Pretty ok affContention 1: Protecting human rights prevents future wars Human rights solve war and WMD prolifWilliam W. Burke-White, Lecturer in Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Spring 04 17 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 249, pp. 249-50This Article presents a strategic--as opposed to ideological or normative--argument that the promotion of human rights should be given a more prominent place in U.S. foreign policy. It does so by suggesting a correlation between the domestic human rights practices of states and their propensity to engage in aggressive international conduct. Among the chief threats to U.S. national security are acts of aggression by other states. Aggressive acts of war may directly endanger the United States, as did the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, or they may require U.S. military action overseas, as in Kuwait fifty years later. Evidence from the post-Cold War period indicates that states that systematically abuse their own citizens' human rights are also those most likely to engage in aggression. To the degree that improvements in various states' human rights records decrease the likelihood of aggressive war, a foreign policy informed by human rights can significantly enhance U.S. and global security. Since 1990, a state's domestic human rights policy appears to be a telling indicator of that state's propensity to engage in international aggression. A central element of U.S. foreign policy has long been the preservation of peace and the prevention of such acts of aggression. If the correlation discussed herein is accurate, it provides U.S. policymakers with a powerful new tool to enhance national security through the promotion of human rights. A strategic linkage between national security and human rights would result in a number of important policy modifications. First, it changes the prioritization of those countries U.S. policymakers have identified as presenting the greatest concern. Second, it alters some of the policy prescriptions for such states. Third, it offers states a means of signaling benign international intent through the improvement of their domestic human rights records. Fourth, it provides a way for a current government to prevent future governments from aggressive international behavior through the institutionalization of human rights protections. Fifth, it addresses the particular threat of human rights abusing states obtaining weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Finally, it offers a mechanism for U.S.-U.N. cooperation on human rights issues.

Human rights solve war

William W. Burke-White, Lecturer in Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Spring 200417 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 249This Article presents a strategic--as opposed to ideological or normative--argument that the promotion of human rights should be given a more prominent place in U.S. foreign policy. It does so by suggesting a correlation between the domestic human rights practices of states and their propensity to engage in aggressive international conduct. Among the chief threats to U.S. national security are acts of aggression by other states. Aggressive acts of war may directly endanger the United States, as did the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, or they may require U.S. military action overseas, as in Kuwait fifty years later. Evidence from the post-Cold War period [*250] indicates that states that systematically abuse their own citizens' human rights are also those most likely to engage in aggression. To the degree that improvements in various states' human rights records decrease the likelihood of aggressive war, a foreign policy informed by human rights can significantly enhance U.S. and global security.Since 1990, a state's domestic human rights policy appears to be a telling indicator of that state's propensity to engage in international aggression. A central element of U.S. foreign policy has long been the preservation of peace and the prevention of such acts of aggression. If the correlation discussed herein is accurate, it provides U.S. policymakers with a powerful new tool to enhance national security through the promotion of human rights. A strategic linkage between national security and human rights would result in a number of important policy modifications. First, it changes the prioritization of those countries U.S. policymakers have identified as presenting the greatest concern. Second, it alters some of the policy prescriptions for such states. Third, it offers states a means of signaling benign international intent through the improvement of their domestic human rights records. Fourth, it provides a way for a current government to prevent future governments from aggressive international behavior through the institutionalization of human rights protections. Fifth, it addresses the particular threat of human rights abusing states obtaining weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Finally, it offers a mechanism for U.S.-U.N. cooperation on human rights issues.

Human rights are key to national security and preventing war

William W. Burke-White, Lecturer in Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Spring 200417 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 249, p. 265-6One causal pathway rooted in liberal international relations theory that may explain the observed correlation between systematic human rights violations and interstate aggression is the institutional constraint that accompanies human rights protections. Institutionalization of human rights norms has at least two powerful effects on state behavior. First, human rights protections govern how broad a spectrum of the community has at least some voice in the political decisions of the state. Even if the state is not a democratic polyarchy, if it provides basic protections for the human rights of all or most citizens, then a very broad spectrum of the polity is represented in political affairs. Freedom of thought and freedom from extrajudicial bodily harm, for example, allow citizens to develop their own views on political issues and, often, to express those views through public channels. A wider spectrum of voices, in turn, increases the level of political competition--one of the key structural explanations for the democratic peace--even without the establishment of a democratic form of government. Of course, in a non-democratic, but human rights respecting state, the views of individual interests may not have a direct effect on state policy, but, arguably, they can still increase the level of political competition by facilitating debate and the exchange of ideas. The second effect of institutionalized protections of human rights is to set a minimum floor of treatment for all citizens within the domestic polity. Even in a non-democracy, minimum human rights protections ensure that rights are accorded to individuals not directly represented by the government. By ensuring a minimum treatment of the unrepresented, human rights protections prevent the government from externalizing the costs of aggressive behavior on the unrepresented. In human rights respecting states, for example, unrepresented individuals cannot be forced at gunpoint to fight or be bound into slavery to generate low-cost economic resources for war, and thus restrain the state from engaging in aggressive action. On the other hand, in a state where power is narrowly concentrated in the hands of a political elite that systematically represses its own people, the state will be more able to bear the domestic costs of war. By violating the human rights of its own citizens, a state can force individuals to fight or support the military apparatus in its war-making activities. Similarly, by denying basic human rights, a state may be better able to bear the political costs of war. Even if such a state had fair elections, denial of freedom of thought and expression might well insulate the government from the electoral costs of an aggressive foreign policy.

Human rights solve war

William W. Burke-White, Lecturer in Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Spring 200417 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 249, p. 266-7

The social beliefs explanation begins from the proposition that individuals within human rights protecting states share a preference for a minimum set of protections of human rights. This assumption is appropriate for two reasons. First, according to liberal political science theory, state policy represents the preferences of some subset of the domestic polity. If the observed state policy is to protect human rights, then at least some subset of the domestic polity must share that preference. Second, even if individuals within a domestic polity seek a variety of differentiated ends, basic respect for human rights allows individuals to pursue--to some degree at least--those ends as they define them. Liberal theory thus suggests that individuals within a human rights respecting state tend to support basic human rights provisions. The next step in the social beliefs argument is to recognize that respect for human rights has an inherently universalist tendency. Unlike cultural or national rights, human rights are just that--human. They apply as to those individuals within a domestic polity as to those outside the polity. Such cosmopolitan liberalism indicates that "the more people are free, the better off all are." The net result is that individuals within a human rights respecting state tend, on the average, to support the human rights of individuals in other states as well. Given a set of universalist human rights values in states that respect human rights, the policy articulated by the government may be one which respects human rights at home and demands their protection abroad. This belief in a thin set of universal human rights may cause the leadership of the state to frame its security policy around that belief structure and to refrain from aggressive acts that would violate the human rights of citizens at home or abroad. As Peter Katzenstein argues, "security interests are defined by actors who respond to cultural factors." Acts of international aggression tend to impinge on the human rights of individuals in the target state and, at least temporarily, limit their freedom. After all, bombs, bullets, death and destruction are not consistent with respect for basic human rights. Framed in the liberal international relations theory terms of policy interdependence, international aggression by State A imposes costs on State B, whose citizens' human rights will be infringed upon by the act of aggression. This infringement in turn imposes costs on citizens in State A, whose citizens have a preference for the protection of the human rights of citizens in both states. This shared value of respect for human rights thus may restrain State A from pursuing international aggression. n105 By contrast, a state which commits gross human rights violations against its own people will not be subject to this restraint. Such violations often occur when the government has been "captured" by a select minority that chooses to violate human rights. If the citizens themselves are not in favor of human rights at home, they are unlikely to be committed to the enforcement of human rights abroad. Where capture occurs, the government is not responsive to the preferences of the domestic polity. In such cases, even if there is a strong preference among citizens to protect human rights at home and abroad, the government is unlikely to respond to those interests and its policies will not be constrained by them.***Impact***Contention 2: Human Rights Stop TerrorismHUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTION THWARTS OPPORTUNITIES FOR TERRORISMRosemary Foot, Professor of International Relations, St. Anthonys College, Oxford, 2003, Survival, Volume 45, No. 2, Summer, p. 173It is a linkage that has lived on the neo-Reaganite George W. Bush administration and appeals because the human security idea allows for connections to be made between neo-conservative and liberal rhetoric. The idea contributed to the decision in Bushs January 2002, State of the Union Address to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an axis of evil and to the argument in the September 2002 National Security Strategy that terrorists would thrive where there was an absence of the rule of law and a failure to protect human dignity. Thus, for the Bush administration, human-rights concerns enter into policymaking first as a result of political, bureaucratic and legislative commitments made in the past. And secondly, because of its acceptance latterly of the idea that gross violations of human rights generally tend to be the mark of a state that might, wittingly or not, provide the base from which terrorist cells can operate, or be hospitable to the establishment of links with transnational terrorism, or through it actions foment violent unrest that spills over its borders.Human rights key to national security prevents terrorist recruitmentMICHAEL J. O'DONNELL, Editor in Chief, Boston College Third World Law Journal, Winter 2004 24 B.C. Third World L.J. 223The resentment and anger engendered by U.S. hypocrisy on human rights policy and corporate responsibility are antithetical to long-term U.S. interests, and represent an immediate security threat in an age of global terrorism. As the U.S. has become entrenched in the Middle East, an area of the world currently saturated by virulent anti-Americanism, its perception abroad has increasingly become a matter of national security policy. As one prominent human rights leader has noted, "Human rights are the foundation of national security, both domestically and around the world." Flagrant inconsistency between U.S. rhetoric and practice abroad provides anti-American extremists and terrorists with an invaluable propaganda tool for adding angry recruits to their ranks. Because such antagonism is eminently preventable, U.S. double standards on human rights and corporate accountability represent a clear foreign policy failure. US human rights leadership is key to national security and stopping terrorismLorne W. Craner, Asst. Sec. Of State For Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, October 31, 2001http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/rm/2001/6378.htmThe world has changed dramatically for all of us since September 11, and some people have expressed the concern that, as a result of the attacks on America, the Bush Administration will abandon human rights and democracy work. To those people I say boldly that this is not the case. In fact, maintaining the focus on human rights and democracy worldwide is an integral part of our response to the attack and is even more essential today than before September 11th. They remain in our national interest in promoting a stable and democratic world. As Dr. [Condoleezza] Rice said only a week after the horrific attack, "Civil liberties matter to this President very much, and our values matter to us abroad. We are not going to stop talking about the things that matter to us, human rights, religious freedom and so forth and so on. We're going to continue to press those things; we would not be American if we did not." In practical terms, we continue to raise human rights issues at the highest levels of governments worldwide and have made it clear that these issues remain important to us. We do so because there is often a direct link between the absence of human rights and democracy and seeds of terrorism. Promoting human rights and democracy addresses the fear, frustration, hatred, and violence that is the breeding ground for the next generation of terrorists. We cannot win a war against terrorism by halting our work promoting the universal observance of human rights. To do so would be merely to set the stage for a resurgence of terrorism in another generation. As Thomas Jefferson said: that government is the strongest of which everyone may feel a part. At the very least, the brutality of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fact that it was completely unprovoked suggest that models based on what we used to call the "rational actor" are far from fully comprehensive -- unless, of course, you are willing to take Clausewitz one step further and suggest that not only is war politics by another means, but so, too, is terrorism. But that would be to give it a legitimacy that it clearly does not merit. Even so, what drives individuals -- not states, but men, individual, independent actors -- to assume the cloak of moral or religious rectitude and declare holy war on a country? This is not an attack on armies, but on symbols. Obviously, we need to learn how to fight the perceptions and misperceptions that lie behind all that better than we do. The question that we all are asking ourselves since that terrible day last month is this: how do we, who have the responsibility for promoting and protecting the values that underpin civil society at home and throughout the world, pick our way through all the causes and effects of that and make sure that it does not happen again? Obviously, there is much we can do: in intelligence-gathering and information sharing, in civil defense and homeland security, in diplomacy and economic leveraging, in international cooperation and coalition-building, in pressure and in force. All this the Administration is doing, and much, much more. My point is not to venture into the realm of military strategy. That is not my responsibility in this administration. Fortunately for all of us, the President has assembled a very experienced and capable team for that. This country is not the cause of all the problems of this world -- quite the contrary. We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to solve them. But still, we cannot be everywhere at once. We cannot solve every regional dispute and ethnic conflict. And yet, we are the sole superpower. Our reach is global and unprecedented. People look to us. Our power and our potential are immense. We have interests and we have obligations to our friends and allies. As the head of the bureau charged with advising the President and Secretary of State on human rights, I have to worry about the causes and consequences of conflicts wherever they take place, for all of them involve human rights in one way or another -- whether in Sudan or Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Macedonia, or the Middle East. I suspect most of you are looking to hear something about this administration's priorities within the field of human rights, especially after the September 11th attacks. Let me begin by outlining the general principles that I think will guide us. First, over the past 20 years, both political parties -- Republicans and Democrats -- have firmly embraced the belief that America has an obligation to advance fundamental freedoms around the world. Thus human rights have the deep and strong backing of both parties, all branches of government, and, most importantly, the American people. This will not change. In a multilateral sense, the United States has been the unquestioned leader of the movement to expand human rights since the Second World War. We pushed it in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and into the conventions and treaty bodies that have ensued. And when I say "we," I do not just mean the U.S. government. For it was our people, Americans from every walk of life, who gave the international non-governmental organization (NGO) movement so much of its intellectual force, its financial muscle, and its firm commitment to civil society. This, too, will not change. We in this administration are conscious of our history and are proud to bear the mantle of leadership in international human rights into this new century.HUMAN RIGHTS PROMOTION IS KEY TO FIGHTING INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM Paula J. Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, HERITAGE FOUNDATION REPORTS, December 21, 2001, p. 1. The advancement of human rights and democracy is important in its own right. At the same time, these efforts are the bedrock of our war on terrorism. The violation of human rights by repressive regimes provides fertile ground for popular discontent. In turn, this discontent is cynically exploited by terrorist organizations and their supporters. By contrast, a stable government that responds to the legitimate desires of its people and respects their rights, shares power, respects diversity, and seeks to unleash the creative potential of all elements of society is a powerful antidote to extremism. I am pleased to tell you that this Administration's commitment to human rights, democracy, and religious freedom is unshakeable. The President and other senior officials have emphasized these core principles repeatedly in the aftermath of September 11. The President's National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, at a recent Forum on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, reiterated our commitment to promoting democracy, noting "democratization and stability are the underpinning for a world free of terrorism."***Impacts***Future terrorist attacks will cause extinctionAlexander 03, Director of Inter-University for Terrorism Studies[Yonah, Washington Times, August 28, LN] bgLast week's brutal suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have once again illustrated dramatically that the international community failed, thus far at least, to understand the magnitude and implications of the terrorist threats to the very survival of civilization itself. Even the United States and Israel have for decades tended to regard terrorism as a mere tactical nuisance or irritant rather than a critical strategic challenge to their national security concerns. It is not surprising, therefore, that on September 11, 2001, Americans were stunned by the unprecedented tragedy of 19 al Qaeda terrorists striking a devastating blow at the center of the nation's commercial and military powers. Likewise, Israel and its citizens, despite the collapse of the Oslo Agreements of 1993 and numerous acts of terrorism triggered by the second intifada that began almost three years ago, are still "shocked" by each suicide attack at a time of intensive diplomatic efforts to revive the moribund peace process through the now revoked cease-fire arrangements [hudna]. Why are the United States and Israel, as well as scores of other countries affected by the universal nightmare of modern terrorism surprised by new terrorist "surprises"? There are many reasons, including misunderstanding of the manifold specific factors that contribute to terrorism's expansion, such as lack of a universal definition of terrorism, the religionization of politics, double standards of morality, weak punishment of terrorists, and the exploitation of the media by terrorist propaganda and psychological warfare. Unlike their historical counterparts, contemporary terrorists have introduced a new scale of violence in terms of conventional and unconventional threats and impact. The internationalization and brutalization of current and future terrorism make it clear we have entered an Age of Super Terrorism [e.g. biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber] with its serious implications concerning national, regional and global security concerns. Two myths in particular must be debunked immediately if an effective counterterrorism "best practices" strategy can be developed [e.g., strengthening international cooperation]. The first illusion is that terrorism can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated completely, provided the root causes of conflicts - political, social and economic - are addressed. The conventional illusion is that terrorism must be justified by oppressed people seeking to achieve their goals and consequently the argument advanced "freedom fighters" anywhere, "give me liberty and I will give you death," should be tolerated if not glorified. This traditional rationalization of "sacred" violence often conceals that the real purpose of terrorist groups is to gain political power through the barrel of the gun, in violation of fundamental human rights of the noncombatant segment of societies. For instance, Palestinians religious movements [e.g., Hamas, Islamic Jihad] and secular entities [such as Fatah's Tanzim and Aqsa Martyr Brigades]] wish not only to resolve national grievances [such as Jewish settlements, right of return, Jerusalem] but primarily to destroy the Jewish state. Similarly, Osama bin Laden's international network not only opposes the presence of American military in the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq, but its stated objective is to "unite all Muslims and establish a government that follows the rule of the Caliphs." The second myth is that strong action against terrorist infrastructure [leaders, recruitment, funding, propaganda, training, weapons, operational command and control] will only increase terrorism. The argument here is that law-enforcement efforts and military retaliation inevitably will fuel more brutal acts of violent revenge. Clearly, if this perception continues to prevail, particularly in democratic societies, there is the danger it will paralyze governments and thereby encourage further terrorist attacks. In sum, past experience provides useful lessons for a realistic future strategy. The prudent application of force has been demonstrated to be an effective tool for short- and long-term deterrence of terrorism. For example, Israel's targeted killing of Mohammed Sider, the Hebron commander of the Islamic Jihad, defused a "ticking bomb." The assassination of Ismail Abu Shanab - a top Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip who was directly responsible for several suicide bombings including the latest bus attack in Jerusalem - disrupted potential terrorist operations. Similarly, the U.S. military operation in Iraq eliminated Saddam Hussein's regime as a state sponsor of terror. Thus, it behooves those countries victimized by terrorism to understand a cardinal message communicated by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on May 13,1940: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be: For without victory, there is no survival."Nuclear technology is easily accessible to terrorist groups, enabling them to inflict maximum damage. O'Neill 97 from the Institute for Science and International Security [Kevn, Editor at the Institute for Science and International Security, The Nuclear Terrorist Threat http://www.isisonline.org/publications/terrorism/threat.pdf] The proliferation of nuclear weapons or radiological dispersal devices to terrorist groups is perhaps one of the most frightening threats to U.S. security. Nuclear materials, technologies and know-how are more widely available today than ever before. Small quantities of both fissile materials and highly radioactive materials, sufficient to manufacture a radiological dispersal device, are actively traded on the black market. A nuclear detonation by a terrorist group would likely result in an unprecedented number of casualties. In contrast, a radiological dispersal attack would probably be less violent, but could significantly contaminate an urban center, causing economic and social disruption. Both types of attacks would have significant psychological impacts on the entire population.Nuclear terrorism will trigger a global nuclear warBeres 87, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University[Louis Ren, Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat, p. 42-43]Nuclear terrorism could even spark full-scale war between states. Such war could involve the entire spectrum of nuclear-conflict possibilities, ranging from a nuclear attack upon a non-nuclear state to systemwide nuclear war. How might such far-reaching consequences of nuclear terrorism come about? Perhaps the most likely way would involve a terrorist nuclear assault against a state by terrorists hosted in another state. For example, consider the following scenario: Early in the 1990s, Israel and its Arab-state neighbors finally stand ready to conclude a comprehensive, multilateral peace settlement. With a bilateral treaty between Israel and Egypt already many years old, only the interests of the Palestiniansas defined by the PLOseem to have been left out. On the eve of the proposed signing of the peace agreement, half a dozen crude nuclear explosives in the one-kiloton range detonate in as many Israeli cities. Public grief in Israel over the many thousands dead ands maimed is matched only by the outcry for revenge. In response to the public mood, the government of Israel initiates selected strikes against terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, whereupon Lebanese Shiite forces and Syria retaliate against Israel. Before long, the entire region is ablaze, conflict has escalated to nuclear forms, and all countries in the area have suffered unprecedented destruction. Of course, such a scenario is fraught with the makings of even wider destruction. How would the United States react to the situation in the Middle East? What would be the Soviet response? It is certainly conceivable that a chain reaction of interstate nuclear conflict could ensure, one that would ultimately involve the superpowers or even every nuclear-weapons state on the planet. What, exactly, would this mean? Whether the terms of assessment be statistical or human, the consequences of nuclear war require an entirely new paradigm of death. Only such a paradigm would allow us a proper framework for absorbing the vision of near-total obliteration and the outer limits of human destructiveness. Any nuclear war would have effectively permanent and irreversible consequences. Whatever the actual extent of injuries and fatalities, such a war would entomb the spirit of the entire species in a planetary casket strewn with shorn bodies and imbecile imaginations. Nuclear terrorism will prompt US nuclear retaliation killing hundreds of millions instantlyEasterbrook 01, Senior Editor of New Republic[Greg, Americas New War: Nuclear Threats, Greenfield at Large, November 1, LN] bgWell, what held through the Cold War, when the United States and Russia had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, what held each side back was the fact that fundamentally they were rational. They knew that if they struck, they would be struck in turn. Terrorists may not be held by this, especially suicidal terrorists, of the kind that al Qaeda is attempting to cultivate. But I think, if I could leave you with one message, it would be this: that the search for terrorist atomic weapons would be of great benefit to the Muslim peoples of the world in addition to members, to people of the United States and Western Europe, because if an atomic warhead goes off in Washington, say, in the current environment or anything like it, in the 24 hours that followed, a hundred million Muslims would die as U.S. nuclear bombs rained down on every conceivable military target in a dozen Muslim countries.Contention 3: No state sovereignty without Human RightsSovereignty is based on an emotional attachment of the people to the government

Michael Ignatieff is a former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and a fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, New Republic, February 16, 2012, p. 25

Sovereignty draws on much deeper identifications. The sovereign protects us with its monopoly of the means of violence. It can also ask citizens to sacrifice their life for their country. This is nobodys idea of a rational contract, but it is everybodys idea of the patriotic ideal. Sovereignty draws on this deep layer of emotional identification of the people with the sovereign as the juridical embodiment of the nation. If this deeper layer did not exist, contract alone would not keep political order intact. Sovereign obedience, on such a view, reposes on a primal emotional bond between citizen and nation, a nexus of individual and collective identity, mediated through a government elected by the people.

Sovereign legitimacy is grounded in the ability of sovereigns to arouse patriotic passion

Michael Ignatieff is a former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and a fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, New Republic, February 16, 2012, p. 25

These emotional underpinnings of sovereignty make liberals uneasy. The liberal attempt to secularize obedience has always been an attempt to make politics rational, to replace awe with consent. By vesting sovereignty in the people, and by locating legitimacy in consent, liberals from Locke onward sought to expunge from sovereigntys claim upon us those irrational, overbearing demands that could lead both to slaughter and to tyranny. Yet the sacramental, sacrificial, all-consuming emotions that popular refuse to be thought away. Contractual sovereignty has never made peace with patriotic passion and never can, any more than philosophies of limited government can make their peace with the passion of the people to feel and act as one. Sovereigns are legitimate to us to the extent that they convince our reason and rouse our patriotic passions.Contention 4: Denying Human Rights DehumanizesHuman rights are fundamental to deny them is to challenge ones very humanity

Natsu Taylor Saito, Professor of Law, Georgia State University College of Law, Yale Law & Policy Review, 2002, 20 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 427, p. 427-8

There is a nexus between the abolition or the diminution of [the precepts of American slavery jurisprudence] as advocated by the slavemasters in power in the American colonial and antebellum periods and the efforts in this decade to advocate universal human rights for all. The more we appreciate the extraordinary injustice of the original precepts, the more persistent we will be in eradicating the vestiges of those precepts in the United States and the equivalent denigration throughout the world. Nelson Mandela reminded a joint session of the United States Congress in 1990 that "to deny any person their human rights is to challenge their very humanity." Human rights law is a subset of international law designed to protect certain fundamental rights of individuals and of ethnic, religious, racial, and national minorities within states. It also encompasses the rights of peoples to self-determination. Since World War II the major world powers have acknowledged that these universal principles of human rights must be accepted as binding on all states, because the domestic laws that protect the rights of "insiders" often fail to protect those regarded as "Other" within the polity. n4 The colonial legacy of the arbitrary imposition of state boundaries upon indigenous nations in almost every part of the world makes international human rights law particularly important. ***Impact***Dehumanization destroys the value to wife and outweighs all calculable impactsBerube 97 Professor of Communication Studies and Associate Director of NanoScience and Technology Studies atUniversity of South Carolina[David M., NANOTECHNOLOGICAL PROLONGEVITY: The Down Side, http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm]This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn[s]: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.Contention 5: Human rights key to democracyHuman rights key to democratizationThomas Carothers, director, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, WASHINGTON QUARTERLY, Summer 1994, p. 106. In most of the countries that have undergone democratic transitions in recent years, during the generative period of the transitions (generally the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s), the emphasis of external actors was on human rights advocacy rather than democracy promotion per se. Therefore, just as human rights advocates should not overlook the fact that democratization has advanced the cause of human rights in many countries, democracy promotion proponents should not ignore the contribution of human rights advocacy to democratization.

Promoting human rights in China is a precondition for the development of democracy and resolving regional conflictsSamuel S. Kim, Adjunct Prof of PoliSci and Senior Research Associate at the East Asian Institute at Columbia University, 2000In What if China Doesnt Democratize?, ed. Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick. p. 155-156To borrow from the familiar Chinese refrain"no state sovereignty, no human rights"we can say, "no human rights, no or little chance of democratization." Viewing democratization as an ongoing and multi-stage process rather than a natural outcome of certain social, cultural, and economic preconditions, human rights can be defined as what David Held calls "empowering rights"73 that are integral to strategic interactions among state, society, and international factors necessary to bring about a transition to democracy. Democracy in a minimalist procedural senseuniversal and equal suffrage and free electoral competition cannot come about without the citizens enjoying civil and political rights as guaranteed in the UDHR (Article 21) and the ICCPR (Article 25) Human rights are empowering democratization in normative and substantive terms as well. There is no way or means of "seeking truth from facts" without an opposition. International legitimation no longer rests solely on the claims of state sovereignty by the powers that be. Increasingly, it rests on the condition of human rights, on how the government treats its own sovereign people.74 Contrary to Deng's chaos theory, respect for human rights is not only a more reliable guide to a peaceful transition to democracy but also for domestic stability in the multinational Chinese state, especially for peaceful resolution of the simmering conflicts in Democratic Taiwan, Buddhist Tibet, and Muslim Xinjiang. There is also the normative/behavioral requirement of great power status: a great power abroad is and becomes what a great power does at home and abroad.75 In short, a China that respects human rights would be a more democratic country, just as a more democratic China would become part of the world order solution in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.***Impacts***Democracy = Best Form of GovernmentDemocracy is the best form of government multiple reasons holds rulers accountable to the people institutions prevent abusive rule and corruption guarantees human rights stimulates political competition that generates higher quality officials McFaul 10 (Michael McFaul, Hoover Senior Fellow, professor of polisci and director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford and nonresident associate at Carnegie, Advancing Democracy Abroad, p. 35-37)

First and foremost, democracy provides the best institutional arrangement for holding rulers accountable to the people. If leaders must compete for popular support to stay in power, they will respond to their citizens preferences. Rulers who do not need popular support to gain or maintain power will likely be more responsive to whatever group the family, the military, the mullahs, or the communist party controls their fate. The larger the number of people needed to elect a leader, the more inclined that leader will be to pursue public policies that benefit the majority. Not surprisingly, therefore, democracies have consistently generated superior levels of social welfare compared to autocracies at similar income levels. Second, the institutions of democracy prevent abusive rule, constrain bad government, and provide a mechanism for getting rid of corrupt or ineffective leaders. Truly oppressive leaders cannot remain in power for long if they must seek the electoral mandate of those being oppressed. Autocrats face no such constraints. Mass terror and genocide occur in autocracies, not democracies. Democracies do not prevent all abusive behavior, but over the centuries, democratic leaders have unquestionably inflicted less pain and suffering on their people than have autocratic leaders. Joseph Stalin and the Soviet regime sent 28.7 million to forced labor camps, 2.7 million of whom died while incarcerated. Stalin consciously starved millions in Ukraine in the 1932-33 holodomor, and ordered the political execution of millions more during his bloody reign. Adolf Hitler not only unleashed carnage through war, he murdered six million Jews and millions more poles, gypsies, and others in his concentration camps. In China, Mao may have killed more than seventy million people during his reign, including the roughly thirty-eight million people who died during a horrific famine generated by government policies. In only four years, Pol Pot exterminated roughly a quarter of Cambodias population. Idi Amin in Uganda, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Slobodan Miloevi in Yugoslavia also systematically slaughtered their own citizens. The carnage within democracies during the same century is tragic, but its breadth is not on the same scale. In the twenty-first century, autocratic regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Burma inflict pain on their citizens in a manner with no parallel in democratic countries. Famine is also a phenomenon of dictatorships, not democracies. Amartya Sen notes in his work the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of modern famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. Ironically, skeptics in the democracy promotion debate in the U.S., often argue that bread and butter issues should come first, or it is hard to care about our vote when you are starving. What these critics fail to recognize is that people often starve because they do not have the power to vote. More generally, democracies are better at guaranteeing human rights and individual freedoms than are autocracies, because they do not rely on the goodwill of leaders. The correlation between Freedom House scores on political liberties and civil liberties is robust. For every liberal autocrat like Singapores Lee Kuan Yew or the King of Jordan, there are several more Hitlers, Stalins, and Mugabes. Finally, democracy stimulates political competition that helps to generate higher quality officials in government. Just as market competition leads to better products, political competition produces better leaders, ideas, and organizations. At a minimum, democracy provides a mechanism for getting rid of bad or incompetent rulers in a way that autocracy does not. The absence of political competition in autocracies produces complacency, corruption, and no mechanism for generating new talent.

Democracy Good Laundry List/EconDemocracy is the best system of governance solves war, terrorism, and economic growth Mitchell and Phillips 8 (Lincoln A. Mitchell, Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics at Columbias School of International and Political Affairs, and David L. Phillips, project director of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, Enhancing Democracy Assistance, January 2008, http://www.acus.org/files/publication_pdfs/65/Enhancing%20Democracy%20Assistance.pdf)

Democracy is both a reflection of American values and in Americas strategic interests. Democracies do not fight wars against each other, nor do they engage in terrorism or produce refugees. They also make more reliable allies and better trading partners. Democracy has proven to be the best system of governance to realize universal human aspirations for freedom and to support human development. Democracy is also the basis for steadier and more reliable economic development. It is grounded in the rule of law, which stimulates competition, innovation, and progress while providing the necessary legal framework for free markets. Democracy also fosters an ethos of self-reliance and entrepreneurship that is far better suited to economic growth than that of authoritarianism, which breeds apathy and stagnation. Democratic governance creates conditions for individuals to fulfill their potential and live better lives.

Peace

Democracy key to peace maintains internal stability, accountability, transparency, and pluralism and decreases extremism Craner and Wollack 8 (Lorne W. Craner, President of the International Republican Institute, and Kenneth Wollack, President of the National Democratic Institute, New Directions for Democracy Promotion, http://www.ndi.org/files/2344_newdirections_engpdf_07242008.pdf)

In recent decades, scores of countries have chosen to become democratic and the majority of people in every region of the world now believe that democracy is the best form of government. While democratic systems may be the standard that nations seek, achieving that standard and sustaining support for democratic governance can be a difficult process. A critical challenge for new democracies is to deliver better lives to their populations. To be successful and maintain popular support, a democracy cannot be just a set of concepts or processes; it must be connected to economic prosperity and produce visible improvements, which are key factors in preventing alternatives, such as autocratic regimes, from gaining ground. Democracies also provide the best alternatives for fostering peace across borders by maintaining internal stability and achieving economic and social development. The September 11 attacks increased the focus on failed states and those in conflict as potential breeding grounds for extremists. Democracies, with their focus on accountability, transparency, and pluralism, can help reduce extremism by allowing avenues for dissent, alternation of power, and protections for the rights of minorities. Nuke WarContinued democratization is essential to avert nuclear warMuravchik 01 Resident Scholar at American Enterprise Institute[Joshua, Democracy and nuclear peace, Jul 11, http://www.npec-web.org/syllabi/muravchik.htm]The greatest impetus for world peace -- and perforce of nuclear peace -- is the spread of democracy. In a famous article, and subsequent book, Francis Fukuyama argued that democracy's extension was leading to "the end of history." By this he meant the conclusion of man's quest for the right social order, but he also meant the "diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states." (1) Fukuyama's phrase was intentionally provocative, even tongue-in-cheek, but he was pointing to two down-to-earth historical observations: that democracies are more peaceful than other kinds of government and that the world is growing more democratic. Neither point has gone unchallenged. Only a few decades ago, as distinguished an observer of international relations as George Kennan made a claim quite contrary to the first of these assertions. Democracies, he said, were slow to anger, but once aroused "a democracy . . . . fights in anger . . . . to the bitter end." (2) Kennan's view was strongly influenced by the policy of "unconditional surrender" pursued in World War II. But subsequent experience, such as the negotiated settlements America sought in Korea and Vietnam proved him wrong. Democracies are not only slow to anger but also quick to compromise. And to forgive. Notwithstanding the insistence on unconditional surrender, America treated Japan and that part of Germany that it occupied with extraordinary generosity. In recent years a burgeoning literature has discussed the peacefulness of democracies. Indeed the proposition that democracies do not go to war with one another has been described by one political scientist as being "as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations." (3) Some of those who find enthusiasm for democracy off-putting have challenged this proposition, but their challenges have only served as empirical tests that have confirmed its robustness. For example, the academic Paul Gottfried and the columnist-turned-politician Patrick J. Buchanan have both instanced democratic England's declaration of war against democratic Finland during World War II. (4) In fact, after much procrastination, England did accede to the pressure of its Soviet ally to declare war against Finland which was allied with Germany. But the declaration was purely formal: no fighting ensued between England and Finland. Surely this is an exception that proves the rule. The strongest exception I can think of is the war between the nascent state of Israel and the Arabs in 1948. Israel was an embryonic democracy and Lebanon, one of the Arab belligerents, was also democratic within the confines of its peculiar confessional division of power. Lebanon, however, was a reluctant party to the fight. Within the councils of the Arab League, it opposed the war but went along with its larger confreres when they opted to attack. Even so, Lebanon did little fighting and soon sued for peace. Thus, in the case of Lebanon against Israel, as in the case of England against Finland, democracies nominally went to war against democracies when they were dragged into conflicts by authoritarian allies. The political scientist Bruce Russett offers a different challenge to the notion that democracies are more peaceful. "That democracies are in general, in dealing with all kinds of states, more peaceful than are authoritarian or other nondemocratically constituted states . . . .is a much more controversial proposition than 'merely' that democracies are peaceful in their dealings with each other, and one for which there is little systematic evidence," he says. (5) Russett cites his own and other statistical explorations which show that while democracies rarely fight one another they often fight against others. The trouble with such studies, however, is that they rarely examine the question of who started or caused a war. To reduce the data to a form that is quantitatively measurable, it is easier to determine whether a conflict has occurred between two states than whose fault it was. But the latter question is all important. Democracies may often go to war against dictatorships because the dictators see them as prey or underestimate their resolve. Indeed, such examples abound. Germany might have behaved more cautiously in the summer of 1914 had it realized that England would fight to vindicate Belgian neutrality and to support France. Later, Hitler was emboldened by his notorious contempt for the flabbiness of the democracies. North Korea almost surely discounted the likelihood of an American military response to its invasion of the South after Secretary of State Dean Acheson publicly defined America's defense perimeter to exclude the Korean peninsula (a declaration which merely confirmed existing U.S. policy). In 1990, Saddam Hussein's decision to swallow Kuwait was probably encouraged by the inference he must have taken from the statements and actions of American officials that Washington would offer no forceful resistance. Russett says that those who claim democracies are in general more peaceful "would have us believe that the United States was regularly on the defensive, rarely on the offensive, during the Cold War." But that is not quite right: the word "regularly" distorts the issue. A victim can sometimes turn the tables on an aggressor, but that does not make the victim equally bellicose. None would dispute that Napoleon was responsible for the Napoleonic wars or Hitler for World War II in Europe, but after a time their victims seized the offensive. So in the Cold War, the United States may have initiated some skirmishes (although in fact it rarely did), but the struggle as a whole was driven one-sidedly. The Soviet policy was "class warfare"; the American policy was "containment." The so-called revisionist historians argued that America bore an equal or larger share of responsibility for the conflict. But Mikhail Gorbachev made nonsense of their theories when, in the name of glasnost and perestroika, he turned the Soviet Union away from its historic course. The Cold War ended almost instantly--as he no doubt knew it would. "We would have been able to avoid many . . . difficulties if the democratic process had developed normally in our country," he wrote. (7) To render judgment about the relative peacefulness of states or systems, we must ask not only who started a war but why. In particular we should consider what in Catholic Just War doctrine is called "right intention," which means roughly: what did they hope to get out of it? In the few cases in recent times in which wars were initiated by democracies, there were often motives other than aggrandizement, for example, when America invaded Grenada. To be sure, Washington was impelled by self-interest more than altruism, primarily its concern for the well-being of American nationals and its desire to remove a chip, however tiny, from the Soviet game board. But America had no designs upon Grenada, and the invaders were greeted with joy by the Grenadan citizenry. After organizing an election, America pulled out. In other cases, democracies have turned to war in the face of provocation, such as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to root out an enemy sworn to its destruction or Turkey's invasion of Cyprus to rebuff a power-grab by Greek nationalists. In contrast, the wars launched by dictators, such as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, North Korea's of South Korea, the Soviet Unions of Hungary and Afghanistan, often have aimed at conquest or subjugation. The big exception to this rule is colonialism. The European powers conquered most of Africa and Asia, and continued to hold their prizes as Europe democratized. No doubt many of the instances of democracies at war that enter into the statistical calculations of researchers like Russett stem from the colonial era. But colonialism was a legacy of Europe's pre-democratic times, and it was abandoned after World War II. Since then, I know of no case where a democracy has initiated warfare without significant provocation or for reasons of sheer aggrandizement, but there are several cases where dictators have done so. One interesting piece of Russett's research should help to point him away from his doubts that democracies are more peaceful in general. He aimed to explain why democracies are more peaceful toward each other. Immanuel Kant was the first to observe, or rather to forecast, the pacific inclination of democracies. He reasoned that "citizens . . . will have a great hesitation in . . . . calling down on themselves all the miseries of war." (8) But this valid insight is incomplete. There is a deeper explanation. Democracy is not just a mechanism; it entails a spirit of compromise and self-restraint. At bottom, democracy is the willingness to resolve civil disputes without recourse to violence. Nations that embrace this ethos in the conduct of their domestic affairs are naturally more predisposed to embrace it in their dealings with other nations. Russett aimed to explain why democracies are more peaceful toward one another. To do this, he constructed two models. One hypothesized that the cause lay in the mechanics of democratic decision-making (the "structural/institutional model"), the other that it lay in the democratic ethos (the "cultural/normative model"). His statistical assessments led him to conclude that: "almost always the cultural/normative model shows a consistent effect on conflict occurrence and war. The structural/institutional model sometimes provides a significant relationship but often does not." (9) If it is the ethos that makes democratic states more peaceful toward each other, would not that ethos also make them more peaceful in general? Russett implies that the answer is no, because to his mind a critical element in the peaceful behavior of democracies toward other democracies is their anticipation of a conciliatory attitude by their counterpart. But this is too pat. The attitude of live-and-let-live cannot be turned on and off like a spigot. The citizens and officials of democracies recognize that other states, however governed, have legitimate interests, and they are disposed to try to accommodate those interests except when the other party's behavior seems threatening or outrageous. A different kind of challenge to the thesis that democracies are more peaceful has been posed by the political scientists Edward G. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. They claim statistical support for the proposition that while fully fledged democracies may be pacific, Ain th[e] transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less." (10) However, like others, they measure a state's likelihood of becoming involved in a war but do not report attempting to determine the cause or fault. Moreover, they acknowledge that their research revealed not only an increased likelihood for a state to become involved in a war when it was growing more democratic, but an almost equal increase for states growing less democratic. This raises the possibility that the effects they were observing were caused simply by political change per se, rather than by democratization. Finally, they implicitly acknowledge that the relationship of democratization and peacefulness may change over historical periods. There is no reason to suppose that any such relationship is governed by an immutable law. Since their empirical base reaches back to 1811, any effect they report, even if accurately interpreted, may not hold in the contemporary world. They note that "in [some] recent cases, in contrast to some of our historical results, the rule seems to be: go fully democratic, or don't go at all." But according to Freedom House, some 62.5 percent of extant governments were chosen in legitimate elections. (12) (This is a much larger proportion than are adjudged by Freedom House to be "free states," a more demanding criterion, and it includes many weakly democratic states.) Of the remaining 37.5 percent, a large number are experiencing some degree of democratization or heavy pressure in that direction. So the choice "don't go at all" (11) is rarely realistic in the contemporary world. These statistics also contain the answer to those who doubt the second proposition behind Fukuyama's forecast, namely, that the world is growing more democratic. Skeptics have drawn upon Samuel Huntington's fine book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Huntington says that the democratization trend that began in the mid-1970s in Portugal, Greece and Spain is the third such episode. The first "wave" of democratization began with the American Revolution and lasted through the aftermath of World War I, coming to an end in the interwar years when much of Europe regressed back to fascist or military dictatorship. The second wave, in this telling, followed World War II when wholesale decolonization gave rise to a raft of new democracies. Most of these, notably in Africa, collapsed into dictatorship by the 1960s, bringing the second wave to its end. Those who follow Huntington's argument may take the failure of democracy in several of the former Soviet republics and some other instances of backsliding since 1989 to signal the end of the third wave. Such an impression, however, would be misleading. One unsatisfying thing about Huntington's "waves" is their unevenness. The first lasted about 150 years, the second about 20. How long should we expect the third to endure? If it is like the second, it will ebb any day now, but if it is like the first, it will run until the around the year 2125. And by then--who knows?--perhaps mankind will have incinerated itself, moved to another planet, or even devised a better political system. Further, Huntington's metaphor implies a lack of overall progress or direction. Waves rise and fall. But each of the reverses that followed Huntington's two waves was brief, and each new wave raised the number of democracies higher than before. Huntington does, however, present a statistic that seems to weigh heavily against any unidirectional interpretation of democratic progress. The proportion of states that were democratic in 1990 (45%), he says, was identical to the proportion in 1922. (13) But there are two answers to this. In 1922 there were only 64 states; in 1990 there were 165. But the number of peoples had not grown appreciably. The difference was that in 1922 most peoples lived in colonies, and they were not counted as states. The 64 states of that time were mostly the advanced countries. Of those, two thirds had become democratic by 1990, which was a significant gain. The additional 101 states counted in 1990 were mostly former colonies. Only a minority, albeit a substantial one, were democratic in 1990, but since virtually none of those were democratic in 1922, that was also a significant gain. In short, there was progress all around, but this was obscured by asking what percentage of states were democratic. Asking the question this way means that a people who were subjected to a domestic dictator counted as a non-democracy, but a people who were subjected to a foreign dictator did not count at all. Moreover, while the criteria for judging a state democratic vary, the statistic that 45 percent of states were democratic in 1990 corresponds with Freedom House's count of "democratic" polities (as opposed to its smaller count of "free" countries, a more demanding criterion). But by this same count, Freedom House now says that the proportion of democracies has grown to 62.5 percent. In other words, the "third wave" has not abated. That Freedom House could count 120 freely elected governments by early 2001 (out of a total of 192 independent states) bespeaks a vast transformation in human governance within the span of 225 years. In 1775, the number of democracies was zero. In 1776, the birth of the United States of America brought the total up to one. Since then, democracy has spread at an accelerating pace, most of the growth having occurred within the twentieth century, with greatest momentum since 1974. That this momentum has slackened somewhat since its pinnacle in 1989, destined to be remembered as one of the most revolutionary years in all history, was inevitable. So many peoples were swept up in the democratic tide that there was certain to be some backsliding. Most countries' democratic evolution has included some fits and starts rather than a smooth progression. So it must be for the world as a whole. Nonetheless, the overall trend remains powerful and clear. Despite the backsliding, the number and proportion of democracies stands higher today than ever before. This progress offers a source of hope for enduring nuclear peace. The danger of nuclear war was radically reduced almost overnight when Russia abandoned Communism and turned to democracy. For other ominous corners of the world, we may be in a kind of race between the emergence or growth of nuclear arsenals and the advent of democratization. If this is so, the greatest cause for worry may rest with the Moslem Middle East where nuclear arsenals do not yet exist but where the prospects for democracy may be still more remote.

Empirically, democracy saves lives the alternative is autocracy which breeds conflict and extremismCraner and Wollack 8 (Lorne W. Craner, President of the International Republican Institute, and Kenneth Wollack, President of the National Democratic Institute, New Directions for Democracy Promotion, http://www.ndi.org/files/2344_newdirections_engpdf_07242008.pdf)

Every major peace agreement negotiated in the last two decades has included, as a principal goal, elections and the possibility of democratic governance. Developing democratic processes in the course of building sustainable peace is central to achieving stability and securityboth domestically in those countries and internationally. The return on this investment is astronomical. The value of lives saved in places as diverse as East Timor, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Nepal, El Salvador, and Kosovo, to list only a few, goes far beyond the expenditures that help to build inclusive political processes that cause belligerents to put down arms and engage in peaceful competition for governmental power. The value in realized and potential economic development and the economic implications derived from international peace and stability also have to be considered in the equation. Democracies provide the best alternatives for fostering peace across borders by maintaining internal stability and achieving economic and social development. Conversely, autocracy, corruption, and lack of accountability exacerbate powerlessness, poverty, and intolerance and breed instability, increasing the potential for conflict and extremism, while hindering efforts to address famine, disease, and other matters essential for human development.

Solves WarDemocracy prevents war democratic states fight in self-defense only no risk of aggressive wars against other democracies separation of powers toleration and respect among citizens Rieffer-Flanagan 10 (Barbara Ann J. Rieffer-Flanagan, assistant professor of political science at Central Washington University, Democratic peace in theory and practice, edited by Steven W. Hook, p. 264)

There are other aspects of liberal democracies that encourage restraint with regard to war. According to John Rawls (1999), citizens in democratic states fight in self-defense, not for economic or territorial gain. Thus, aggressive wars against other liberal democratic societies are improbable. It has also been argued that the separation of powers found in many democratic political systems can slow down and limit the drive to war (Russett 1993, 40). Furthemore, most citizens in liberal democratic societies hold norms of toleration and respect for their fellow citizens. While they may disagree on particular issues, they respect the rights of other citizens to participate and voice their views. If we extend these notions of respect and toleration to liberal democratic peoples in foreign countries, the likelihood of war decreases. Ultimately, the cultural and normative framework that democratic citizens develop results in peaceful values and expectations and relations between states (Schafer & Walker 2006).

Backstop Against TurnsDemocracy acts as a backstop against all of their impacts no democratically elected leader will allow policy disastersMcGinnis and Somin 7John and Ilya, Professor of Law @ NU and Georgetown Respectively, Should International Law Be Part of Our Law?, Stanford Law Review, Questia

Finally, democratic accountability also plays a crucial role in preventing major public policy disasters, since elected leaders know that a highly visible catastrophic failure is likely to lead to punishment at the polls. For example, it is striking that no democratic nation, no matter how poor, has ever had a mass famine within its borders, (96) whereas such events are common in authoritarian and totalitarian states. (97) More generally, democracy serves as a check on self-dealing by political elites and helps ensure, at least to some extent, that leaders enact policies that serve the interests of their people.

Democracy Good EmpiricsDemocracy solves all disadvantages empirical studies prove democratic governments resolve conflicts peacefullyNdulo, Professor of Law @ Cornell, 3Muno Ndulo, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Zambia; Professor, Cornell Law School; Director, Institute for African Development, Cornell University, 2003, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Lexis

A 1993 study of 233 internal conflicts around the world, concluded that democracies had a far better record of peacefully managing such conflicts than alternative systems. 54 The empirical fact that democracies are far less likely to go to war with each other than other regimes further substantiates the relationship between poverty and conflict, and their impact on the democratization process. Authoritarian or totalitarian systems simply do not have the institutions by which conflicts in society can be peacefully expressed and resolved. Dictatorships generally try to deal with conflicts by ignoring or denying them, or by suppressing them using state coercive apparatus. While such methods may indeed control conflicts (albeit usually at a severe cost), they [End Page 323] generally cannot resolve them. 56 The implication of fundamental issues such as identity and cultural integrity in such conflicts means that almost nothing short of mass expulsions or genocide will make the conflicts disappear. It is generally believed that the ethnic conflict that erupted in the former Yugoslavia in 1990, for example, had been suppressed for almost fifty years during the years of communism, but was always present and unresolved. 57 An authoritarian system can present an illusion of short-term stability through its use of coercive state power to suppress dissent, but is unlikely to sustain that stability over the long term. In contrast, it is argued that under a democracy, disputes that arise are likely to be processed, debated, and reacted to, rather than resolved definitively and permanently. 58 In short, democracy operates as a conflict management system. As Harris and Reilly have observed, it is this ability to handle conflicts without having to suppress them or be engulfed by them that distinguishes democratic governance from authoritarian rule. 59 This does not by any means suggest that democracy is perfect, or that the mere establishment of democratic governance will itself lead to the settlement or prevention of conflicts. There are a number of cases in which democratic institutions are hastily "transplanted" to post-conflict societies without taking root or with a subsequent resumption of hostilitiesas in the cases of Burundi, Cambodia and Liberia. 60 But it is equally true that these cases offer many lessons as to how deals are struck and which choices are of crucial importance to building a sustainable outcome. 61 Democracy is often messy and difficult, but it is also the best hope for building sustainable solutions to most conflicts in the world. However, democratic institutions have to be strong enough to function effectively and fairly. They can only be strong where the economic conditions are such that they can be sustained.

The most comprehensive empirical models prove the viability of democratic peace theoryWard et al, Professor of Political Science, 98Michael D. Ward, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, and Kristian S. Gleditsch, graduate research trainee in the Globalization and Democratization Program, et al, at University of Colorado, Boulder, March 1998, The American Political Science Review

As Figure 1 details, democratization-whether in mild or strong degrees-is accompanied by reduction, not increase, in the risk of war. Though we do not present graphs of the converse, changes toward autocracy and reversals of democratization are accompanied by increased risks of war involvement. These risks are proportionally greater than the decline or benefits of further democratization. Thus, there is strong evidence that democratization has a monadic effect: It reduces the probability that a country will be involved in a war. Although the probability of war involvement does not decrease linearly, it does decrease monotonically, so that over the entire range of democracy minus autocracy values, there is a reduction of about 50%. During the democratic transition, at every point along the way as well as at the end points, there is an attendant reduction in the probability of a polity being at war. We also find that reversals toward greater levels of autocracy (not shown) not only increase the probability of war involvement. Apparently, it is more dangerous to be at a given level of democracy if that represents an increase in the level of authoritarianism than it is to be at the same level of democracy if that represents a decrease in the authoritarian character of the regime. Stated differently, reversals are riskier than progress.ll It has been argued that institutional constraints are theoretically important in translating the effect of democracy into foreign policy (Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson, and Woller 1992; Siverson 1995). If the idea of democracy is separated into its major components, then the degree of executive constraints empirically dominates the democracy and autocracy scales (Gleditsch and Ward 1997). Accordingly, we demonstrate that moving toward stronger executive constraints also yields a visible reduction in the risk of war.It continuesCONCLUSION Our results show that the process of democratization is accompanied by a decrease in the probability of a country being involved in a war, either as a target or as an initiator. These results were obtained with a more current (and corrected) database than was used in earlier work, and our analyses also focus more clearly on the process of transition. In comparison to studies that look only at the existence of change in authority characteristics, we examine the direction, magnitude, and smoothness of the transition process.

Solves Econ Collapse

Democracy solves economic decline autocracies are twice as likely to experience economic collapseMcFaul 10 (Michael McFaul, Hoover Senior Fellow, professor of polisci and director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford and nonresident associate at Carnegie, Advancing Democracy Abroad, p. 46-47)

Just as democracy immunizes a society from the worst forms of governments, democracy also protects a society from the worst forms of economic disasters. Autocracies do not. No democracy has ever experienced the level of economic and social dislocation of Stalinism, Maoism, or Pol Potism. To be sure, democratic countries all suffered during the Great Depression, and economic downturns continue to occur in the democratic world. However, the frequency and the scale of these economic swings are much more moderate in the democratic world compared to the autocratic world. According to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton Root, [T]he variance in economic growth rates for autocracies is about twice what it is for democracies. Or put another way, Mort Halperin, Joseph Siegle, and Michael Weinstein calculate that, Over the past 40 years, autocracies have been twice as likely to experience economic collapse [that is, a shrinkage in annual GDP per capita of 10 percent or more] as democracies. Really bad policies that can bring economic ruin occur less frequently in democracies. In the long run, democratic regimes produce policies that favor sustained growth and prosperity just as well as authoritarian regimes do. On average, democratic regimes also have higher levels of trade liberalization, which in turn generates higher growth rates. Democratic regimes also foster the accumulation of human capital, which has a positive effect on economic development. Rulers in democracies also must be more responsive to the basic needs of their population, which does not always produce positive economic results in the short run, but does compel political leaders to pursue policies beneficial to majorities over the long run. In contrast, authoritarian regimes are accountable to a powerful rich minority, and thus are more likely to prey on parts of society. These regimes also have incentives to extract the maximum possible surplus to use for their own purposes, not for the welfare of the population as a whole. Contemporary comparisons of regime type and growth usually focus on the developing world, but leaving out the developed economies skews the sample. When all countries are included in the analysis, the oldest democracies in the world are also the richest countries in the world: only two of the twenty-five highest ranking countries on the Human Development Index Hong Kong (if it is still counted as an independent political entity) and Singapore are not democracies.

Terrorism

Lack of democracy causes terrorism Pillar 10 (Paul R. Pillar, professor and director of graduate studies at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown, Democratic peace in theory and practice, edited by Steven W. Hook, p. 246-7)

Although perhaps not reducible to convincing statistics, one empirical pattern that suggests a relationship between a lack of democracy and the roots of terrorism concerns two of the most conspicuous attributes of the Middle East. One is that the Middle East, more than any other region, has been the birthplace of the terrorist groups and individual terrorists most worrisome to the West today. The other is that the Middle East is by most measures the least democratic region of the world. Admittedly, there are other important characteristics of the Middle East that are pertinent to the role terrorism has played in that region, such as the long-running conflict between Israelis and Arabs. But the correlation between terrorism and the paucity of democracy is no accident. The connection can be understood by reflecting on the most basic principles of political systems and the articulation of political interests. Terrorism is a difficult, dangerous, illegal, and, for most people, immoral business. Few would venture into it if easier and less nasty ways of pursuing the same objectives were available. As a political act, terrorism is used to pursue various interests and express various grievances that more often are pursued and expressed peacefully, when permitted by the political system. Political systems that offer peaceful channels democracies are less likely to drive people into terrorism than systems that do not (Pillar 2007). That is a simple statement of the basic principle involved. In practice, of course, counterexamples abound. Terrorism has many contributing causes, at the level of nations and societies as well as at the level of individuals and their personal situations and psychologies. Any explanation based on one cause, be it a lack of democracy or any other, always will fall short. Yet that does not deny the relevance of the cause or the prospect that addressing that cause could change the magnitude and nature of the terrorist problem. The principle just offered is consistent with one of the most basic elements of traditional democratic theory. Democracies are good because they are more likely than other political systems to ensure that the interests of the ruled will guide the actions of the rulers. That is because the ruled have more of a role in selecting and removing their rulers. Many causes that terrorist groups pursue involve a population (often defined in terms of religion, ethnicity, or class) that to some degree sees itself as being ruled in a manner contrary to its interests and as not having peaceful means to rectify the situation. Democratic theory offers other insights pertinent to how more democracy might mean less of a proclivity toward terrorism. Democracy is good not only because it provides a mechanism for the ruled to choose and cashier their rulers but also because of the effects that broad participation in government has on the temperament and habits of the ruled themselves. As one political theorist puts it, a justification for democracy is as a means to producing certain states or attitudes of mind in the citizens, independence of mind, respect and tolerance for others, interest in public affairs, willingness to think about them and discuss them, and a sense of responsibility for the whole community (Field 1963). Several of these qualities are the antithesis of the way most terrorists think and operate. Certainly, intolerance and a lack of respect for opposing opinions are central characteristics of the terrorist mindset. Disdain for free discussion a preference for blowing up negotiating tables rather than sitting at them is another. Within most terrorist groups there typically is not only a lack of independent thinking but also assiduous efforts by group leaders to quash any hint of it. A sense of belonging to and responsibility for the community also are important. That means not merely a mythical or longed-for community, such as the umma, or community of believers in Islam, that Islamists often invoke as one of their reference points. It means the political system, nation-state, province, and town in which an individual lives. Alienation from ones community is an element in the sources of extremism in much of the Middle East and, to a lesser degree, in other parts of the Muslim world. People see themselves as having little or no stake in the states and political systems in which they live. They are subjects of a political order but do not feel a part of it. Consequently, they may have little compunction about turning violently against that order. To the extent that democracy by directly, peacefully, and meaningfully involving citizens in the political process imparts a sense of belonging to the political system, it becomes a disincentive against such violent rejection.

Human Rights

Democracy key to human rightsShale Horowitz, Ass. Prof. Of Polisci at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Albrecht Schnabel, Senior Research Fellow at Swiss Peace Foundation, Bern, 2004In Human Rights and Societies in Transition, ed. Horowitz and Schnabel, p. 7.However, the situation for other human rights is likely to be worse if political rights and freedoms are weak or non-existent. Authoritarian regimes and leaders typically use their discretionary power to attack and weaken their political opponents and to prevent new opposition from arising. This strategy usually goes beyond action against political freedoms proper: authoritarian regimes are more likely to try to monopolize control of the mass media and other "informational" institutions, particularly the educational system and religious institutions. This control will be used to shut out opposition voices, including human rights advocates. At the same time, the regime will argue that local traditions and historical experiences justify its own practices and that they are threatened by the supposedly "alien" demands of the opposition. Authoritarian regimes are also more likely to politicize economic subsidies and regulations in an effort to build bases of support through patronage networks. This results in more widespread discrimination and greater neglect in providing public goods. Last, authoritarian regimes may initiate or perpetuate civil and international conflicts, in order to divert public attention away from political and economic difficulties that undermine their legitimacy.6 These likely interactions are shown in figure 1.1

The protection of human rights is necessary for the survival of the speciesCopelon 99(Profesor of Law at NY School of Law, 3 N.Y. City L. Rev.) The indivisible human rights framework survived the Cold War despite U.S. machinations to truncate it in the international arena. The framework is there to shatter the myth of the superiority [*72] of the U.S. version of rights, to rebuild popular expectations, and to help develop a culture and jurisprudence of indivisible human rights. Indeed, in the face of systemic inequality and crushing poverty, violence by official and private actors, globalization of the market economy, and military and environmental depredation, the human rights framework is gaining new force and new dimensions. It is being broadened today by the movements of people in different parts of the world, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere and significantly of women, who understand the protection of human rights as a matter of individual and collective human survival and betterment. Also emerging is a notion of third-generation rights, encompassing collective rights that cannot be solved on a state-by-state basis and that call for new mechanisms of accountability, particularly affecting Northern countries. The emerging rights include human-centered sustainable development, environmental protection, peace, and security. 38 Given the poverty and inequality in the United States as well as our role in the world, it is imperative that we bring the human rights framework to bear on both domestic and foreign policy.A2: Democratization Bad

Democratization now, US intervention critical to success

The Nation (Pakistan), April 16, 2011Obama's dilemma!, http://mespectator.blogspot.com/2011/04/obamas-middle-east-dilemma.html DA 5/1/11

When US President Barack Obama used the Cairo University as a platform to lecture the Arab world on the merits of democracy a couple of years ago, he did not imagine that his words and speeches would be tested before the end of his presidency. In fact, the Arab revolutions have put Obama and his political advisers off guard, and have presented them with a dilemma that needs to be dealt with at some point.In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and even in Libya, Washington seemed to have been quite content with the status quo. It was forced to adjust its policy only when it became absolutely clear that change in these countries was inevitable. Several excuses have been given to justify the lack of interest by the Obama administration in democracy promotion in the Middle East (ME). Absorbed with his internal problems and preoccupied with re-establishing America's leadership abroad, Obama's utmost priorities are to resuscitate the US economy and end two unnecessary wars, i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been argued. Given the golden opportunity presented by the uprisings in the Arab world to advance the cause of democracy, however, these excuses are hardly convincing. Unlike the costly intervention in Iraq, for example, the US could contribute to establishing democracies in the Arab world at a cheap price. Over the past two years, since he became President, Obama has not been really interested in the kind of rhetoric which featured prominently under his predecessor and focused on democratic change in the ME. Words such as democracy promotion' have almost disappeared from Obama's public speeches. This trend brought to the fore the eternal question in US policy circles about the ability of America to live with democratic governments in the ME. The thesis that America must support dictators or else accept to live with the very people it regards as dangerous for its interests and core values has become the compass that directs US policy in the ME under Obama.

A2: Democratization BadDemocratization inevitable, US needs to provide assistance to consolidate it

Congressional Documents and Publications, April 13, 2011, House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia Hearing; "Shifting Sands: Political Transitions in the Middle East, Part 1."; Testimony by Scott Carpenter, Keston Family Fellow, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/112/Car041311.pdf DOA: 5/2/11

For the Saudis, however, there is an absolute paranoia surrounding the Shia, who they believe are being supported wholly by the revolutionaries in Tehran. They hear Iranian propaganda about the Egyptian revolution being a continuation of Iran's revolution as truth. It is for this reason that the Saudis have pressured the King of Bahrain and bankrolled the hard-liners within the Khalifa family to guarantee that Bahraini Shia demands are in no way met.The Saudis risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy which will be wholly negative for U.S. interests in the region. By urging the King of Bahrain to crush the uprising there, the government of Saudi Arabia has handed Iran, Hezbollah, and other Shia reactionaries, such as Iraq's Muqtada al-Sadr, a new rallying cry. The Saudis are increasing public pressure on the government of Iraq, for example, which provides Hezbollah with a welcome distraction at a time when its patron in Damascus is under pressure. Clearly, the vehement anti-Shia rhetoric and violence used against Bahrian's Shia in recent weeks is contributing to the radicalization of Shia across the region who, until Saudi troops rolled across the causeway, were content to be Iraqi, Kuwati,Yemeni, Saudi or Bahraini. Ultimately, in my view, the forest fire th