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The apocalyptic framing of climate change results in fatalism – makes all their impacts inevitableCrist 7   (Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech University; 2007, “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos, Volume 141, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 53-)In fatalistic thinking, the trajectory of industrial-consumer civilization appears set on tracks that humanity cannot desert without derailing; it is implied that while the specifics of the future may elude us, in broad outline it is (for better or for worse) a fixed direction of more of the same. Fatalism projects the course of human history (and concomitantly of natural history) as the inevitable unfolding of the momentum of present trends. By virtue of the inertia that massive forces display, from a fatalistic viewpoint, 66 present patterns of global economic expansion, consumption increase , population growth, conversion and exploitation of the land, killing of wildlife, extinction of species , chemical contamination, depletion of oceans, and so on, will more or less keep unfolding. 67 We glimpse here what Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind when they pointed out that “logical necessity...remains tied to domination, as both its reflection and its tool.” 68 Indeed fatalism is a mind-set that strengthens the trends that generate it by fostering compliance to those very trends . The compliance that fatalism effects is invisible to the fatalistic thinker, who does not regard him or herself as a conformist, but simply as a realist. 69 But the conceptual and pragmatic fortification of the socioeconomic establishment by fatalistic reasoning is incontestable, arising as an effect cognate to what is called “positive feedback” in cybernetics, 70 “looping action” in philosophy, 71 and “ self-fulfilling prophesy ” in sociology. 72 The complicity of fatalism in sustaining the dominance of industrial consumer civilization merits close scrutiny: fatalism may be the most potent form of ideology in existence. Ideology, as Jürgen Habermas succinctly recaptured the concept, “serves to impede making the foundations of society the object of thought and reflection.” 73 The declaration that we live in the Anthropocene (to stay with this key example) has the ideological effect of discouraging deep questioning and dismissing even discussion of revolutionary action. Rather, we are indirectly advised, our fate is to live our days in the “Age of Modern Man,” within which we must manage ourselves and the world as best we can. Further, the narrow and technical conception of climate change as “the problem” is beholden to the same fatalistic mind-set. The real problem —the industrial-consumer complex that is overhauling the world in an orgy of exploitation, overproduction, and waste—is treated with kid gloves , taken as given, and regarded as beyond the reaches of effective challenge. But this civilization is not beyond the reaches of radical action—and it is certainly not beyond the reaches of radical critique. 74 If the price of “think[ing] in terms of alternatives to the dominant order [is to] risk exclusion from polite intellectual society,” as social theorist Joel Kovel observes about our times, then let us pay the price while preserving our clarity about the unredeemable socioeconomic reality in which we live. 75

Environmental apocalypticism causes eco-authoritarianism and mass violence against those deemed environmental threats – also causes political apathy which turns caseBuell 3 (Frederick Buell, cultural critic on the environmental crisis and a Professor of English at Queens College and the author of five books; “From Apocalypse To Way of Life,” pg. 185-186)Looked at critically, then, crisis discourse thus suffers from a number of liabilities. First, it seems to have become a political liability almost as much as an asset. It calls up a fierce and effective opposition with its predictions; worse, its more specific predictions are all too vulnerable to refutation by events . It also exposes environmentalists to being called grim doomsters and antilife Puritan extremists. Further, concern with crisis has all too often tempted people to try to find a “ total solution ” to the problems involved— a phrase that, as an astute analyst of the limitations of crisis discourse, John Barry, puts it, is all too reminiscent of the Third Reich’s infamous “ final solution .”55 A total crisis of society— environmental crisis at its gravest— threatens to translate despair into inhumanist

authoritarianism; more often, however, it helps keep merely dysfunctional authority in place. It thus leads, Barry suggests, to the belief that only elite - and expert-led solutions are possible .56 At the same time it depoliticizes people , inducing them to accept their impotence as individuals; this is something that has made many people today feel, ironically and/or passively, that since it makes no difference at all what any individual does on his or her own, one might as well go along with it. Yet another pitfall for the full and sustained elaboration of environmental crisis is, though least discussed, perhaps the most deeply ironic. A problem with deep cultural and psychological as well as social effects, it is embodied in a startlingly simple proposition: the worse one feels environmental crisis is, the more one is tempted to turn one’s back on the environment. This means, preeminently, turning one’s back on “nature”—on traditions of nature feeling, traditions of knowledge about nature (ones that range from organic farming techniques to the different departments of ecological science), and traditions of nature-based activism. If nature is thoroughly wrecked these days, people need to delink from nature and live in postnature—a conclusion that, as the next chapter shows, many in U.S. society drew at the end of the millenium. Explorations of how deeply “nature” has been wounded and how intensely vulnerable to and dependent on human actions it is can thus lead, ironically, to further indifference to nature- based environmental issues, not greater concern with them . But what quickly becomes evident to any reflective consideration of the difficulties of crisis discourse is that all of these liabilities are in fact bound tightly up with one specific notion of environmental crisis—with 1960s- and 1970s-style environmental apocalypticism. Excessive concern about them does not recognize that crisis discourse as a whole has significantly changed since the 1970s. They remain inducements to look away from serious reflection on environmental crisis only if one does not explore how environmental crisis has turned of late from apocalypse to dwelling place. The apocalyptic mode had a number of prominent features: it was preoccupied with running out and running into walls; with scarcity and with the imminent rupture of limits; with actions that promised and temporally predicted imminent total meltdown; and with (often, though not always) the need for immediate “ total solution .” Thus doomsterism was its reigning mode ; eco-authoritarianism was a grave temptation ; and as crisis was elaborated to show more and more severe deformations of nature, temptation increased to refute it, or give up, or even cut off ties to clearly terminal “nature.”

Their war discourse manifests itself in a drive for certainty which causes endless violenceBurke, 7 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales at Sydney, Anthony, Johns Hopkins University Press, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Project Muse)This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid

metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic , one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state ). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use , control and destruction , and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end , an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique,

immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon , like tomorrow's sunrise.' The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being , means, events and decisions into a single , unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined . As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war . This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state. This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror' Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth . However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped? How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time , and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political.

The alternative is to deterritorialize the 1AC through a historical and critical lens – rather than objectively approaching their threat discourse, we choose more diverse forms of analysisKrause and Williams 97 (Keith Krause, professor of political science at the Graduate Institute on International and Development Studies, Michael C Williams, professor of international relations at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, “From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies,” chapter 2 of Critical Security Studies, p 49-50)

The challenges to the conventional understanding of security and the object to be secured also necessitate an epistemological shift in the way security is to be understood and studied. What is involved is a shift in focus from abstract individualism and contractual sovereignty to a stress on culture, civilization, and identity; the role of ideas, norms, and values in the constitution of that which is to be secured; and the historical context within which this process takes place. Epistemologically, this involves moving away from the objectivist, rationalist approach of both neorealism and neoliberalism, and toward more interpretive modes of analysis. While these issues have gained some prominence in debates over the nature of regime theory and the study of international organizations, they have made little impact on security studies.51 This is clearly illustrated by Helga Haftendorn’s attempts to broaden the ambit of security studies. On method, she concludes that the goal of security studies is “to construct an empirically testable paradigm,” which involves defining the “set of observational hypotheses,” the “hard core of irrefutable assumptions,” and the “‘set of scope conditions’ that…are required for a ‘progressive’ research program.” Although she admits that “we might do well to follow [Robert] Keohane’s counsel to apply somewhat ‘softer,’ more interpretive standards,” there is little room in this approach for studying norm change and the role of ideational elements in constituting the historical context within which actors take specific decisions.52 Despite Haftendorn’s goal of incorporating new issues that are normatively driven, the subordination of normative and reflexive conceptions of agency to objectivist visions of method

remains largely undisturbed, and she remains committed to the fact value distinction. To understand security from a broader perspective means to look at the ways in which the objects to be secured, the perceptions of threats to them, and the available means of securing them (both intellectual and material) have shifted over time .53 New threats emerge ; new enemies are created ; erstwhile fellow citizens become objects of hatred and violence; former enemies can be transformed into members of the same community. The status of Others is uncertain , needing to be deciphered and determined.54 To comprehend these processes requires an understanding of the problematics of security as constituted by self-reflexive historical practices . The knightly code of honor, for example, was both a central structuring practice of latemedieval conflict and a central object that was to be secured. Honor was an integral part of conflict in its genesis as well as its practice. To view the military conflict of the late-medieval world as a competition between instrumentally rational actors in the modern sense is to misunderstand it in both form and content.55 The shift to interpretive models of understanding (broadly conceived) also yields a different vision of the transformation of practices. As historically grounded, the practices of security become capable of conscious transformation through the process of critical reflection. No longer objective in the sense of a fixed reality that the analyst can only mirror, reality as the realm of subjective practices and structures becomes self-reflexive . This is most emphatically not to say that security studies needs to move away from studying the role of ideas, institutions, and instruments of organized violence in political life. In this respect, the continuing defenders of traditional strategic/security studies are correct (although this formulation will probably leave them uncomfortable). But if we are to understand these realities, we must take them more seriously than the abstractions of neorealism allow. We must grasp the genesis and structure of particular security problems as grounded in concrete historical conditions and practices, rather than in abstract assertions of transcendental rational actors and scientific methods. We must understand the genesis of conflicts and the creation of the dilemmas of security as grounded in reflexive practices rather than as the outcome of timeless structures.56

Every affirmation is fundamentally a decision and an affirmation of a particular interpretation of what it means to decide – their attempt to elevate their particular method of decision to the status of metaphysics links to all of our offense and begs the question of their justification for exclusionDillon 99 (Michael Dillon, professor of international relations at the University of Lancaster, PhD in philosophy, April 1999, “Another Justice,” published in Political Theory Volume 27 Number 2, page 157-8)I wish to argue, in addition, that the condition of being-in-between is exemplified by the 'inter' of another international relations. Especially in the proximity of the Refugee, for example, there is an explicit manifestation of the advent of the claim of Justice. The traditional intersubjectivity of international relations defaults, through the way in which the advent of the Refugee always calls to presence the stranger in the self itself, into the intra of a plural and divided self. The figure of the sovereign subject so integral to traditional international thought falsely poses the key questions of the self, of origination and of Justice. There can be no sovereign point of departure . The law is always born from a broken law , justice from the absence of Justice. There is always a co-presence of the other in the same ; such that every self is a hybrid. The origin, if it is to issue forth in anything, therefore, must always already come divided and incomplete. The advent of Justice and the possibility of politics arise only because that plethos is ineradicable. There is then no sovereign subject . The self is a divided self from a beginning that is itself incomplete. It is only by virtue of that very division, that very incompleteness, that the question of justice arises at all. Thought of another Justice is therefore a continuous displacement of normal justice, a radical discomfort to it. But I have first to note how normal justice understands its place before considering the taking place of Justice differently. At its simplest the normal model of justice-sometimes known as the distributive model-notes that any society is governed by rules.9 Normal models differ, however, according to how they account for the derivation of those rules, what those rules define as just and unjust, and who or what is empowered by them to make, execute, and interpret the law. The most basic of these rules establish the status and entitlements of those who belong to the community . Correspondingly, these rules also specify who is a stranger, outsider, or alien, and they sometimes make provision for how the alien is to be dealt with should she or he appear at, or cross, the threshold of the community. This, in its crudest terms, is distributive justice. The laws , which it specifies, establish a regime of justice that expresses the ethical beliefs and commitments of that community . More than that, they inaugurate them. Each juridical decision is in some way, great or small, a communal rededication of those beliefs . The law , then, does not

merely make a decision or enact a will. It reinaugurates a sense of what it is to have a will and make a decision in that community, as well as to what ends and purposes these may be devoted.10 Such law has to come from somewhere. An official narrative of one form or another supports how the community came to have the law which it does , together with the means and manner by which it is to be interpreted and exercised. That narrative explains both the origins of the law and the way in which it has been handed down. God and covenants, immemorial traditions and social contracts are amongst the most favoured of these. Divine inspiration, the dictates of reason, or a common sense are then said to furnish the law with the secure foundation it is thought to require. Injustice for the normal model, it further follows, is a function of sin, or the breakdown of reason, or the failure to attend to the dictates of common sense. One way or another, each of these ruptures tends to be blamed upon the irruption of irregular passions and desires which the law was inaugurated to limit and control as the means of determining and dispensing justice in the first place. Injustice for the normal model, in short, is the abnormal which effects a breach in the very paternity of the law itself. It is what the normal model claims to keep at bay as distributive justice orders the affairs of the community. All thought of justice and politics must , of course, pass through thought . How could it be otherwise? We think justice in the way that we do because of the various forms through which it is established and distributed. We also think justice in the way that we do because of the way that we think. The thought of another Justice is necessarily dependent therefore upon a way of thinking other than that which has historically come to govern our diverse onto-theological traditions of justice . That other way of thinking has continuously to be contrasted with the thought that underlies distributive justice, so that the characteristic features of another Justice may be differentiated from those of the normal model. Two of the key points of difference concern the interpretation of Time and the interpretation of the Human. Each of these derives from what I call the return of the ontological in continental thought.

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A. Interpretation – engagement is a strategy depending on positive incentives which seeks to shape the behavior of a target countryHaass & O’Sullivan, 2000 – *Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution AND *Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, (Richard N & Meghan L., “Terms of engagement: alternatives to punitive policies,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 113–35, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1093/survival/42.2.113#preview)The term ‘engagement’ was popularised in the early 1980s amid controversy about the Reagan administration’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards South Africa. However, the term itself remains a source of confusion. Except in the few instances where the US has sought to isolate a regime or country, America arguably ‘engages’ states and actors all the time simply by interacting with them. To be a meaningful subject of analysis , the term ‘ engagement’ must refer to something more specific than a policy of ‘ non-isolation’ . As used in this article, ‘ engagement’ refers to a foreign-policy strategy which depends to a significant degree on positive incentives to achieve its objectives . Certainly, it does not preclude the simultaneous use of other foreign-policy instruments such as sanctions or military force: in practice, there is often considerable overlap of strategies, particularly when the termination or lifting of sanctions is used as a positive inducement. Yet the distinguishing feature of American engagement strategies is their reliance on the extension or provision of incentives to shape the behaviour of countries with which the US has important disagreements.

That means the plan must be a quid-pro-quoDe LaHunt, 6 – Assistant Director for Environmental Health & Safety Services in Colorado College's Facilities Services department (John, “Perverse and unintended” Journal of Chemical Health and Safety, July-August, Science Direct)Incentives work on a quid pro quo basis – this for that. If you change your behavior, I’ll give you a reward . One could say that coercion is an incentive program – do as I say and I’ll let you live. However, I define an incentive as getting something you didn’t have before in exchange for new behavior, so that pretty much puts coercion in its own box, one separate from incentives. But fundamental problems plague the incentive approach. Like coercion, incentives are poor motivators in the long run, for at least two reasons – unintended consequences and perverse incentives.

B. The affirmative is not a QPQ – it unconditionally increases financing for advanced biofuels

C. Vote negative

1. Predictable limits – functionally narrows the topic because few cases can defend conditioning – otherwise the neg has to defend against hundreds of tiny aid affs

2. Ground – ensures topic generics including topic country politics DAs, unconditional CPs, and critiques of conditions

Ex-Im

Discourse instigating global action on climate change obfuscates local politics – it depoliticizes the subject in the name of global solutions that forestall the productive forces of locality - means the debate is key - we aren't technocratic elitesCarvalho 10Anabela Carvalho, Departamento deCiências da Comunicação, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 9 FEB 2010, "Media(ted)discourses and climate change: a focus on political subjectivity and (dis)engagement" 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Volume 1, Issue 2, pages 172–179, March/April 2010

A large part of mainstream media stories about climate change are set in the context of high-profile intergovernmental meetings and advance the notion that the global is the appropriate political space for action. A study of the volume of print media coverage at a series of key moments since 1990 in Portugal has shown that the peaks coincided with international summits; in contrast, key national events, such as the public presentation of the Portuguese Climate Change Plan in 2001 and the presentation of the Portuguese Plan of Allocation of Emissions Allowances in 2004, received little media attention. Content analysis and discourse analysis of articles has also shown a disproportional representation of international politics, and that the media often (implicitly) constituted the global into the appropriate locus of action.55 Similarly, Olausson56 has maintained that mitigation was mainly represented as a transnational responsibility in Swedish media. Sampei and Aoyagi-Usui's5 analysis of newspaper coverage in Japan made visible that most peaks coincided with high-status international summits (national events only achieved significant attention when they were associated with media-oriented campaigns).Although this can partly be expected, given the relevance of international negotiations for the management of climate change, it can also be argued that the national and the local are the right levels to act. Yet, sustained analysis of the possibilities for local policy-making on climate change features only rarely in the mainstream media . Hence, while climate change may be represented as a tragic threat, debate on the climate impacts of a new road or a new housing development does not necessarily take place in a meaningful way. There is an apparent disconnect between climate change and specific sources of greenhouse gas emissions and between the global and local scales .It is likely that this has influenced perceptions and ideas about the scale of climate change. Multiple surveys show that people tend to rank climate change higher as a problem for the world than as a problem for their own country or region.5, 57 Furthermore, by constructing climate change primarily as a global political issue, these discourses construct citizen agency as minute. Citizens are likely to feel powerless to affect processes and decisions at the global level. Such a setting emphasizes the distance between ordinary citizens and decision-making and reinforces the image of climate politics as being reserved to the heads of the most powerful states. As the management of climate change is, in most mediated discourses, the realm of (scientific and political) elites, citizens are constituted into spectators or bystanders.fPerceptions of the politics of climate change and of one's roles therein are also inexorably intertwined with wider discourses on ‘ globalization’ . Policy-makers, international organizations, and—most obviously—corporations have been representing the ‘mobility’ of capital and production across the world as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ processes.58 This construction of globalization , which is left unquestioned by many of the mainstream media, omits responsibility for particular choices and leaves no scope for citizen participation and informed deliberation .

Adaptation solves the extinction impactNIPCC 11 Archived 8 March, Surviving the Unprecedented Climate Change of the IPCC, http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/mar/8mar2011a5.html(Citing: Willis, K.J., Bennett, K.D., Bhagwat, S.A. and Birks, H.J.B. 2010. 4°C and beyond: what did this mean for biodiversity in the past? Systematics and Biodiversity 8: 3-9.)

In a paper published in Systematics and Biodiversity, Willis et al. (2010) consider the IPCC (2007) "predicted climatic changes for the next century" -- i.e., their contentions that "global temperatures will increase by 2-4°C and possibly beyond, sea levels will rise (~1 m ± 0.5 m), and atmospheric CO2 will increase by up to 1000 ppm" -- noting that it is "widely suggested that the magnitude and rate of these changes will result in many plants and animals going extinct," citing studies that suggest that "within the next century, over 35% of some biota will have gone extinct (Thomas et al., 2004; Solomon et al., 2007) and there will be extensive die-back of the tropical rainforest due to climate change (e.g. Huntingford et al., 2008)." On the other hand, they indicate that some biologists and climatologists have pointed out that "many of the predicted increases in climate have happened before, in terms of both magnitude and rate of change (e.g. Royer, 2008; Zachos et al., 2008), and yet biotic communities have remained remarkably resilient (Mayle and Power, 2008) and in some cases thrived (Svenning and Condit, 2008)." But they report that those who mention these things are often "placed in the 'climate-change denier' category," although the purpose for pointing out these facts is simply to present "a sound scientific basis for understanding biotic responses to the magnitudes and rates of climate change predicted for the future through using the vast data resource that we can exploit in fossil records." Going on to do just that, Willis et al. focus on "intervals in time in the fossil record when atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased up to 1200 ppm, temperatures in mid- to high-latitudes increased by greater than 4°C within 60 years, and sea levels rose by up to 3 m higher than present," describing studies of past biotic responses that indicate "the scale and impact of the magnitude and rate of such climate changes on biodiversity." And what emerges from those studies, as they describe it, "is evidence for rapid community turnover, migrations, development of novel ecosystems and thresholds from one stable ecosystem state to another." And, most importantly in this regard, they report "there is very little evidence for broad-scale extinctions due to a warming world." In concluding, the Norwegian, Swedish and UK researchers say that "based on such evidence we urge some caution in assuming broad-scale extinctions of species will occur due solely to climate changes of the magnitude and rate predicted for the next century," reiterating that "the fossil record indicates remarkable biotic resilience to wide amplitude fluctuations in climate."

Representations of China as a threat ignore the normative value-judgments inherent to the process of claiming to empirically know Chinese national and political identity—this makes security threats self-fulfilling propheciesPan 4 – PhD in Political Science and International Relations and member of the International Studies Association ISA (Chengxin Pan: “The "China threat" in American self-imagination: the discursive construction of other as power politics”, Alternatives RC)

China and its relationship with the United States has long been a fascinating subject of study in the mainstream U.S. international relations community. This is reflected, for example, in the current heated debates over whether China is primarily a strategic threat to or a market bonanza for the United States and whether containment or engagement is the best way to deal with it. (1) While U.S. China scholars argue fiercely over "what China precisely is," their debates have been underpinned by some common ground, especially in terms of a positivist epistemology. Firstly, they believe that China is ultimately a knowable object, whose reality can be, and ought to be, empirically revealed by scientific means. For example, after expressing his dissatisfaction with often conflicting Western perceptions of China, David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, suggests that "it is time to step back and look at where China is today, where it might be going, and what consequences that direction will hold for the rest of the world." (2) Like many other China scholars, Lampton views his object of study as essentially "something we can stand back from and observe with clinical detachment." (3) Secondly, associated with the first assumption, it is commonly believed that China scholars merely serve as "disinterested observers" and that their studies of China are neutral, passive descriptions of reality. And thirdly, in pondering whether China poses a threat or offers an opportunity to the United States, they rarely raise the question of "what the United States is." That is, the meaning of the United States is believed to be certain and beyond doubt. I do not dismiss altogether the conventional ways of debating China. It is not the purpose of this article to venture my own

"observation" of "where China is today," nor to join the "containment" versus "engagement" debate per se. Rather, I want to contribute to a novel dimension of the China debate by questioning the seemingly unproblematic assumptions shared by most China scholars in the mainstream IR community in the United States. To perform this task, I will focus attention on a particularly significant component of the China debate; namely, the "China threat" literature. More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically linked to how U.S. policymakers /mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative , meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.- China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality . In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature--themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions. These themes are of course nothing new nor peculiar to the "China threat" literature. They have been identified elsewhere by critics of some conventional fields of study such as ethnography, anthropology, oriental studies, political science, and international relations. (4) Yet, so far, the China field in the West in general and the U.S. "China threat" literature in particular have shown remarkable resistance to systematic critical reflection on both their normative status as discursive practice and their enormous practical implications for international politics. (5) It is in this context that this article seeks to make a contribution. I begin with a brief survey of the "China threat" argument in contemporary U.S. international relations literature, followed by an investigation of how this particular argument about China is a discursive construction of other, which is predicated on the predominant way in which the United States imagines itself as the universal, indispensable nation-state in constant need of absolute certainty and security. Finally, this article will illustrate some of the dangerous practical consequences of the "China threat" discourse for contemporary U.S.-China relations, particularly with regard to the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis and the 2001 spy-plane incident.

Discourse of Russian threats Otherize Russia and actualizes itselfJÆGER 2000 (Øyvind, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, “Securitizing Russia: Discursive Practices of the Baltic States,” Peace and Conflict Studies, November, http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf)Security is a field of practice into which subject matters can be inserted as well as exempted. Security is a code for going about a particular business in very particular ways. By labelling an issue a security issue, that is, a threat to security, one legitimises the employment of extraordinary measures to counter the threat, because it threatens security. In other words, security is a self-referential practice that carries its own legitimisation and justification. Security issues are allotted priority above everything else because everything else is irrelevant if sovereignty is lost, the state loses independence and ceases to exist. This makes for the point that it is not security as an objective or a state of affairs that is the crux of understanding security, but rather the typical operations and modalities by which security comes into play, Wæver (1995) notes.15 The typical operations are speech-acts and the modality threatdefence sequences. That is, perceiving and conveying threats and calling upon defence hold back the alleged threat. This is also a self-referential practice with the dynamic of a security dilemma: Defensive measures taken with reference to a perceived threat cause increased sense of insecurity and new calls for defence, and so forth. Wæver’s argument is that this logic is at work also in other fields than those busying themselves with military defence of sovereignty. Moreover, viewing security as a speech act not only makes it possible to include different sectors in a study of security, and thus open up the concept. It also clears the way for resolving security concerns by desecuritising issues which through securitisation have raised the concern in the first place. Knowing the logic of securitisation and pinning it down when it is at work carries the possibility of reversing the process by advocating other modalities for dealing with a given issue unluckily cast as a matter of security. What is perceived as a threat and

therefore invoking defence, triggering the spiral, might be perceived of otherwise, namely as a matter of political discord to be resolved by means of ordinary political conduct, (i.e. not by rallying in defence of sovereignty). A call for more security will not eliminate threats and dangers. It is a call for more insecurity as it will reproduce threats and perpetuate a security problem . As Wæver (1994: 8)16 puts it: "Transcending a security problem, politicizing a problem can therefore not happen through thematization in terms of security, only away from it." That is what de-securitisation is about. David Campbell (1992) has taken the discursive approach to security one step further. He demonstrates that security is pretty much the business of (state) identity. His argument is developed from the claim that foreign policy is a discourse of danger that came to replace Christianity’s evangelism of fear in the wake of the Westphalian peace. But the effects of a "evangelism of fear" and a discourse of danger are similar – namely to produce a certitude of identity by depicting difference as otherness. As the Peace of Westphalia signified the replacement of church by state, faith by reason, religion by science, intuition by experience and tradition by modernity, the religious identity of salvation by othering evil ("think continually about death in order to avoid sin, because sin plus death will land you in hell"17 – so better beware of Jews, heretics, witches and temptations of the flesh) was replaced by a hidden ambiguity of the state. Since modernity’s privileging of reason erased the possibility of grounding social organisation in faith, it had to be propped up by reason and the sovereign state as a anthropomorphic representation of sovereign Man was offered as a resolution. But state identity cannot easily be produced by reason alone. The problem was, however, that once the "death of God" had been proclaimed, the link between the world, "man" and certitude had been broken (Campbell 1992: 53). Thus ambiguity prevailed in the modernist imperative that every presumption grounded in faith be revealed by reason, and on the other hand, that the privileging of modernity, the state, and reason itself is not possible without an element of faith. In Campbell’s (1992: 54) words: In this context of incipient ambiguity brought upon by an insistence that can no longer be grounded, securing identity in the form of the state requires an emphasis on the unfinished and endangered nature of the world. In other words, discourses of "danger" are central to the discourses of the "state" and the discourses of "man". In place of the spiritual certitude that provided the vertical intensity to support the horizontal extenciveness of Christendom, the state requires discourses of "danger" to provide a new theology of truth about who and what "we" are by highlighting who and what "we" are not , and what "we" have to fear. The mode through which the Campbellian discourse of danger is employed in foreign (and security) policy, can then be seen as practices of Wæverian securitisation. Securitisation is the mode of discourse and the discourse is a "discourse of danger" identifying and naming threats, thereby delineating Self from Other and thus making it clear what it is "we" are protecting, (i.e. what is "us", what is our identity and therefore – as representation – what is state identity). This is done by pointing out danger, threats and enemies, internal and external alike, and – by linking the two (Campbell 1992: 239): For the state, identity can be understood as the outcome of exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a discourse of danger (such as Foreign Policy) with threats identified and located on the "outside". To speak security is then to employ a discourse of danger inter-subjectively depicting that which is different from Self as an existential threat – and therefore as Other to Self . Securitisation is about the identity of that which is securitised on behalf of, a discursive practice to (re)produce the identity of the state. Securitising implies "othering" difference – making difference the Other in a binary opposition constituting Self (Neumann 1996b: 167). Turning to the Baltic Sea Region, one cannot help noting the rather loose fitting between the undeniable – indeed underscored – state focus in the works of both David Campbell and the Copenhagen School on the one hand, and the somewhat wishful speculations of regionality beyond the state – transcending sovereignty – on the other. Coupling the two is not necessarily an analytical problem. It only makes a rather weak case for regionality. But exactly that becomes a theoretical problem in undermining the very theoretical substance, and by implication – empirical viability – of regionality. There are of course indications that the role of states are relativised in late modern (or postmodern) politics. And there is reason to expect current developments in the security problematique of the Baltic states – firmly connected to the dynamic of NATO’s enlargement – to exert an impact on regional co-operation in the Baltic Sea Region, possibly even on regionality. NATO moving east, engaging Russia and carrying elements of the post-modernist security agenda with it in the process, is likely to narrow the gap between the two agendas. Moreover, since the Baltic states are not included in

a first round of expansion, they might in this very fact (failure, some would say) find an incentive for shifting focus from international to regional levels. Involving Poland and engaging Russia, the enlargement of NATO will in fact bring the Alliance as such (not only individual NATO countries as the case has been) to bear increasingly on the regional setting as well as on regional activity. That might add significance to the regional level. It does not, however, necessarily imply that the state as actor and state centric approaches will succumb to regionality. Neither does it do away with the state as the prime referent for, and producer of, collective identity, so central to the approaches of both Wæver and Campbell. But it might spur a parallel to sovereignty. A way out of this theoretical impasse would then be not to stress the either or of regionality/sovereignty, but to see the two as organising principles at work side by side, complementing each other in parallelity rather than excluding one another in contrariety. The Discourse of Danger The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of what Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24; cf. Haab 1997). The constitutional ban in all three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet political structures is indicative of a threat perception that confuses Soviet and post- Soviet, conflating Russia with the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of ethnic minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The opposite value of these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this discursive practice intensifies by shifting onto a security mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of political existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is (re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are employed in a discourse of in-security and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and thus securitised in the Wæverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish "[t]hat the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "[s]hould there be no higher command, self-controlled combat actions of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal." (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that [t]he power of civic resistance is constituted of the Nation’s Will and self-determination to fight for own freedom, of everyone citizen’s resolution to resist to [an] assailant or invader by all possible ways, despite citizen’s age and [or] profession, of taking part in Lithuania’s defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4). When this is added to the identifying of the objects of national security as "human and citizen rights, fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty; rights of the nation, prerequisites for a free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state territory and its integrity, and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions thereof; the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2) one approaches a conception of security in which the distinction between state and nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to national security that follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national values,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has become a totalising one taking everything to be a question of national security. The chain of equivalence is established when the very introduction of the National Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of Lithuania’s century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and subjugation" (see quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that follows.

Mexico

The predictions regarding Asian insecurity are a result of shoddy scholarshipKang, 3 – David Kang, Professor of International Relations and Business, Director of Korean Studies Institute, Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks International Security, Volume 27, Number 4, Spring 2003, pg. 57-85 museFollowing the end of the Cold War in 1991, some scholars in the West began to predict that Asia was “ripe for rivalry.”12 They based this prediction on the following factors: wide disparities in the levels of economic and military power among nations in the region; their different political systems, ranging from democratic to totalitarian; historical animosities; and the lack of international institutions. Many scholars thus envisaged a return of power politics after de- cades when conoict in Asia was dominated by the Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, scholars envisaged a re- turn of arms racing and the possibility of major conflict among Asian coun- tries, almost all of which had rapidly changing internal and external environments. More specific predictions included the growing possibility of Japanese rearmament ;13 increased Chinese adventurism spurred by China’s rising power and ostensibly revisionist intentions;14 conflict or war over the status of Taiwan;15 terrorist or missile attacks from a rogue North Korea against South Korea, Japan, or even the United States;16 and arms racing or even conoict in Southeast Asia, prompted in part by unresolved territorial disputes.17 More than a dozen years have passed since the end of the Cold War, yet none of these pessimistic predictions have come to pass. Indeed there has not been a major war in Asia since the 1978–79 Vietnam-Cambodia-China conoict; and with only a few exceptions (North Korea and Taiwan), Asian countries do not fear for their survival. Japan, though powerful, has not rearmed to the extent it could. China seems no more revisionist or adventurous now than it was before the end of the Cold War. And no Asian country appears to be balancing against China. In contrast to the period 1950–80, the past two decades have witnessed enduring regional stability and minimal conoict. Scholars should directly confront these anomalies, rather than dismissing them. Social scientists can learn as much from events that do not occur as from those that do. The case of Asian security provides an opportunity to examine the usefulness of accepted international relations paradigms and to determine how the assumptions underlying these theories can become misspeciaed. Some scholars have smuggled ancillary and ad hoc hypotheses about prefer- ences into realist, institutionalist, and constructivist theories to make them at various aspects of the Asian cases, including: assumptions about an irrational North Korean leadership, predictions of an expansionist and revisionist China, and depictions of Japanese foreign policy as “abnormal.”18 Social science moves forward from the clear statement of a theory, its causal logic, and its predictions. Just as important, however, is the rigorous assessment of the the- ory, especially if predictions oowing from it fail to materialize. Exploring why scholars have misunderstood Asia is both a fruitful and a necessary theoretical exercise . Two major problems exist with many of the pessimistic predictions about Asia. First, when confronted with the nonbalancing of Asian states against China, the lack of Japanese rearmament, and ave decades of noninvasion by North Korea, scholars typically respond: Just wait . This reply, however, is intellectually ambiguous. Although it would be unfair to expect instantaneous na- tional responses to changing international conditions, a dozen years would seem to be long enough to detect at least some change. Indeed Asian nations have historically shown an ability to respond quickly to changing circum- stances. The Meiji restoration in Japan in 1868 was a remarkable example of governmental response to European and American encroachment, and by 1874 Japan had emerged from centuries of isolation to occupy Taiwan.19 More recently, with the introduction of market reforms in late 1978, when Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “To get rich is glorious,” the Chinese have trans- formed themselves from diehard socialists to exuberant capitalists beginning less than three years after Mao’s death in 1976.20 In the absence of a specific time frame, the “just wait” response is un-falsifiable. Providing a causal logic that explains how and when scholars can expect changes is an important as-

pect of this response, and reasonable scholars will accept that change may not be immediate but may occur over time. Without such a time frame , however, the “just wait” response is mere rhetorical wordplay designed to avoid troubling evidence.

Asia instability impacts replicate the binary relation between the rational, moral West and the wicked, illogical East – this sustains academic orientalism making discursive violence inevitableIzadi & Saghaye-Biria, 7. Foad Izadi, doctoral student in communication, and Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, masters student in communication, both at LSU, “A Discourse Analysis of Elite American Newspaper Editorials: The Case of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31.2,http://jci.sagepub.come/cgi/content/abstract/31/2/140An important characteristic of Orientalist discourse is its reliance on binary language (Said, 1978). According to Said, Orientalism , as a style of thought,   is a dichotomous Western worldview based on   ― an   ontological and   epistemological distinction   (p. 2)   between the   so-called   Orient and the West. Sardar (1999) argues that such a dichotomy is ―the life force of Western self-identification‖ (p. 13). In addition to using a dichotomous language, Orientalism uses an essentialist discourse, universalizing certain traits and characteristics to the Orient and the Islamic World (Said, 1978). Said considers the numerous writers, novelists, journalists, philosophers, political theorists, historians, economists, and imperial administrators, who have accepted the basic Oriental/Occidental distinction as the foundation for their work concerning the Orient, as Orientalists. Most significant for this study, Said says, ―The Middle East   experts who advise   [U.S.]   policymakers are   imbued with Orientalism, almost to a person‖ (p. 321). According to Macfie (2000), Orientalism has come to signify an ideology justifying and accounting for Western imperialism. The notion of dividing the globe into dichotomous categories originates from a structuralist view of language (de Saussure, 1959). de Saussure argues that the universal structuring principle in all human language is that of binary oppositions. Language, viewed as a totality and as a social construction, is formed by the meanings assigned to objects and by those objects‘ relationship to their opposites, for example, black versus white, man versus woman, and so on. Objects are understood as to what they are not. Therefore, a dichotomous system governs the formation of language, and the numerous possibilities of meaning are restricted. According to Switzer, McNamara, and Ryan (1999), news narratives are primarily based on binary signs, reducing reality to ―discrete, dichotomous  facts‘‖ (p. 33). Switzer et al. contend that binary language and the tendency to define the world in terms of opposites provide the sociocultural foundation of ideology. Similarly, Said (1978) arguesthat the process of identity formation and maintenance in every culture entails the existence of ―another, different and competing alter ego‖ (p. 331). Said argues that, in the process of Western self-presentation, Orientalism is constructed as the West‘s alter ego.   The binary vocabulary of Orientalism includes East versus West, despotism versus democracy, cruelty versus fair treatment, irrational versus rational, and cunning versus trust (Baldwin, Longhurst, McCracken, Ogborn, & Smith, 2000, p. 171). By the absolute fixing of the meaning of the Orient, Orientalism functions as a Foucaultean discourse of power and domination (Said, 1978). Van Dijk‘s (1998b) ―ideological square‖ (p. 33) explains the dichotomous character of the prevailing discourses in societies. The ideological square gets its label from the four dimensions that make it up and acts as a justification for the presence of inequality in the society by polarizing in-groups and out-groups through a double process of emphasis and mitigation. Ideological discourses emphatically present the good properties/actions of ―us‖ and the bad properties/actions of ―them. The discourse also mitigates the bad properties/actions of the in-group and the good properties/actions of the out-group. Van Dijk (1995) maintains that ideologies are often articulated on the basis of the ideological square.

Their terrorism scenario is epistemologically suspect – the ballot is crucial to reject state-sponsored knowledge that legitimizes global violence Raphael 9—IR, Kingston University (Sam, Critical terrorism studies, ed. Richard Jackson, 49-51) ellipses in orig.

Over the past thirty years, a small but politically-significant academic field of ‘ terrorism studies’ has emerged from the relatively disparate research efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, and consolidated its position as a viable subset of ‘security studies’ (Reid, 1993: 22; Laqueur, 2003: 141). Despite continuing concerns that the concept of ‘terrorism’, as nothing more than a specific socio-political phenomenon, is not substantial enough to warrant an entire field of study (see Horgan and Boyle, 2008), it is nevertheless possible to identify a core set of scholars writing on the subject who together constitute an ‘epistemic community’ (Haas, 1992: 2–3). That is, there exists a ‘network of knowledge-based experts’ who have ‘recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain’. This community, or ‘network of productive authors’, has operated by establishing research agendas, recruiting new members, securing funding opportunities, sponsoring conferences, maintaining informal contacts, and linking separate research groups (Reid, 1993, 1997). Regardless of the largely academic debate over whether the study of terrorism should constitute an independent field, the existence of a clearly-identifiable research community (with particular individuals at its core) is a social fact.2¶ Further, this community has traditionally had significant influence when it comes to the formulation of government policy, particularly in the United States. It is not the case that the academic field of terrorism studies operates solely in the ivory towers of higher education; as noted in previous studies (Schmid and Jongman, 1988: 180; Burnett and Whyte, 2005), it is a community which has intricate and multifaceted links with the structures and agents of state power, most obviously in Washington. Thus, many recognised terrorism experts have either had prior employment with, or major research contracts from, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and other key US Government agencies (Herman and O’Sullivan, 1989: 142–190; RAND, 2004). Likewise, a high proportion of ‘core experts’ in the field (see below) have been called over the past thirty years to testify in front of Congress on the subject of terrorism (Raphael, forthcoming). Either way, these scholars have fed their ‘knowledge’ straight into the policymaking process in the US.3¶ The close relationship between the academic field of terrorism studies and the US state means that it is critically important to analyse the research output from key experts within the community. This is particularly the case because of the aura of objectivity surrounding the terrorism ‘knowledge’ generated by academic experts . Running throughout the core literature is a positivist assumption, explicitly stated or otherwise, that the research conducted is apolitical and objective (see for example, Hoffman, 1992: 27; Wilkinson, 2003). There is little to no reflexivity on behalf of the scholars, who see themselves as wholly dissociated from the politics surrounding the subject of terrorism. This reification of academic knowledge about terrorism is reinforced by those in positions of power in the US who tend to distinguish the experts from other kinds of overtly political actors. For example, academics are introduced to Congressional hearings in a manner which privileges their nonpartisan input:¶ Good morning. The Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism meets in open session to receive testimony and discuss the present and future course of terrorism in the Middle East. . . . It has been the Terrorism Panel’s practice, in the interests of objectivity and gathering all the facts, to pair classified briefings and open briefings. . . . This way we garner the best that the classified world of intelligence has to offer and the best from independent scholars working in universities, think tanks, and other institutions . . .¶ (Saxton, 2000, emphasis added)¶ The representation of terrorism expertise as ‘independent’ and as providing ‘objectivity’ and ‘facts’ has significance for its contribution to the policymaking process in the US. This is particularly the case given that, as we will see, core experts tend to insulate the broad direction of US policy from critique. Indeed, as Alexander George noted, it is precisely because ‘they are trained to clothe their work in the trappings of objectivity, independence and scholarship’ that expert research is ‘particularly effective in securing influence and respect for’ the claims made by US policymakers (George, 1991b: 77).¶ Given this, it becomes vital to subject the content of terrorism studies to close scrutiny . Based upon a wider, systematic study of the research output of key figures within the field (Raphael, forthcoming), and building upon previous critiques of terrorism expertise (see Chomsky and Herman, 1979; Herman, 1982; Herman and O’Sullivan, 1989; Chomsky, 1991; George, 1991b; Jackson, 2007g), this chapter aims to provide a critical analysis of some of the major claims made by these experts and to reveal the ideological functions served by much of the research. Rather than doing so across the board, this chapter focuses on research on the subject of terrorism from the global South which is seen to challenge US interests. Examining this aspect of

research is important, given that the ‘threat’ from this form of terrorism has led the US and its allies to intervene throughout the South on behalf of their national security, with profound consequences for the human security of people in the region .¶ Specifically, this chapter examines two major problematic features which characterise much of the field’s research. First, in the context of anti-US terrorism in the South, many important claims made by key terrorism experts simply replicate official US government analyses . This replication is facilitated primarily through a sustained and uncritical reliance on selective US government sources , combined with the frequent use of unsubstantiated assertion. This is significant, not least because official analyses have often been revealed as presenting a politically-motivated account of the subject. Second, and partially as a result of this mirroring of government claims, the field tends to insulate from critique those ‘counterterrorism’ policies justified as a response to the terrorist threat. In particular, the experts overwhelmingly ‘ silence’ the way terrorism is itself often used as a central strategy within US-led counterterrorist interventions in the South. That is, ‘counterterrorism’ campaigns executed or supported by Washington often deploy terrorism as a mode of controlling violence (Crelinsten, 2002: 83; Stohl, 2006: 18–19).¶ These two features of the literature are hugely significant. Overall, the core figures in terrorism studies have, wittingly or otherwise, produced a body of work plagued by substantive problems which together shatter the illusion of ‘objectivity’. Moreover, the research output can be seen to serve a very particular ideological function for US foreign policy. Across the past thirty years, it has largely served the interests of US state power, primarily through legitimising an extensive set of coercive interventions in the global South undertaken under the rubric of various ‘war(s) on terror’. After setting out the method by which key experts within the field have been identified, this chapter will outline the two main problematic features which characterise much of the research output by these scholars. It will then discuss the function that this research serves for the US state.

No border terrorismPowell 11 – Houston Chronicle writer(Stewart M., “Are Potential Terrorists Crossing into Texas From Mexico?”, 12/2/11; < http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Are-potential-terrorists-crossing-into-Texas-from-2341185.php>)//BeddowPakistani officials told Texas' Republican Congressman Michael McCaul on a recent visit to Karachi that potential operatives from Pakistan, Iran, al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Haqqani network can obtain visas for Mexico from Mexican diplomatic outposts in Pakistan far more easily than getting them for the United States, making Mexico a perfect way station. Yet despite these dire possibilities - including Perry's contention that Hamas and Hezbollah are working in Mexico to come to the U.S. - experts say such Iranian -financed factions are not crossing the southwest border. They point instead to the 327 airports and border crossings in the United States where legitimate or forged passports might be used the same way that 19 hijackers gained access to carry out the 9/11 attacks. "The last thing these organizations want is to start out at the border with a high profile criminal act that gets attention," says James Carafano, a West Point graduate and retired Army lieutenant colonel handling security affairs at the Heritage Foundation. "They want to be as unobtrusive as possible ." Federal law enforcement agents picked up 445,000 border crossers last year. But only 13 Iranians were taken into custody, a fraction of the 663 "special interest aliens" from 35 countries detained along the southwestern border for special U.S. scrutiny. None of the Iranians - indeed none of the 663 "special interest aliens" - has faced federal prosecution on terror-related charges, according to federal officials. No credible cases The number of Iranians apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol "has been historically minimal ," said a Department of Homeland Security official. " No credible terrorist threat has been identified , however DHS carefully monitors any potential threats along the Southwest border and responds accordingly ."

Food

The status quo food crisis in directly linked to the logic of neoliberal – speculation and land grabbing provesHoutart 11 (Francois, Belgian Marxist Sociologist, serves as an advisor to CETRI (Centre Tricontinental) a Belgian non-governmental organization which he founded in 1976, was awarded the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence, “ FROM ‘COMMON GOODS’ TO THE ‘COMMON GOOD OF HUMANITY,” ROSA LUXEMBURG FOUNDATION BRUSSELS, NOVEMBER)

There are two aspects to the food crisis . One is a conjunction of short-term factors, the other is due to (structural) long term factors. The former can be seen in the sudden rise of food prices in 2007 and 2008. It is true that this can be attributed to several causes, such as dwindling reserves, but the main reason was speculative, with the production of agrofuels being partly responsible (maize-based ethanol in the United States). Thus over a period of two years, the price of wheat on the Chicago stock exchange rose by 100 per cent, maize by 98 per cent and ethanol by 80 per cent. During these years appreciable amounts of speculative capital moved from other sectors into investing in food production in the expectation of rapid and significant profits. As a consequence, according to the FAO director general, in each of the years 2008 and 2009 more than 50 million people fell below the poverty line, and the total number of those living in poverty rose to the unprecedented level of over one billion people. This was clearly the result of the logic of profits, the capitalist law of value. The second aspect is structural. Over the last few years there has been an expansion of monoculture, resulting in the concentration of land-holdings – in other words, a veritable reversal of land reform. Peasant and family agriculture is being destroyed all over the world on the pretext of its low productivity . It is true that monoculture can produce from 500 and even 1,000 times more than peasant agriculture in its present state. Nevertheless, two factors should be taken into account: first, this kind of production is leading to ecological destruction. It eliminates forests, and contaminates the soil and the waters of oceans and rivers through the massive use of chemical products. Over the next 50 to 75 years we shall be creating the deserts of tomorrow. Second, peasants are being thrown off their lands, and millions of them have to migrate to the cities, to live in shanty towns, exacerbating the tasks of women and causing urban crises, as well as increasing internal migratory pressure, as in Brazil; or they are going to other countries (Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco, Algeria, West Africa).Together with public services, a griculture is now one of the new frontiers for capital (Samir Amin, 2004), especially in times when the profitability of productive industrial capital is relatively reduced and there is a considerable expansion of financial capital seeking new sources of profit. Recently we have witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon: the land grabbing by private and State capital, particularly in Africa, for the production of food and agrofuels. The South Korean corporation Daewoo obtained a concession of 1,200,000 hectares in Madagascar for a period of 99 years, which provoked a serious political crisis in that country and finally a revision of the contract. Countries like Libya and the Gulf Emirates are doing likewise in Mali and various other African countries. European and North American mining and agro-energy multinationals are securing the opportunity to exploit tens of millions of hectares for long periods, as Chinese State and private enterprises are also doing. There is very little concern in these initiatives for the ecological and social implications, which are considered as ‘ externalities ’ , i.e. external to market calculations. And this is precisely the second aspect of capitalist logic, after the growth of the rate of profitability. It is not capital that is having to deal with the negative effects, but local societies and individuals. This has always been the strategy of capital , even in the countries of the centre, with no concern for the fate of the working classes, or for the peoples in the peripheries under colonialism. There is no concern, either, for nature and the way of life of local populations. It is for all these reasons that the food crisis , in both its conjunctural and structural aspects, is directly linked to the logic of capitalism.

The affirmative’s discourse of “failed states” as per their Brown evidence legitimizes an interventionist epistemology that effaces difference, makes north-south inequality inevitable, and is self-fulfillingEisenträger 12 (Stian Eisenträger, MA student in IR, board member at International Reporter, a Norwegian NGO, 3-27-12, “Failed State or Failed Label?: The Concealing Concept and the Case of Somalia,” http://www.e-ir.info/2012/03/27/failed-state-or-failed-label-the-concealing-concept-and-the-case-of-somalia/) gz

The end of the Cold War shaped a new international political context where the issues of democracy and human rights were brought out from the internal to the external scene. The weakened role of the Soviet Union gave the United States the possibility to increase its global influence. In this context the absence of effective government emerged on the world political agenda together with the concept of the “failed state” (Akpinarli 2009). Boutros Boutros-Gali and Kofi Annan, the former Secretaries-General of the UN, used the “failed state” term as early as in 1990, although the General Assembly or the Security Council never used it. Somalia, which was a typical case of the absence of effective government, was described by the UN without the use of the term “failed state”. The concept was then applied for the first time in the article “Saving Failed States” published in the winter edition of Foreign Policy Magazine in 1992-1993 (Helman & Ratner). This article, which was written in the post-Cold War context with its high aspirations for democracy, human rights, the more active role of the United Nations in safeguarding collective security and the emergence of the United States’ as the leading agenda-setting actor, established the basic concept and the paradigm. Although some have tried to incorporate “failed states” in international law, the term is highly debated because of the neo-colonial notion attached to it (Akpinarli 2009, 87-89). According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word “fail” can have a range of different meanings: “to lose strength”, “to fade or die away”, “to stop functioning normally”, “to fall short”, “to be or become absent or inadequate”, “to be unsuccessful” and “to become bankrupt or insolvent” (Merriam-Webster 2011). Thus, I would argue that the word is too imprecise to be meaningful in our attempt to broaden our understanding of the world. In addition, the word is heavily value-laden and has loads of negative connotations attached to it, and therefore I find it unsuitable to use in science. That journalists and politicians still use the term, which is both catchy and tabloid, is understandable when we take into consideration the rather brutal limitations of time and space these two occupational groups have in their struggle to reach their audiences. Nevertheless, numbers of scholars have used and still use the failed state label, many even without engaging critically with the term (Bates 2008; Ghani & Lockhart 2008; Holzgrefe & Keohane 2003, just to mention a few). The urge to “fix”: Securitization and intervention The failed state paradigm implies that there is something that needs to be “fixed” or “saved” – of course by “good” liberal democratic external forces . “Preventing states from failing, and rescuing those that do fail, are (…) strategic and moral imperatives”, Robert I. Rotberg (2002) proclaims in an article with the dramatic title “Failed States in a World of Terror” (the argument is elaborated in his book, bearing the same title). One can feel the notion of “the white mans burden”. One of the most neoliberal contributions in the failed states debate is probably that of Ashraf Ghani & Clare Lockhart ( 2008, 124 ) who in their book “Fixing failed states” boldly declare that “today states must fulfil their citizens’ aspirations for inclusion and development and also carry out a constellation of interrelated functions”. They conclude that states “in the world today” should perform ten key functions, which are: 1) Rule of law; 2) A monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; 3) Administrative control; 4) Sound management of public finances; 5) Investments in human capital; 6) Creation of citizenship rights through social policy; 7) Provision of infrastructure services; 8) Formation of a market; 9) Management of public assets; 10) Effective public borrowing. So now when we have the list, can we just go out in the world and start “fixing”? Fixing “failed states” is a dangerous exercise: For many policymakers the failed state label contributes to open up for and make a good excuse for military and other interventions . Petra Minnerop shows how the US throughout the second half of the 20th century developed several terms, for example “rogue states”, for “states to which it ascribed a high threat potential as regards the United States and international security” (2003). In the years to follow after the 1992 article in Foreign Policy Magazine the international community, with the US in the leading role, carried out military interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis that the chaotic situation in these states poses a threat to the US and international security in general. The terms “failed state”, “rogue state” and “war on terror” have all been given prominent roles in the public debate. As Akpinarli also remarks, these concepts have been invented by the North to “solve” problems in the South , as well as to

advocate for and justify military interventions to protect international peace and security (Akpinarli 2009). I would argue that the concept rather causes more trouble than it solves – not only in terms of military intervention, but also by keeping “failed” states in the margins of international relations. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the labelling of “failed states” is a prime example of what the Copenhagen School of Security has dubbed securitization . The founding fathers of this concept point out that “a discourse that takes form of presenting something to an existential threat to the referent object does not by itself create securitization – this is a securitizing move, but the issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts it as such.” (Buzan et al. 1998, 25). The audience – in this instance, ordinary citizens in the North – has to a large extent accepted the “failed state” paradigm, especially with reference to Somalia. Both the media and the large organizations working with/in/for the “failed state” are acting as agents for the securitizing actors – that is the governments in the North, especially the United States’ government. Somalia has been among the top five on the list since the first Failed States Index was published in 2005, and since 2008 Somalia has had the dubious honour of being the world’s “most failed state”. Whether it is possible to measure a state’s “failure” is a question that probably requires a book to be answered. Since 2005 the magazine and Fund for Peace have ranked the world’s countries after measuring the following variables: Demographic pressures, refugees/IDPs, group grievance, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, delegitimization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, factionalized elites and external intervention (Fund for Peace 2011). No doubt that all these measurements may give a good indicator of how the situation is in a number of countries. However, my point and critique is that the index fails in grasping the vast empirical variations within the research object itself in the case of Somalia. Using the juridical state of Somalia as the object of analysis without looking under the surface becomes a serious hindrance of capturing the full picture. Somalia’s image problem As Michael C. Williams (2003, 527) excellently points out, “Security policies today are constructed not only with the question of their linguistic legitimation in mind; they now are increasingly decided upon in relation to acceptable image-rhetorics ”. In this context we can identify the visualization of the verbal rhetoric of the failed state paradigm. The presentation of ”failed states” is often accompanied with depictions of a war-torn hell -hole, and the Foreign Policy Magazine takes the lead by presenting the Failed States Index together with a collection of photos appearing under the splash heading: “Postcards from Hell” (Foreign Policy Magazine 2011). When the Failed States Index is referred to by other news outlets, this kind of presentation is reproduced (for a recent example, see: BBC 2011a). I have yet to see an example of any media organization to examine the Index more closely. Only telling one side of the story is a serious problem. We can compare the use of the “failed state” label with how Somalia is depicted in the daily media coverage. How many times can you remember to have seen the pictures from Somalia, the disaster zone, with starving children, heavily armed Islamist fighters and dead people being dragged through the streets by a cheering mob? Quite a few times, I suppose. On the other hand, how many times have you seen pictures from Somalia showing farmers working in their fields, smiling and playful children, or the beach in Mogadishu crowded with both men, women and children? Probably not at all. Of course, the pictures of the disaster zone of Somalia are real and by every journalistic standard it is right to publish such pictures. The practice becomes a problem when these are the only pictures that are being shown, when the stories about starving children and dangerous terrorists are the only stories that are being told about Somalia outside Somalia. This misrepresentation in the media can for a large part be attributed to the “failed state” label that is burn-marked on the country, and which pay so little attention to the variations within the geographical area that makes up the state of Somalia. When a statement is repeated enough times, it becomes a “truth”. Politicians and scholars, as well as the media itself are responsible for this brand marking, and the process is self-reinforcing. The situation has reached the point where members of the Somali diaspora community in Norway has established an organization with one of its main goals to adjust the picture that has been made of Somalia and the Somali people (Iftiin – somalisk-norsk kunnskapssenter 2011). Somalia has a serious image-problem – literally. Not only does this put the country in risk of external intervention, it also contributes to keep Somalia and much of its population in the margins of international relations . There is a lack of representation of the people inhabiting the territory of the Somali Republic, both because the TFG lacks authority, but also because of the non-recognition of the de facto states of Somaliland and Puntland. Here we have to functional geopolitical entities that are not represented in the UN nor in other global or regional institutions. Furthermore foreign investors and tourists stay away because of the perception and understanding of the whole of Somalia being a ”failed state”. Africa and the Knowledge of Non-Being In his classic work Orientalism, Edward Said (2003 [1978]) scrutinize the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the

East. He argues that orientalism is a powerful European ideological creation and a way for dealing with the “otherness” of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs . Achille Mbembe applies much of the same argumentation in his critique of Africanism. He says that historically, the West has constructed its own civilization , enlightenment and progress through the “others ”,

thus non-Western cultures, and especially Africa. Mbembe argues that: “Africa as an idea, a concept, has historically served, and still continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world” (Mbembe 2001, 2). One of the challenges in grasping how things work outside the Western world is that many, if not even all, of the concepts we use when describing the universe of International Relations is based in Western history and thinking. Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (Weber et al. 1991, 78). In Western thinking, Weber’s definition represents the idea of an “ideal state”, and it seems like many have the perception that Western states fit into this idea or norm. When analyzing states in Africa, this is revealed when African states are compared with the idea of an “ideal state”, which is believed to be a prototype of a Western state – leading to the focus on African states’ absences, lacks and incompleteness, as weak or failed. In this way Mbembe’s analysis is straight to the point when he states that “while we feel we know nearly everything that African states, societies, and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are”. Our knowledge of Africa is to a large degree based on the knowledge of non- being (Mbembe 2001, 9). But claiming that the “Western state” resembles the Weberian state, or even that the “Western state” is the norm, is highly problematic. First of all, every state has its own specific features, and the higher the degree of generalization, the more problematic it is. Secondly, Weber’s state is an idea of a state that has never existed in practice – even not in Europe or North America – for example when we take into account the important fact that private violence and private security has existed through modern history, and even today. Abrahamsen & Williams (2010), Colás & Mabee (2010) and Thomson (1994) are among several scholars who have demonstrated how private violence and private security takes form in e.g. private companies, criminal organizations and vigilante groups. If the states in Europe and North America are to be judged by the same standards as the states in Africa, many of these could get the “failed” label as well. Noam Chomsky, for example, has turned the tables in his book “Failed States”, where he shows that the US shares features with other “failed states” (2007). But does the “failed state” label provide us with more and better insight into how different states work; does it enlighten us in any way? Definitely not. The label conceals more than it enlightens. Abrahamsen & Williams (2010) argues that we must look beyond the state when analysing security issues in Africa. I would argue that we must look both beyond and within the state also when we want to analyse states in Africa, and especially Somalia.

Empirics prove there’s no link between food shortages and war – correlation not causationScheschkewitz 11 (Daniel, correspondent for Deutsche Welle in Washington, D.C., “Food wars: hunger as a threat to global security,” 11/14, http://www.dw.de/food-wars-hunger-as-a-threat-to-global-security/a-15444860, LVS)

It can be very difficult to scientifically prove a direct correlation between conflict and a lack of resources. Theoretically, any additional competition for resources in politically fragile countries and regions can lead to violent conflict. But in most cases, hunger or food shortages are only one of many factors, said Steffen Angenendt, co-author of a study by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs on the conflict potential of natural resource shortages. Unequal distribution or bad government leadership has to pile up in order to create security problems . ¶ The most recent hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa threatens security there¶ At that point, protests against high food prices can lead to antagonism toward the regime in power. That is how the street demonstrations against the regime of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali began, as protests against high bread prices, before they turned against the system as a whole.¶ "The bread riots in the Arab Spring were more symbolic, " said Joachim von Braun, the development researcher. "They were the catalyst for demonstrations in a complex political conflict, and thus only one of

many reasons for unhappiness. " ¶ Acute food price demonstrations take place in countries with noticeably lower incomes than Tunisia. There they play an increasingly important role, as in Ethiopia, where the constitution states that the land belongs to the state.

2NC

FW

Situatedness determines political efficacyDillon 99 (Michael Dillon, professor of politics at the University of Lancaster, 1999, “Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics,” pp 97-8)

Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable . For one cannot say anything about anything that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought , in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it . What this ontological turn does to other regional modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another . You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision , a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being , and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.

Framing determines the outcomes of policy – uniquely true in the context of securityCalkivik 10 (Emine Asli Calkivik, PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota, October 2010, “Dismantling Security,” http://purl.umn.edu/99479) gz

In contrast to traditional approaches to security, which assume an objective¶ world that operates according to ahistorical formal models and rely on a statist¶ political ontology that naturalizes the meaning of what security is and how it can be¶ achieved,120 critical approaches attend to the relations of power that structure the ¶ production of in/securities and expose the processes by which national identities and ¶ what are deemed as a danger to those identities are constructed. A common point¶ shared by these engagements is their emphasis on the ethical dimension of scholarly¶ inquiry as well as the recognition that knowledge claims are always embedded in ¶ relations of power . Their emphasis on the “ought” rather than the “is” reflects less a¶ reworking of the hierarchy between material and ideational power than an emphasis¶ on the social nature of global politics and an understanding that all phenomenon¶ pertaining to international relations exists through the cultural and ideological¶ structures through which they are given meaning and legitimated.121¶ Definition and construction of threats and the way in which states respond to¶ those threats constitutes one of the primary items on the agenda of critical scholars.122¶ While conventional analyses of security conceive threats as arising from material¶ capabilities of sovereign states located in a self-help system, critical approaches point¶ to the ways in which threats and intentions are not objectively given but socially ¶ constructed : they involve history, culture, and power relations that

cannot be reduced ¶ to an objective measure of military capabilities . They investigate the ways in which¶

systems of signification and normative structures constrain or regulate collective ¶ security practices or transform conduct in war. All of these studies reveal the ¶ historically situated dynamics underlying practices that shape the desire to secure ¶ bodies, nations, and states. ¶ Primary examples of these engagements come from scholars working under¶ the broad banner of Constructivism.123 These scholars take as their premise the¶ proposition that interests and actions of states are socially constructed and therefore¶ subject to change. While leaving intact the traditional assumptions about military and¶ state-centric understandings of security, some of these studies nevertheless challenge ¶ the traditional frameworks by explaining security practices through a recourse to ¶ ideational elements such as norms and identities rather than relying on material ¶ factors .124 In particular, these works challenge Neorealist and Neoliberal approaches, ¶ which assume that states are rational, self-help actors in an anarchic environment. For¶ instance, Alexander Wendt in his seminal study shows how different (Hobbesian or¶

Kantian) anarchical cultures can play a role in channeling the security practices of ¶ states on different paths.125 Focusing on international norms, such as the prohibitions¶ against the use of chemical and nuclear weapons or norms of humanitarian¶ intervention, other scholars argue that questions about international security cannot be ¶ answered by Realist materialist explanations alone .126 An example to these¶ investigations is provided by Risse-Kappen, who argues that NATO’s post-Cold War¶ survival can only be explained with reference to ideational factors such as values and¶ identity—in this case, democratic, liberal values—that guarantee the institution’s¶ survival in the absence of a distinct threat.127¶

The post-Cold War security environment and proliferating threat discourses in ¶ the absence of the “Soviet enemy” provide ample resource for scholars who focus on ¶ the representational practices that played role in the construction of threats to state ¶ security. For instance, Mutimer examines in detail the linguistic and metaphorical¶ construction of threats to the United States and its allies through the “image of¶

proliferation.”128 He points out the way in which a particular discursive framing of a ¶ problem—in this case, the construction of the use of chemical or biological weapons ¶ as a problem of proliferation as opposed to a problem of disarmament— shapes the ¶ constitution of identities and interests of the actors in question and gives way to ¶ particular patterns of foreign policy .¶ The discourse of threats and their social production—as well as the¶ construction of the objects of security as an inextricable aspect of security¶

discourses—constitutes an important item on the agenda of critical investigations.129¶ In conventional analyses, the purported state of nature populated by instrumentally¶ rational actors is taken as the departure point of analysis. Within this framework, the¶ state acts as the primary source of authority, the guarantor of order, and the primary¶ protector of the values and interests of these individuals. While the state is rendered¶ the locus of security, security of the state gets equated to the security of the citizen. In¶

contrast to the positing of the state as the locus of security with a neutrally given¶ interest of survival, critical scholars argue that a concept like national security needs to¶ be understood as a social construction rather than an objectively given fact. For¶ instance, in her case study of the Cuban missile crisis, Jutta Weldes shows how a core ¶ concept such as the national interest is discursively constituted through ¶ representational practices and linguistic elements. 130 Other investigations explore the¶ working of security as a political practice, or the processes of construction of threats¶ through institutional mobilization and knowledge production. Some of these scholars¶ use “speech-act theory” to study how utterances of security constitute certain issues as¶ security problems.131¶ A related line of analysis, conducted mostly from post-structural and postcolonial ¶ perspectives, is to trace the operation of power in its various guises and to ¶ map the hierarchical relations, highlighting the gaps and silences of hegemonic ¶ security narratives. In his Writing Security, David Campbell investigates how certain ¶ risks are interpreted as dangers, what power effects these interpretative articulations ¶ produce, and how they police the boundaries of the political community and produce ¶ obedient subjects. 132 Going against the grain of state-centric, strategic accounts of war,¶ scholars such as Michael Shapiro bring to focus the role of political violence in the ¶ construction of the geopolitical imaginary and the production/ affirmation of collective ¶ identity .133 Others focus on the international interventions that took place during the ¶ 1990s and discuss the ways in which these imperial investments are legitimated by the ¶ West through a moral discourse based on universal values .134¶ Other studies lay bare the historical biases, Eurocentric assumptions , and ¶ racialized or gendered content of conceptions, analyses, theories, and practices of ¶ security . Attending to the power of representation, they expose the links between ¶ economies of power and “truth” in the re/production of international hierarchies and ¶ in/securities. Problematizing the representation of post-colonial states as “failed” or ¶ lacking, and hence as a major threat to international security, some of these scholars ¶ demonstrate how these so-called failures were precisely the products of

unequal ¶ encounters with Western colonialism, pointing out the ways in which these ¶ hierarchical relations were being reproduced through ongoing unequal economic, ¶ social, and military relations. 135 They analyze the construction of the non-Western ¶ subject as the inferior other—“the Southern” or “the Oriental”—and attend to the ¶ ways in which these representations are mobilized to legitimate certain security ¶ practices and policies such as nuclear proliferation in the Third World. 136 Introducing¶ feminist perspectives into their analyses, other scholars expose the gender biases ¶ imbued in security practices, problematizing state security for rendering violence and ¶ insecurity from the perspective of women. 137

Giving the tool of imagination over to the state exonerates us from responsibility – we should imagine our own role in violence Kappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence, pgs 9-11)

War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation , the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the 'outbreak' of war, of sexual violence , of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all. 'We are the war,' writes Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her existential analysis of the question, 'what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell my friend, but I see it everywhere . It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you. in the fact that you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values - in short: us. We are the war. , , And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone else responsible. We make this war possible , we permit it to happen . 'We are the war' - and we also are' the sexual violence , the racist violence , the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called 'peacetime", for we make them possible and we permit them to happen. 'We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of 'collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective 'assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence , our own power and our own responsibility - leading to the well- known illusion of our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon - our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina or Somalia _ since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us in to thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events , or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major power mongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do ' anything , say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president , the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective

ones , and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‘I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention ', 'I want to stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. '? 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our 'non- comprehension' : our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don 't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others'. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence.

More specifically, Environmental Reformism is merely an exercise in blame shifting and assuaging guilt—shielding us from ever having to take responsibility for our own personal complicity in the environmental crisisBobertz 1995 (Bradley, Nebraska Law, Legitimizing Pollution Through Pollution Control Laws: Reflections on Scapegoating Theory, 73 Tex. L. Rev. 711)

A routine pattern in environmental lawmaking is a tendency to blame environmental problems on easily identifiable objects or entities rather than on the social and economic practices that actually produce them . n17 Once identified as the culprit of an environmental problem, this blame-holder comes to symbolize and embody the problem itself. Lawmaking then begins to resemble a re-enactment of a scapegoat ritual , in which the community's misfortunes are symbolically transferred to an entity that is then banished or slain in order to cleanse the community of its collective wrongdoing and remove the source of its adversity . The topic of scapegoating is commonly encountered in studies of racism, n18 family psychology, n19 and mass sociology, n20 but is not often associated with law and legal scholarship. Nevertheless, parallels appear to exist between the general scapegoat phenomenon and environmental lawmaking.The term "scapegoat" derives from the guilt offerings ceremony set forth in the biblical book of Leviticus. According to the Levitical  [*717]  scapegoat ceremony, Aaron placed both hands on the head of a live goat and confessed the sins of the people of Israel. n21 Having thereby transferred the collective guilt of the people to the goat, he drove the goat into the desert "to carry off their iniquities to an isolated region." n22

This ceremony was to be repeated each year on the Day of Atonement. Other sacrifice rituals, including the "sin offering for the community" n23 and the "guilt offerings," n24 were to be performed on a periodic basis. Essentially identical, n25 these other ceremonies involve the slaying of a young bull as a means for forgiving inadvertent transgressions of the people. n26Other cultures also employ similar sacrifice rituals to expunge evils brought about by the collective misconduct of the community. Beginning with James Frazer's The Golden Bough, n27 anthropologists have catalogued a remarkable variety of sacrifice rituals intended to expel collective sin. n28 Despite subtle variations in form and emphasis, these ceremonies follow a remarkably similar pattern: the participants view the ritual as a necessary measure for expelling collective wrongdoing, often after some misfortune or calamity has befallen the community. n29 Often, both the transference of the community's sins to the scapegoat object and the sacrifice of the object itself are performed by persons having special standing in the community, typically of a religious character. n30 [*718]  While we might view these sacrifice rituals as acts of merely symbolic import, the participants themselves clearly believe the ceremonies accomplish their desired ends. The people of Southern Africa do not place the blood of their sick people on the head of a goat (which is then banished to the veldt) to engage the curiosity of European anthropologists. They simply intend to make sick people well. n31 Likewise, the people put to death in Salem were killed because they were thought (proven!) to be witches, not because they were personifications of some other social anxiety. n32 To the detached observer, the bizarre and gruesome aspects of the ceremonies may stand out, but the participants do what they do because they believe it will work. n33This Article is not intended to support the notion that the targets of environmental regulation, in one way or another, are "scapegoats" in the common understanding of the term -- deserving of pity and freedom from compliance with environmental laws. Instead, I intend to shed light on a simple but troubling pattern: Environmental legislation is more likely to emerge from the lawmaking process when the problem it seeks to control is readily symbolized by an identifiable object, entity, or person -- a "scapegoat" in the sense discussed above. In the absence of such a scapegoat , however, lawmakers are less likely to take action . This pattern is particularly problematic because the identified scapegoat often bears an incomplete or distorted relationship to the actual problem at hand, resulting in laws that are likewise incomplete or distorted . As discussed below in Part V, because we deal harshly with culturally accepted symbols of environmental problems, it is less likely that we will deal with the problems (and their causes) themselves . For anyone concerned about the correlation between social problems and the legal regimes we create to solve them, this phenomenon should be cause for concern.

AT: Case outweighs

Structural violence o/wHintjens 7 (Helen Hintjens, Lecturer in the Centre for Development Studies, University of Wales; “MDF Understanding Development Better,” http://udb.global-connections.nl/sites/udb.global-connections.nl/files/file/2923317.051%20-%20Position%20Paper%20Helen%20Hintjens.pdf]

From Johan Galtung, famous Norwegian peace ‘guru’, still alive and heads up TRANSCEND University on-line, has been working since 1960s on showing that violence is not OK. His Ghandian approach is designed to convince those who advocate violent means to restore social justice to the poor, that he as a pacifist does not turn a blind eye to social injustices and inequality . He extended therefore our understanding of what is violent, coercion, force, to include the economic and social system’s avoidable injustices, deaths, inequalities. Negative peace is the absence of justice, even if there is no war . Injustice causes structural violence to health, bodies, minds, damages people, and must therefore be resisted (non-violently). Positive peace is different from negative (unjust and hence violent) peace. Positive peace requires actively combating (struggling peacefully against) social injustices that underpin structural violence. Economic and social, political justice have to be part of peacebuilding . This is the mantra of most NGOs and even some agencies (we will look later at NGO Action Aid and DFID as examples). Discrimination has to end, so does the blatant rule of money, greater equality is vital wherever possible. All of this is the opposite of neoliberal recipes for success, which in Holland as in Indonesia, tolerate higher and higher levels of social inequality in the name of efficiency. Structural violence kills far more people than war fare – for example one estimate in DRC is that 4 million people have been killed in war since 1998, but NGOs estimate that an additional 6 million people have died in DRC since then, from disease, displacement and hunger, bringing the total to an unthinkable 10 million of 90 million est. population. “Since there exists far more wealth in the world than is necessary to address the main economic causes of structural violence, the real problem is one of priorities”…p. 307 “Structural violence…is neither natural nor inevitable”, p. 301 (Prontzos).

Authoritarianism

Environmental apocalypticism results in eco-authoritarianism – that’s Buell – people run to find scapegoats for environmental problems and populations are mobilized against entities that are perceived to be dangerous to the global order – it also creates a permanent state of exception as the sovereign holds in its hands the power over all life – this ensures mass atrocityAgamben 98 – professor of philosophy at university of Verona (Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 139-140)It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain countries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of “life devoid of value” (or “life unworthy of being lived”) corresponds exactly—even if in an apparently different direction—to the bare life of homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every valorization and every “politicization” of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only “sacred life,” and can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society—even the most modern—decides who its “sacred men” will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceprio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now— in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty—moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.

Furthermore, political scapegoating ensures targeting of the third worldGilbert 12Emily Gilbert, Canadian Studies and Geography University of Toronto, 2012, "The Militarization of Climate Change," ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11 (1), 1-14 7

First, the military’s interest in climate change resurrects a narrow concept of security. Although the 2010 QDR recognizes impending concerns associated with human security (eg migration, disease and food security), it models the anticipated conflict through a traditional state-to-state war scenario, refracted through a neo- Malthusian conflict over resources (Dalby, 2009; Homer-Dixon, 1999). Resource conflict and other climate change impacts are mapped onto already vulnerable places in Sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia (Broder, 2009; CNA, 2007; Podesta and Ogden, 2007-08; Werz and Manlove, 2009), where, it is argued, they will act as ‘threat multipliers’ that will escalate into ‘failed state’ scenarios. This perpetuates a model whereby the enemy to the nation is elsewhere , and that ‘environmental threats are something that foreigners do to Americans or to American territory,’ not as a result of domestic policies (Eckersley 2009: 87). In this vein, the CIA has established a Center on Climate Change and National Security to collect foreign ‘intelligence’ on the national security impact of environmental change in other parts of the world.6The bifurcation of domestic security and external threat reinforces a fiction of territorial and nationalist integrity , and works against thinking about climate change as a global problem with a need for global responsibility and global solutions (Dalby 2009: 50; Deudney 1999: 189).7 Moreover, the model of external threats coheres easily with the competitive frame that has been established between China and the US, as they vie not only for economic ascendency and resource- acquisition, but also for energy security and environmental policies and initiatives.8 In this vein, Thomas Freidman has proposed a militant green nationalism, something along the lines of a triumphalist Green New Deal that will recapture

US global hegemony (Friedman, 2009).9 Achieving this result requires, however, more political agreement across US Democrats and Republicans, and it is precisely here that reframing climate change as a military issue seems to be an effective strategy for cross-partisan agreement.10 But what are the costs when militarization becomes necessary to legitimize climate change action?The upshot is that the military is also legitimized, to the detriment of formal and informal politics. In a secretive and hierarchical military framework there is limited scope for public participation or legislative debate (UNEP 2007: 403). Militaries are about the ‘maintenance of elite power’ (Barnett 2001: 25). Issues regarding social justice are disregarded in favour of national objectives , while the vulnerabilities institutionalized through climate change are perpetuated (Barnett, 2006). This is particularly apparent vis-a-vis environmental refugees, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates will swell to 150 million by 2050 (Reuveny, 2007). Militarism encourages the use of force against foreigners, with barriers erected to exclude those who bear the immediate impact of climate change, even though they are usually the least responsible for climate change. As Paul Smith notes, Operation Seal Signal, which the US deployed in 1994 to deal with 50,000 refugees from Haiti and Cuba, offers an instructive example of how the military addresses refugees, most of whom were held at Guantanamo Bay while their cases were processed (Smith, 2007). The responses to human tragedy in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina, when military priorities took hold over the immediate needs of the racialized, impoverished victims, speaks to the dangers of concocting security threats so that abandonment is prioritized over assistance (Giroux, 2006; Hallward, 2010). This is part of a worrisome trend of the rise of an ‘aid-military complex’ and military ‘encroachment’ on civilian-sponsored development (Hartmann 2010: 240).

Warming OVWar outweighs warminga. Securitization undermines cooperation – turns the caseTrombetta 8 (Maria Julia Trombetta, postdoctoral researcher at the department of Economics of Infrastructures, Delft University of Technology; “Environmental security and climate change: analysing the discourse,” Outh Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 21, Number 4, December 2008)

Opponents were quick to warn that the term 'security' evokes a set of confrontational practices associated with the state and the military which should be kept apart from the environment al debate (Deudney 1990). Concerns included the possibilities of creating new competencies for the military— militarizing the environment rather than greening security (Kakonen 1994)—or the rise of nationalistic attitudes in order to protect the national environment (Deudney 1999, 466-468). Deudney argued that not only are practices and institutions associated with national security inadequate to deal with environmental problems, but security can also introduce a zero-sum rationality to the environmental debate that can create winners and losers, and undermine the cooperative efforts required by environmental problems. Similar objections came from a southern perspective: environmental security was perceived as a discourse about the security of northern countries, their access to resources and the protection of their patterns of consumption

(Shiva 1994; Dalby 1999; Barnett 2001). Although the debate waxed and waned, the concept slowly gained popularity. In April 2007 the security implications of climate change were discussed by the United Nations (UN) Security Council but the state representatives remained divided over the opportunity of considering climate change and, more generally, environmental degradation as a security issue (United Nations Security Council 2007).The divide between those who oppose the use of the term environmental security by arguing that the logic of security is fixed and inflexible and those who support it by suggesting that the logic of security should be changed distracts attention away from the question of whether practices associated with providing security have been transformed by environmental security discourses. In the literature there is a debate about whether and how security language transforms the method of dealing with an issue—the debate focuses 'on the implications of using security language for the definition and governance of migration and the environment' (Huysmans 2006, 16)—but there is little on the reverse process or on the implications of using environmental language for the definition and governance of security. This article is an attempt to develop the latter type of analysis by exploring the meaning and function of environmental and climate security. The purpose is to consider how the use of a word in different contexts challenges and transforms the practices and meanings associated with it. It aims to explore 'what the practices of definition and usage do to a concept, and what the concept in turn does to the world into which it is inscribed' (Bartelson 2000,182). To undertake this analysis it is necessary to explore how different discourses about environmental and climate security have developed and 'condition ed the possibility of thought and action' (181).The article is presented in three parts. The first explores why the environment has been excluded from security considerations. By adopting a perspective that is attentive to the social construction of security issues and its implications, the article assesses the potential of a discursive approach in transforming existing security practices . The analysis draws on the theory of securitization elaborated by the Copenhagen School (inter alia Buzan and Waever 1998) and integrates it with elements borrowed from Beck's work (inter alia 1992, 1999, 2006) on risk society to provide a framework that accounts for transformation. It argues that the securitization of environmental issues can reorient security logics and practices. The second and third parts apply this framework to explore the development of environmental security and climate security discourses respectively.

Ex-Im

post politics is defined by consensus - policy making becomes centered on technical administration of the environment - every political decision becomes compromise, forestalling an alternative vision of politics [at perm][framing arg about politics]Erik Swyngedouw, Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester A. Lewis Building, July/Dec. 2011 "Whose environment? The end of nature, climate change and the process of post-politicization" Ambient. soc. vol.14 no.2 Campinas

4. Post-Political and Post-Democratic EnvironmentsSlavoj Zizek and Chantal Mouffe define the post-political as a political formation that actually forecloses the politica l (ZIZEK, 1999; ZIZEK, 2006; MOUFFE, 2005). Post-politics reject ideological divisions and the explicit universalization of particular political demands. Post-politics reduces the political terrain to the sphere of consensual governing and policy-making , centered on the technical, managerial and consensual administration (policing) of environmental, social, economic or other domains, and they remain of course fully within the realm of the possible, of existing social relations. "The ultimate sign of post-politics in all Western countries", Zizek argues, "is the growth of a managerial approach to government: government is reconceived as a managerial function, deprived of its proper political dimension" (ZIZEK, 2002: 303). The consensual times we are currently living in have thus eliminated a genuine political space of disagreement. Under a post-political condition, "[e]verything is politicized, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way and as a non-conflict . Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away; politics becomes something one can do without making decisions that divide and separate" (DIKEN, 2004). Difficulties and problems, such as re-ordering the climate or re-shaping the environment that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical arrangement, and the production of consensus. The key feature of consensus is "the annulment of dissensus ... the 'end of politics '" (RANCIÈRE, 2001: 32; SWYNGEDOUW, 2009).Climate governance and the policing of environmental concerns are among the key arenas through which this post-political consensus becomes constructed, when "politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration" (ZIZEK, 2005: 117). The post-political environmental consensus , therefore, is one that is radically reactionary, one that forestalls the articulation of divergent, conflicting, and alternative trajectories of future environmental possibilities and assemblages. There is no contestation over the givens of the situation, over the partition of the sensible; there is only debate over the technologies of management , the timing of their implementation, the arrangements of policing, and the interests of those whose stake is already acknowledged, whose voice is recognized as legitimate. In this post-political era, adversarial politics (of the left/right variety or of radically divergent struggles over imagining and naming different socio-environmental futures for example) are considered hopelessly out of date. Although disagreement and debate are of course still possible, they operate within an overall model of elite consensus and agreement (CROUCH, 2004), subordinated to a managerial- technocratic regime14. Disagreement is allowed, but only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organizational fixes, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of their timing and implementation, not with respect to the socio-political framing of present and future natures.In this sense, environmental and other politics are reduced to the sphere of the police, to the domain of governing and polic(y)ing through allegedly participatory deliberative procedures, within a given hierarchical distribution of places and functions. Consensual policy-making in which the stakeholders (i.e. those with recognized speech) are known in advance and where disruption or dissent is reduced to debates over the institutional modalities of governing, the accountancy calculus of risk, and the tech nologies of expert administration or management, announces the end of politics, annuls dissent from the consultative spaces of policy making and evacuates the proper political from the public sphere.

1NR

Orientalism

Orientalism necessitates war and genocide against the supposedly irrational Oriental other. Accepting this ideology sparks a new wave of Crusades. The only way to deal with a completely excluded other is to seek its elimination. Once we have designated a group of people is inherently differentBatur, 7 Vassar College (Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, “Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide”)Albert Memmi argued that “We have no idea what the colonized would have been without colonization, but we certainly see what happened as a result of it”(Memmi, 1965: 114). Events surrounding Iraq and Katrina provide three critical points regarding global racism. The first one is that segregation, exclusion, and genocide are closely related and facilitated by institutions employing the white racial frame to legitimize their ideologies and actions. The second one is the continuation of violence, either sporadically or systematically, with single- minded determination from segregation, to exclusion, to genocide. The third point is that legitimization and justification of violence is embedded in the resignation that global racism will not alter its course, and there is no way to challenge global racism. Together these three points facilitate the base for war and genocide In 1993, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samuel P. Huntington racialized the future of global conflict by declaring that “the clash of civilizations will domi- nate global politics”(Huntington 1993: 22). He declared that the fault line will be drawn by crisis and bloodshed. Huntington’s end of ideology meant the West is now expected to confront the Confucian- Islamic “other.” Huntington intoned “Islam has bloody borders ,” and he expected the West to develop cooperation among Christian brethren, while limiting the military strength of the “Confucian-Islamic” civilizations, by exploiting the conflicts within them. When the walls of communism fell, a new enemy was found in Islam, and loathing and fear of Islam exploded with September 11. The new color line means “we hate them not because of what they do, but because of who they are and what they believe in.” The vehement denial of racism, and the fervent assertion of democratic equality in the West, are matched by detestation and anger toward Muslims, who are not European, not Western, and therefore not civilized. Since the context of “different” and “inferior” has become not just a function of race or gender, but of culture and ideology , it has become another instrument of belief and the self- righteous racism of American expansionism and “new imperialism. ” The assumed superiority of the West has become the new “White Man’s Burden,” to expand and to recreate the world in an American image. The rationalization of this expansion, albeit to “protect our freedoms and our way of life” or “to combat terrorism,” is fueled by racist ideology, obscured in the darkness behind the façade of inalienable rights of the West to defend civilization against enemies in global culture wars. At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, stretch- ing from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in American foreign policy exhibited how capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999). Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other—Eastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational, savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination for exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment Europe and later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the “Terrible Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In

this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion . It racialized exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, orientalism recreated the superior race , even though there was no “race .” It equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the “right ideological and cultural framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other.” Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades , but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the West,

one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said,“show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said,“I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims”(Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he was not apologizing for being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point. Through orientalist and the white racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist legitimization.

Terrorism

No threat – weak leadership and no recent attacks Zenko and Cohen 12, *Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, *Fellow at the Century Foundation, (Micah and Michael, "Clear and Present Safety," March/April, Foreign Affairs, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137279/micah-zenko-and-michael-a-cohen/clear-and-present-safety

NONE OF this is meant to suggest that the United States faces no major challenges today. Rather, the point is that the problems confronting the country are manageable and pose minimal risks to the lives of the overwhelming majority of Americans. None of them -- separately or in combination -- justifies the alarmist rhetoric of policymakers and politicians or should lead to the conclusion that Americans live in a dangerous world.Take terrorism. Since 9/11, no security threat has been hyped more . Considering the horrors of that day, that is not surprising. But the result has been a level of fear that is completely out of proportion to both the capabilities of terrorist organizations and the United States' vulnerability . On 9/11, al Qaeda got tragically lucky. Since then , the United States has been preparing for the one percent chance (and likely even less) that it might get lucky again. But al Qaeda lost its safe haven after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and further military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement efforts have decimated the organization , which has essentially lost whatever ability it once had to seriously threaten the United States.According to U.S. officials, al Qaeda's leadership has been reduced to two top lieutenants : Ayman al-Zawahiri and his second-in-command, Abu Yahya al-Libi. Panetta has even said that the defeat of al Qaeda is "within reach." The near collapse of the original al Qaeda organization is one reason why, in the decade since 9/11, the U.S. homeland has not suffered any large-scale terrorist assaults . All subsequent attempts have failed or been thwarted, owing in part to the incompetence of their perpetrators. Although there are undoubtedly still some terrorists who wish to kill Americans, their dreams will likely continue to be frustrated by their own limitations and by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of the United States and its allies.