric: it unfolds itself for-the-Other, and regardless of the actual content delivered, its first word is
"Welcome."
AFF: SCHMITT WAS A NAZI

Schmitts Nazism is at the root of his work- you cannot condone his philosophy without
accepting his position in the Holocaust.
Peter C. Caldwell, Professor of History and Slavic Studies @ Rice University, “Foreword: Carl Schmitt and the
Jews,” May 22, 2007
German jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) significantly influenced Western political and legal
thinking in the last century, yet his life and work have also stirred considerable controversy. While his ideas have
been used and diffused by prominent philosophers on both the left and the right, such as Jürgen Habermas and Leo
Strauss, his Nazi-era past, especially his active efforts to remove Jewish influence from German law, has cast a
cloud over his life and oeuvre. Still, his many supporters have generally been successful in claiming that
Schmitt's was an "antisemitism of opportunity," a temporary affectation to gain favor with the Nazis.
In Carl Schmitt and the Jews, available in English for the first time, historian Raphael Gross vigorously repudiates
this "opportunism thesis." Through a reading of Schmitt's corpus, some of which became available only after
his death, Gross highlights the importance of the "Jewish Question" on the breadth of Schmitt's work.
According to Gross, Schmitt's antisemitism was at the core of his work—before, during, and after the Nazi era.
His influential polarities of "friend and foe," "law and nomos," "behemoth and Leviathan," and "ketechon and
Antichrist" emerge from a conceptual template in which "the Jew" is defined as adversary, undermining the
Christian order with secularization. The presence of this template at the heart of Schmitt's work, Gross
contends, calls for a major reassessment of Schmitt's role within contemporary cultural and legal theory.
"No one interested in Carl Schmitt can afford to ignore Raphael Gross's powerful discussion of how intimately
linked were Schmitt's anti-Semitism and his political theory. Gross persuasively argues that Schmitt's post 1933
writings on the "Jewish" origins of universalism and positivism had a central importance for both Nazi aims and his
work as a whole. A new Afterword demonstrates that Gross's work has elicited a broad discussion and inserts his
own moral and intellectual voice into contemporary debates."—Anson Rabinback, Princeton University
"Gross's study not only documents, analyzes, and highlights Schmitt's anti-Semitism, but also demonstrates in
great and nuanced detail how his anti-Jewish attitudes permeated the very structure and grounds of
Schmitt's thought and categories."—Steven E. Aschheim, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

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Gonzaga Debate Institute 2007 1

THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL HUMANISM

LINKS: “THE OTHER”

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (1/5)

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (2/5)

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (3/5)

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (4/5)

The question of intervention exposes the impossibility of neutrality in enforcing liberal

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS (5/5)

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS/ UNIVERSALITY

LINKS: AFRICA: HUMAN RIGHTS/ AID

LINKS: AFRICA: INT’L HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO

LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM

LINKS: AFRICA: MODERNIZATION

LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM/ DEMO/ “NEUTRALITY” (1/3)

LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM/ DEMO/ “NEUTRALITY” (2/3)

LINKS: AFRICA: LIBERALISM/ DEMO/ “NEUTRALITY” (3/3)

LINKS: AFRICA: SELF-DETERMINATION

LINKS: AID/ CHARITY

LINKS: PUBLIC HEALTH/ DISEASE ADVS

LINKS: PUBLIC HEALTH/ DISEASE ADVS

LINKS: HIV/AIDS TREATMENT

The anti-FGM movement is marked by utter intolerance and an emphasis on eliminating

LINKS: WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1/2)

LINKS: WOMEN’S RIGHTS (2/2)

LINKS: EQUALITY/ RACE

LINKS/ CASE TURN: GENOCIDE PREVENTION/ MONITORING (1/2)

LINKS/ CASE TURN: GENOCIDE PREVENTION/ MONITORING (2/2)

LINKS: “FIXING” INDECENT SOCIETIES

LINKS: INTERNATIONAL LAW

LINKS: INTERNATIONAL LAW/ H.R. NORMS

LINKS: HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO/ COSMOPOLITANISM (1/3)

LINKS: HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO/ COSMOPOLITANISM (2/3)

Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan democracy

LINKS: HUMAN RIGHTS/ DEMO/ COSMOPOLITANISM (3/3)

American expansionism is an insidious political theology designed codified in the Monroe

American hegemony attempts to create an impossibly total inclusion, making exclusions

American hegemony creates invisible exclusions and constructs threats to it as enemies of

LINKS: HEGEMONY/ TRADE

LINKS: GLOBALIZATION (1/2)

LINKS: GLOBALIZATION (2/2)

HUMAN RIGHTS/ LIBERALISM BAD

( ) By creating a rubric of human rights violations, we are imposing the very

HUMAN RIGHTS NOT = HUMAN DIGNITY

IMPACTS: INVISIBLE EXCLUSIONS = TOTAL WAR/ ENMITY GOOD

IMPACTS: CAN’T SOLVE/ NORMS ARE EMPTY

IMPACTS: VALUE TO LIFE

ALT SOLVENCY: BETTER CONFIGURATION OF RIGHTS

ALT SOLVES VIOLENCE

A/T: PERMUTATION (1/2)

A/T: PERMUTATION (2/2)

A/T: WHAT ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

A/T: SCHMITT WAS A NAZI

AFF: HUMAN RIGHTS GOOD

AFF: GENOCIDE ULTIMATE IMPACT

AFF: HUMAN RIGHTS PROMO IN AFRICA GOOD

Despite myriad challenges, a strong commitment to political negotiations and expanding

AFF: H.R./DEMO PROMO IN AFRICA GOOD

AFF: LIBERALISM/ NEUTRALITY GOOD

AFF: LIBERALISM GOOD/ ALT = TOTALITARIANISM

AFF: FRIEND/ENEMY = FASCISM

Basing politics in Friend-enemy relationship creates fascist relationships, refusing the

AFF: HUMANISM GOOD/ ALT = EXTINCTION

AFF: INTERNATIONAL LAW/ HUMAN RIGHTS NORMS GOOD