security/ realism bad kritik - wcdebate.com€¦ · web viewfrom that ethic derives the...

West Coast Publishing 1Securitization/Statism Good/Bad

Securitization and Statism Good/Bad

Securitization Bad – Violence...................................................................................................................................2Securitization Bad – War..........................................................................................................................................3Securitization Bad – Genocide.................................................................................................................................4Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Micropolitical Resistance.........................................................................5Securitization Bad – Link – Foreign Policy................................................................................................................6Securitization Bad – Link – State of Emergency........................................................................................................7Securitization Bad – Link – War as Event..................................................................................................................8Securitization Bad – Link – Peace as Event...............................................................................................................9Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Rejection...............................................................................................10Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Debate Performance.............................................................................11Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Questioning...........................................................................................12Securitization Bad – A2: Perm................................................................................................................................13

Statism K – Link – Social Progress...........................................................................................................................14Statism K – Impact – Nuclear War..........................................................................................................................15Statism K – Impact – Nuclear Extinction.................................................................................................................16Statism K – Impact – Individual Rights...................................................................................................................17Statism K – Alternative – Rejection........................................................................................................................18Statism K – Alternative – A2: Permutation.............................................................................................................19

Securitization Good – War.....................................................................................................................................20Securitization Good – Terrorism/War....................................................................................................................21Securitization Good – Predictions Key....................................................................................................................22Securitization Good – Empowering........................................................................................................................23

A2: Statism K – Alternative Fails – Rejection..........................................................................................................24A2: Statism K – Reformism Good...........................................................................................................................25A2: Statism K – State Good – Morality...................................................................................................................26A2: Statism K – Alternative Fails – Totalizing..........................................................................................................27


Securitization Bad – Violence

A. SECURITY DISCOURSE EMPLOYS A WILLINGNESS TO COMMIT ALL VIOLENCEDavid Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, and Michael Dillon, professor of politics at Lancaster University, The Political Subject of Violence, 1993 p. 29

From that ethic derives the characteristic way in which the politics of security makes political order present in specific material conditions of social existence. Subject to scrutiny from within the interpretive frame of the end of philosophy, it turns out, however, that security is more than a mere goal, even the chief goal, of the rationally ordered means-ends calculus which defines the political subject of violence. It is, rather, the generative and immanent principle of formation of that political subject. To bring security into question, therefore, is to bring the entire axiomatic foundation and architecture of this political construction into question. In the end process, that questioning further problematises the foundation of epistemic realism which underpins the intellectual discourses which claim to account for and speak the truth about the political subject of violence; notably the discipline of international relations, whose disciplinary response to this un-securing of its own boundaries has naturally been to elicit, from the grip of epistemic realism in which it seeks to fasten itself ever more strongly, more security against its new enemies.

B. THIS DISCOURSE CREATES A SELF=FULFILLING PROPHECY WHERE THE THREATS WE PERCIEVE BEGIN TO OCCUR IN REALITYDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998.WRITING SECURITY, p. 49.

To talk of the endangered nature of the modem world and the enemies and threats that abound in it is thus not to offer a simple ethnographic description of our condition; it is to invoke a discourse of danger through which the incipient ambiguity of our world can be grounded in accordance with the insistences of identity. Danger (death, in its ultimate form) might therefore be thought of as the new god for the modern world of states, not because it is peculiar to our time, but because it replicates the logic of Christendom’s evangelism of fear. a Indeed, in a world in which state identity is secured through discourses of danger, some low tactics are employed to serve these high ideals. These tactics are not inherent to the logic of identity, which only requires the definition of difference. But securing an ordered self and an ordered world—particularly when the field upon which this process operates is as extensive as a state — involves defining elements that stand in the way of order as forms of “othemess.”~ Such obstructions to order “become dirt, matter out of place, irrationality, abnormality, waste, sickness, perversity, incapacity, disorder, madness, unfreedom.

C. THE AFFIRMATIVE’S SECURITY PARADIGM ENABLES VIOLENCE TO CONTINUEDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998.WRITING SECURITY, p. 46-47.

Under Christendom, divine providence was the teleology that determined the quality of the world for “man” and therefore the necessary mode of behavior required of “men.” Faced with contingency and unable to find the solution in God, ~ reconstructs the world through “self-assertion”: “Deprived of God’s hiddenness of metaphysical guarantees for the world, man constructs for himself a counterworld of elementary rationality and manipulability.”36 This construction is not free of resistances, nor is it entirely volitional. The position that was occupied by the teleology of divine providence is reoccupied by the notion that the world has an endangering quality that prescribes man’s basic mode of behavior. Specifically, this quality is marked by the metaphor of the “unfinished world” — a world that is ambiguous, uncertain, and dangerous — which is a condition of the possibility of human action: “The ‘unfinished world’ becomes the metaphor of a teleology that discovers reason as its own immanent rule that up until then had been projected onto nature.”37 The “unfinished world” provides the necessary teleology for human action because a complete world means that all the activities of “men” would be for nothing. If the world is unfinished, uncertain, and dangerous, then the vocation of “man” is to take part in its (hoped for but never realized) completion.


Securitization Bad – War

Structural violence is the root cause of warWayne S. Cox, lecturer in political studies at Queen's University, 1994, “U.S. Hegemony & the Management of Trade”, Beyond Positivsm: Critical Reflections on International Relations, page 64-65

The term structural violence is used here to describe a process of existing power struggles between social groups. Whereas mainstream international conflict studies place the focus of their analyses upon the actual physical act of violence (usually the direct result of the use of military force in the name of states), the theoretical framework proposed here seeks to broaden the definition of violence to include structural relations of hegemony between social groups . In effect, the physical act of violence is but the external expression of an ongoing structural relationship between social groups-a relationship built on structural violence. A definition of conflict that focuses upon the physical act of violence can therefore only describe the results of violence rather than understand the overall process itself. Johan Galtung has provided a basis for the model of sociostructural violence, arguing that "hostile aggression is no inseparable part of the innate structure of the 'minds of men,' but added to it from the outside, e.g. through special socialization processes" (Caltung, llJ64:l)5). According to Galtung, although IIwoutward observations of aggression (in this case, organized politicill acts of violence) are worthy of study in themselves, they are merely a reflection, or a result of, existing sociostructural relationships that are arranged by a set of power relations. These relationships result in an "interaction system [which] is a multi-dimensional system of stratification" (Galtung, 1964:96). From here, Galtung set up a seril's of possible relationships between groups, which are simply characterized as Topdog (T) and Underdog (U). Throughout his discussion, Galtung has focused on the notion of power relationships dictated by the Topdog.

Structural issues are more likely to cause conflict David Singer, former Professor of Sociology, 1980, “Accounting for International War: The State of The Discipline,” Annual Review of Sociology, pg. 350

Despite the possible attractiveness of the above argument,f ew other investigatorsi nto the war/peace question have accepted it, and as a result, a fair fraction of research on the systemic conditions associated with war has emanated so far largely from the Michigan Correlates of War project. Further, of the three types of systemic conditions - mate-rial, structural, and cultural - most of the reproducible evidence to date reflects the structural dimension (Sullivan, 1976). Un-fortunately, there is little systematic work on such material attributes of the system as weapons technology, industrial development, resourcel imits, climate,o r demographicp at-terns. Similarly, outside of some preliminary efforts by Kegley et al. (1979), Choi (1978), and Gantzel (1972) little effort has been invested in the search for systematic con-nections between cultural conditions and the incidence of war. On the other hand, re-searchers of a scientific bent have been as assiduous in their examination of structural correlates of war as their methodologically traditional colleagues, and it is to that litera-ture that we now turn. Perhaps the most plausible of the system's structural attributes in the war/peacec ontext is that of the configurations generated by alliance bonds, with those generated by dis-tributions of power following closely behind. Looking first at the structural characteristic knowna s bipolarity, we usuallyh ave in mind the extent to which the nations in a given geographical region, or in the major power sub-set( a functional' region'), or world-wide, are clustered into two clearly opposed coali-tions. While there are several definitions of bipolarity and rather diverse operational indicators, it generally implies the degree of conformity to an 'ideal' condition in which all of the nations are - via military alli-ance - in one or another of two equally powerful coalitions with no alliance bonds .


S ecuritization Bad – Genocide

1. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE ELIMINATES THE OTHERRonnie D. Lipschutz, Professor at UC Santa Cruz, 2000. AFTER AUTHORITY, p. 61.

Nuclear deterrence, in other words, came to depend not on physical destructiveness, but rather on the maintenance of borders on the ground and in the mind: To be secure, one had to believe that, were the Other to cross the line, both the self and the Other would cease to exist; to maintain the line and be secure meant living with the risk that it might be crossed. Although neither side would dare to physically cross the line, it was still possible that mental crossings—what was called “Finlandization” (a slur)—could occur. The threat of nothingness secured the ontology of being, but at great political cost to those who pursued the formula. Authority deemed the fiction necessary to survival. Since 1991, the nuclear threat has ceased to wield its old cognitive force, and the borders in the mind and on the ground have vanished, in spite of repeated efforts to draw them anew, perhaps farther East, perhaps elsewhere. To be sure, the United States and Russia still do not launch missiles against each other because both know the result would be annihilation. But the same is true for France and Britain, or China and Israel. It was the existence of the Other across the border that gave national security its power and authority; it is the disappearance of the border that has vanquished that power. Where Russia is now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no need to be secured.26 France is fully capable of doing great damage to the United States, but that capability has no meaning in terms of U.S. security. In other words, if safety cannot be distinguished from danger, there is no border and, hence, no security problem.

2. SECURITY DISCOURSES CAUSE GENOCIDE AND MASS DEATHRonnie D. Lipschutz, Professor at UC Santa Cruz, 2000. AFTER AUTHORITY, p. 144.

Inherent, too, in such national organicism was a notion of “Purity,” not only of origins but also of motives. Long-term survival could not be attributed simply to luck; it had, as well, to be a matter of maintaining one nation’s moral distinctiveness from those who were not of the nation, and of accounting for survival with a teleological national mythology. Maintenance of such distinction through culture was not, however, enough; there also had to be dangers associated with difference. These dangers, often as not imagined into being (rather than being “real” in any objective sense), made concrete those borders separating one state from another.’0 Those living in borderlands were forced to choose one side or the other. Anyone on the wrong side of such a border were, quite often, forcibly made to migrate across them, as with Native Americans during the nineteenth century, Greeks and Turks after World War I, Germans after World War II, Hindus and Muslims in 1947, Palestinians on the wrong side of the moving “Green Line” between 1947 and 1949, and many others since. Once again, a form of moral order was invoked and moral purity maintained.

3. SECURITIZATION IS LIKE NAZISM IT EMPLOYS A WILLINGNESS TO ELIMINATE WHOLE GROUPS OF PEOPLE, NATIONS, AND COMMUNITIESRonnie D. Lipschutz, Professor at UC Santa Cruz, 2000. AFTER AUTHORITY, p. 145.

The apotheosis of this politics of danger took place during World War II in those areas of Europe that fell under Nazi rule. To the national socialist regime, guardian of the moral and biological purity of all Germans, whether within the Third Reich or not, races of a lower order were threats to both (Pois, 1986). The Nazi moral hierarchy could live with Slays restricted to their place (although it intended eventually to eliminate them or force them to move further to the east). It could not tolerate Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, all of whom tended toward high mobility across social, geographical, and sexual borders, and who treated with what the national socialists regarded as ‘impure” ideas and practices (e.g., “Jewish science”). Inasmuch as containment in ghettos and camps was insufficient to protect the German nation from these impurities, extermination came to be seen as a necessity. And, so, millions died. Ethnic cleansing thus serves a double purpose. Whereas forced transfer leaves alive aggrieved populations whose territorial claims might, at some time in the future, gain international legitimacy and recognition, genocide does not. Not only does it remove contenders for title to property, it also eliminates all witnesses to the deadly actions of the “moral community”—and, at times, as in towns and cities in the former Yugoslavia and other partitioned or


cleansed territories, all physical traces, too.1’ Any who are left behind will testify to the evil intentions of those Others who have so conveniently been eliminated or erased from the scene.


Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Micropolitical Resistance

ENACTING MICROPOLITICAL RESISTANCE CAN CREATE CHANGE AND ASSERT A NEW ETHICAL REALITY INTO POLITICSDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, and Michael Dillon, Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, 1993. THE POLITICAL SUBJECT OF VIOLENCE, p. 172.

That resistance is a choice, and not an obligation, will prove for some the unsatisfactory nature of a perspective like this. After all, they will argue, evil is evil, and our resistance cannot depend upon the luxury of opting in or out of opposition as we desire. Were life so simple, and evil always so easily and unproblematically identifiable, the unambiguous nature of such declarations would be welcome. But when ‘we’ (individuals and states) have opposed some murderous despots through the application of lofty principles, while turning a blind eye to or encouraging others, it is un-becoming (neither helpful nor honest) to demand morally absolute prescriptions from others as the price of their participation in the debate about how ‘we’ can and should act. Resistance, however, is a choice. There is no passivity or quietism entailed in this affirmation. We can act. We do act. All the time. Even, and perhaps particularly, when asserting the stance which Stephen White ultimately finds unsatisfactory because it does not meet his requirement of what it means to act, politically; to act with regard to what, in Simon Critchley’s chapter, is signifed as Ia politque. Moreover, in Alan White’s reading, Nietzsche clearly indicates that for life to be affirmed resistance to despotism is vital.42 Besides, does a dancer need to be told by someone off the floor that their art is being interfered with?

ONLY BY WITHDRAWING OUR SUPPORT FROM SECURITY DISCOURSES CAN WE EVER STOP INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCERonnie D. Lipschutz, Professor at UC Santa Cruz, 2000. AFTER AUTHORITY, p. 53-55.

In a cohesive, conceptually robust state, a broadly accepted definition of both national identity and the security speech acts needed to freeze that identity is developed and reinforced by each of these three groups as a form of Gramscian hegemony. Each group, in turn, contributes to the discourses that maintain that conventional wisdom. The authority and power of these groups, acting for and within the state, is marshaled against putative threats, both internal and external. The institutions of the state oversee policies directed against these threats, and the specific “idea” of the state- and identity of its citizens- comes to be reinforced in terms of, how the state stands and acts in relation to those threats and, second, the way those responsible for maintenance of the idea (through socialization) communicate this relationship. This outcome is a generally accepted authorized (by authorities) consensus on what is to e protected the means through which this is to be accomplished and the consequences if such actions are not taken. Such a consensus is by no means immutable. Things change. A catastrophe can undermine a consensual national epistemology, as in the case of Germany and Japan after World War II. But it is also possible that what might appear to others to be a disaster, for example, Iraq’s defeat in 1991, can also provide an opportunity for reinforcement of that epistemology, as has been apparent in Iraq since 1991. The systemic changes discussed earlier can also undermine consensus, although much more slowly. Domestic and external forces can act so as to chip away or splinter hegemonic discourses by undermining the ideational and material bases essential to their maintenance and the authority of those who profess them. If there is some question about the legitimacy of the state and its institutions, or the validity of its authority, those in positions of discursive power may decide to rearticulate the relationship between citizen identity and state idea.

Seeing war as embedded is designed to disrupt crisis-based politicsChris Cuomo is a theorist, activist, and artist, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and Director of the Institute for Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia 11.4, 1996

It is of course crucial that the analysis I recommend here notice similarities, patterns, and connections without collapsing all forms and instances of militarism or of state-sponsored violence into one neat picture. It is also important to emphasize that an expanded conception of war is meant to disrupt crisis-


based politics that distract attention from mundane, everyday violence that is rooted in injustice. Seeing the constant presence of militarism does not require that middle-class and other privileged Americans suddenly see themselves as constantly under siege. It does require the development of abilities to notice the extent to which people and ecosystems can be severely under siege by military institutions and values, even when peace seems present.


Securitization Bad – Link – Foreign Policy

1. FOREIGN POLICIES TREAT DIFFERENCES AS BAD AND NATURALIZE THE DESTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCEDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at Newcastle, 1998. WRITING SECURITY, p. 70-71.

All meaning is constituted through difference (an assumption on which this analysis is based), then there can be no declaration about the nature of the self that is totally free of suppositions about the other. Although a positive declaration of some characteristic of the self might be devoid of specific reference to an other, it proffers nonetheless an at least implicit valuation of those who might be considered other. Of course, the nature of that valuation and its effects can vary considerably: a simple contrast need not automatically result in the demonization of the other, and the differentiation or distantiation of one group from another does not require that their relationship be one of violence. But insofar as the logic of identity requires difference, the potential for the transformation of difference into othemess always exists. Moreover, in the context of Foreign Policy, the logic of identity more readily succumbs to the politics of negation and the temptation of otherness. The claim is not that Foreign Policy constitutes state identity de novo; rather, it is that Foreign Policy is concerned with the reproduction of an unstable identity at the level of the state, and the containment of challenges to that identity In other words, Foreign Policy does not operate in a domain free of entrenched contingencies or resistances. Whichever Foreign Policy practices are implemented, they always have to overcome or neutralize other practices that might instantiate alternative possibilities for identity; and the intensive and extensive nature of the “internal” and “external” political contestation that this presupposes means the efficacy of one particular practice will more often than not be sharpened by the representation of danger.

2. ANY ATTEMPT TO CREATE SECURITY ONLY LEADS TO MORE INSECURITYDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at Newcastle, 1998. WRITING SECURITY, p. 18-19.

Finally, this erasure of certainty brought on by the irruption of contingency has produced the rarefaction of political discourse.13 To put it simply, although they retain some power, the conventional (and foundational) categories of ordering are exhausted. Their work can only continue by abjuration rather than affirmation; they can maintain an existence and identity by specifying exceptions and exclusions, but they are no longer able to mobilize support in terms of a prior and positive ideal. Even more important, the desire to order has itself become a source of danger in our time. Political discourse that speaks only of the interest and institutional bases of action; the need for attunement, normalization, or mastery as the technologies of order; or power as an object or ethics as a command, or of sovereignty and territoriality as the container of politics; has lost its capacity-if it ever had it-to provide security.

3. SECURITY LETS STATES KILL FOR ‘THE GREATER GOOD’ WITHOUT THINKINGAnthony Burke, Prof at the School of Political Science and International Studies at University of Queensland, Alternatives, 2002. APORIAS OF SECURITY, p. 5.

My particular concern with humanist discourses of security is that, whatever their critical value, they leave in place (and possibly strengthen) a key structural feature of the elite strategy they oppose: its claim to embody truth and fix the contours of the real. In particular, the ontology of security/threat or security/insecurity— which forms the basic condition of the real for mainstream discourses of international policy—remains powerfully in place, and security’s broader function as a defining condition of human experience and modern political life remains invisible and unexamined. This is to abjure a powerful critical approach that is able to question the very categories in which our thinking, our experience, and actions remain confined. This article remains focused on the aporias that lie at the heart of security, rather than pushing into the spaces that lie beyond. The contours of this project are already becoming clearer.’~ What is still required is a properly genealogical account of security’s ability to provide what Walker calls a “constitutive account of the political”: as Walker says, “claims about common security, collective security, or world security do little more than fudge the contradictions written into the heart of modern politics: we can only become humans or anything else, after we have given up our humanity, or any other attachments, to the greater good of citizenship.”’6


Securitization Bad – Link – State of Emergency

1. DEFINING PEACE AND WAR AS EVENTS LEADS TO EMERGENCIES AND STATE CONTROLSlavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy, May 23, 2004.ARE WE IN A WAR? DO WE HAVE AN ENEMY? London Review of Books, Volume 24, Number 10. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy.html

The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft's recent claim that 'terrorists use America's freedom as a weapon against us' carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, together with the explosive display of 'American patriotism' after 11 September, create the climate for what amounts to a state of emergency, with the occasion it supplies for a potential suspension of rule of law, and the state's assertion of its sovereignty without 'excessive' legal constraints. America is, after all, as President Bush said immediately after 11 September, in a state of war. The problem is that America is, precisely, not in a state of war, at least not in the conventional sense of the term (for the large majority, daily life goes on, and war remains the exclusive business of state agencies). With the distinction between a state of war and a state of peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a time in which a state of peace can at the same time be a state of emergency.

2. A STATE OF EMERGENCY ENABLES MILITARY CONTROLSlavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy, May 23, 2004.ARE WE IN A WAR? DO WE HAVE AN ENEMY? London Review of Books, Volume 24, Number 10. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy.html

Such paradoxes also provide the key to the way in which the liberal-totalitarian emergency represented by the 'war on terror' relates to the authentic revolutionary state of emergency, first articulated by St Paul in his reference to the 'end of time'. When a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true emergency and return to the 'normal course of things'. It is, you will recall, a feature of all reactionary proclamations of a 'state of emergency' that they were directed against popular unrest ('confusion') and presented as a resolve to restore normalcy. In Argentina, in Brazil, in Greece, in Chile, in Turkey, the military who proclaimed a state of emergency did so in order to curb the 'chaos' of overall politicisation. In short, reactionary proclamations of a state of emergency are in actuality a desperate defence against the real state of emergency.

3. HUMANITARIANISM IS A MASK FOR CONTROLSlavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy, May 23, 2004.ARE WE IN A WAR? DO WE HAVE AN ENEMY? London Review of Books, Volume 24, Number 10. Accessed June 7, 2004. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy.html

This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer — 'ethnic-religious conflicts' which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on the part of the Western powers — and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict — the US-dominated global force — has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the 'local population'.


Securitization Bad – Link – War as Event

1. VIEWING WAR AS EVENT KILLS OUR ABILITY TO CHALLENGE SECURITYChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, pg. online

These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems.

2. THIS DEPICTION OF WAR IGNORES PEACEFUL MASSACRES AND VIOLENCEChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, pg. online

The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life, or a sort of happening that is appropriately conceived apart from everyday events in peaceful times. Not surprisingly, most discussions of the political and ethical dimensions of war discuss war solely as an event - an occurrence, or collection of occurrences, having clear beginnings and endings that are typically marked by formal, institutional declarations. As happenings, wars and military activities can be seen as motivated by identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and collective decision-makers and agents of states. But many of the questions about war that are of interest to feminists - including how large-scale, state-sponsored violence affects women and members of other oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, raced, and nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other oppressive and violent institutions and hegemonies - cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events.

3. ABSTRACTING ABOUT WAR MAKES IT THINKABLE AND PERMITTABLEChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, pg. online

But the abstraction of the particularities of war depends on an abstraction of war itself. The distance of such abstraction is created in part by willingness to think of war without considering the presence of war in "peaceful" times. Wars becomes conceptual entities - objects for consideration - rather than diverse, historically loaded exemplifications of the contexts in which they occur. In order to notice the particular and individual realities of war, attention must be given to the particular, individual, and contextualized causes and effects of pervasive militarism, as well as the patterns and connections among them.

4. TREATING WAR AS AN EVENT LEADS TO MILITARISM AND STATE-SPONSORED VIOLENCEChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, pg. online

Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence


draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state.


Securitization Bad – Link – Peace as Event

1. THE AFFIRMATIVE VIEWS CONFLICT AS OUTSIDE OF ITSELF THIS IGNORES RESPONSIBILITY AND CREATES THE CONDITIONS FOR VIOLENCESlavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy, October 7, 2001. WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL:REFLECTIONS ON WTC. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real-1.html

Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than real: in Africa, EVERY SINGLE DAY more people die of AIDS than all the victims of the WTC collapse, and their death could have been easily cut back with relatively small financial means. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Ruanda and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.

2. POSITION PEACE AS SOMETHING TO BE MAINTAINED ELSEWHERE CAUSES OPPRESSIONSlavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy, October 7, 2001. WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL:REFLECTIONS ON WTC. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real-1.html

We don't yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics, war, this event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of things only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is: will Americans decide to fortify further their "sphere," or to risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the deeply immoral attitude of "Why should this happen to us? Things like this don't happen HERE!", leading to more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world, making the long-overdued move from "A thing like this should not happen HERE!" to "A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!". Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE. In short, America should learn to humbly accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation.

3. WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE OUR PEACE IS THE RESULT OF CATASTROPHE ELSEWHERE THE AFFIRMATIVE PEACE IS A FORM OF CONTROLSlavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy, October 7, 2001. WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL:REFLECTIONS ON WTC. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real-1.html

America's "holiday from history" was a fake: America's peace was bought by the catastrophes going on elsewhere. These days, the predominant point of view is that of an innocent gaze confronting unspeakable Evil which stroke from the Outside — and, again, apropos this gaze, one should gather the strength and apply to it also Hegel's well-known dictum that the Evil resides (also) in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around itself. There is thus an element of truth even in the most constricted Moral Majority vision of the depraved America dedicated to mindless pleasures, in the conservative horror at this netherworld of sexploitation and pathological violence: what they don't get is merely the Hegelian speculative identity between this netherworld and their own position of fake purity — the fact that so many fundamentalist preachers turned out to be secret sexual perverts is more than a contingent empirical fact. When the infamous Jimmy Swaggart claimed that the fact that he visited prostitutes only gave additional strength to his preaching (he knew from intimate struggle what he was preaching against), although undoubtedly hypocritical at the immediate subjective level, is nonetheless objectively true.


Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Rejection

1. BY SAYING ‘NO’ TO THE AFFIRMATIVE WE CAN BEGIN TO RESIST DISCOURSES OF DANGERDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998. WRITING SECURITY, p. 204-205.

The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the “bio-power” discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western nations have been increasingly directed toward modes of being and forms of life — such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government — the ongoing agonism between those practices and the freedom they seek to contain means that individuals have articulated a series of counterdemands drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts.

2. MICROPOLITICAL RESISTANCE HAS BEEN HISTORICALLY SUCCESSFUL AT SOLVING VIOLENCEDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998. WRITING SECURITY, p. 205.

State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, “the core of what we now call ‘citizenship’ . . . consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war.”40 In more recent times, constituencies associated with women’s, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on society.41 These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive/nondiscursive dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of “the political” has been a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy’s concern for the ethical borders of identity in America.

3. BROADENING THE CATEGORIES OF RESISTANCE CAN LEAD TO POLITICAL CHANGEChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, pg. online

Moving away from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war."


Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Debate Performance

1. ENDORSING OUR PROJECT OF PERFORMATIVE RESISTANCE CAN UNMASK DISCIPLINARY DOMINATIONJessica Kulynych, Ass Prof of Political Science at Withrop University, Winter 1997.POLITY, Volume XXX, Number 2, p. 332-334.

Thus, as Chaloupka sees it, a demonstration is also “a show.” The demonstration in this sense is not an explanation but an exposure, a defiance embodied in action that flies in the face of acceptability. Accordingly, The protestor’s usage moves toward the contingent realm of strategies and emotions. Here demonstration does not establish objectivity and logic, so much as it shows up the objective order, assertively getting in the way.66Thus the performative aspect of demonstration cannot be adequately captured with the lens of truth and justice. The protestor is not trying to make a point, to prove that the system is unjust. Rather, the protestor exposes the contingency of justice itself. Foucault comes close to saying what Chaloupka argues here when he states, a critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest . . . . Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believes, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such.67

2. DEBATE CAN BE A UNIQUE SPHERE TO QUESTION DISCOURSES AND CREATE RESISTANCEJessica Kulynych, Ass Prof of Political Science at Withrop University, Winter 1997.POLITY, Volume XXX, Number 2, p. 332-334.

If we interpret the “to show” here not as point out what is wrong with disciplinary society (which would leave Foucault subject to Fraser’s normative criticism), but rather as “showing,” or “showing up,” then we no longer need the introduction of normative notions, we are merely doing disciplinary society one better. Making a point is a function of discourse the ability to align and arrange arguments that support a position. Yet, the performative protestor does not argue against the state, he mocks it. The protestor works at the margins of discourse, utilizing puns and jokes and caricature to ‘expose’ the limits of what is being said. Thus, performative resistance, when considered as critique, does not need to tell us what is wrong, rather it reveals the existence of subjection where we had not previously seen it. I am not suggesting that we can get a normative anchor out of the notion of performativity. To the contrary, I am suggesting performative resistance makes no such normative distinctions. We bring normativity to our performances as ethical principles that are themselves subject to resistance. By unearthing the contingency of the “self-evident,” performative resistance enables politics. Thus, the question is not should we resist (since resistance is always, already present), but rather what and how we should resist.

3. REJECTING THE PROJECT OF SECURITY IS ESSENTIAL TO STOPPING VIOLENCEMichael Dillon, Senior Lecturer in Politics/International Relations University of Lancaster, 1996.THE POLITICS OF SECURITY, p. 20.

To recover the political, to repose the question of the political, does not, however, suppose that it was once properly understood but lost in the midst of time, so that we would have to travel back through those mists in order to rediscover it. To recover the political means to respond to that very subjectivising technologisation of politics as a security project, which has reached its apogee in the (inter)national security politics of the modern State system, by calling into question the security imperative itself through recalling the obligatory freedom of human being. The question ‘Must we secure security?’ politicizes the technologising anti-politics of our current (inter)national politics of security, therefore, grounded as it is in the insistence upon secure subjectivities of every invented description, because it responds to the absence of the political through the triumph of calculation in our current politics of security.


Securitization Bad – Alternative Solves – Questioning

1. CRITIQUE IS IMPORTANT TO CHALLENGE SECURITIZATIONDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at Newcastle, 1998. WRITING SECURITY, p. 227.

Yet the political consequences of these arguments — such as the way in which the ethos might play out in the specific sites of United States Foreign Policy, for example — has attracted to date little enthusiasm.87 Not because the proposals are unappealing per se, but because they allegedly do not disclose new options that mark them off completely from those that could be advocated by competing perspectives. In such criticisms lies an important misunderstanding that is worth clarifying by way of conclusion. Even when an argument of this kind shifts to the register of policy, its contribution is not to simply advocate one fixed position. This is not because it is incapable of endorsing or suggesting particular decisions in specific circumstances that should be pursued. Rather, an argument of this kind embodies an ethos that considers critique to be a form of intervention.

2. CONTESTING SECURITY DILEMMAS IS THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVEDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at Newcastle, 1998. WRITING SECURITY, p. 227.

This ethos is therefore primarily concerned with the temporal process of critique and the positions it makes possible. Whether deconstructive, genealogical, or of some other kind, an argument like this is always looking to the limits and how they can be contested, disturbed, or negotiated. Its contribution is to recognize the way such limits establish both the possibility and the insufficiency of particular policy resolutions, to appreciate that despite such deficiencies decisions must be taken only to be simultaneously criticized and taken again, and to enact the Enlightenment attitude by a persistent and relentless questioning in specific contexts of the identity performances, and their inescapable indebtness to difference, through which politics occurs. All of this is necessarily part of an ethico-political position far removed from the disciplinary ambitions of social science, for it maintains that only by pursuing the agonism between closure and disturbance, naturalization and denaturalization, can a democratic ethos be lived.

3. REIMAGINING SECURITY DISCOURSE IS KEY TO CREATING CHANGEChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, p. online

When Peach discusses "alternatives to war," she is clearly referring to alternatives to entering into war, or to participating in "the escalation of conflicts." The avoidance of eruptions of military violence is certainly important, and Peach is correct that feminist insights about conflict resolution could present significant recommendations in this regard. However, feminist moral imagination cannot end there. In thinking of alternatives to war, we need to continue to imagine alternatives to militaristic economies, symbolic systems, values, and political institutions. The task of constructing such alternatives is far more daunting and comprehensive than creating alternatives to a specific event or kind of event. Pacifist writers as diverse as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barbara Deming have emphasized the fact that pacifism entails a critique of pervasive, systematic human violence.

4. MILITARISM CAN ONLY BE DISRUPTED BY POINTING OUT STATIC UNDERSTANDINGS OF WAR AND PEACEChris J. Cuomo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati, Hypatia, 1996. SPECIAL ISSUES: WOMEN AND VIOLENCE, Volume 11 Number 4, p. online

In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are actually more destructive than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and, because they function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by environmentalists, especially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that "national security" is an adequate excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16). If environmental destruction is a necessary aspect of war and the peacetime practices of military institutions, an analysis of war which


includes its embeddedness in peacetime militarism is necessary to address the environmental effects of war..


Securitization Bad – A2: Perm

1. THE PERMUTATION CANNOT SOLVE. WE MUST ENTIRELY REJECT Simon Dalby, Department of Political Science Simon Fraser University, 1992. ALTERNATIVES , p. 121.

Any political strategy using the term security will need to be cautious, given the potential for cooptation and the difficulties inherent in using a term that is widely used with decidedly unprogressive overtones. Simply taking on “ecological” or “common” or “sustainable” may not be enough to shift the focus away from neorealism assumption and the practices of security as imposed force. Neither, as R. B. Walker argues, is a global policy as yet as easy to conceptualize in political terms whatever the hopes of the prophets of “biosphere politics.” Reforming security drastically, as Booth’s “emancipation” ideas suggest, requires a complete change of the discouse on international security – a political project of very large scope indeed, albeit one that could draw on poplar common sense meaning of the term security to subvert the institutionalized definitions.

2. THE MERE EFFORT OF SPEAKING SECURITY INSCRIBES THE PROBLEM-O. Waever, Center for Peace and Conflict Research, 1995. ON SECURITY, ed. Ronnie D. Lipshutz, p. 75.

The point of my arugment, however, is not that to speak “security” means simply to talk in a higher-pitched voice. It is slightly more complex than that: “security” is a specific move that entails consequences which involve risking oneself and offering a specific issue as a test case. Doing this may have a price and, in that sense, it could be regarded as a way to “raise the bet.” The concrete issue is made principled, thereby risking the principles (and order), but potentially controlling the concrete. The game has a whole inner logic to it and, when approaching it from some specific field, one should remain

3. THE PERMUTATION IS A REALIST TACTIC TO HIDE DOMINATION AND VIOLENCER.B. J. Walker, Professor of International Relations at Keele University, 1993. INSIDE/OUTSIDE: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS POLITICAL THEORY, p. np.

While much of the contemporary concern with speed and acceleration may well be found in intellectual currents that are modern in this latter sense, as well as in currents that are more convinced that modernity is an evaporating condition, theories of internalization relations remain deeply informed by the ontological horizons of early modernity, although many elements of the late-nineteenth-century crisis of historicism are readily visible in some version of the claim to political realism. In fact, I will argue, reiterated appeals to political realism simply obscure contradiction that have long been troublesome to theorists of modernity. This is especially the case with recently influential attempts to articulate a so-called structural or neorealist theory of international relations, attempts which I read as yet another attempt to avoid serious ontological difficulties through a gratuitous appeal to epistemological necessities. aware of the effect of having an issue codified in the language of security.

4. THE PROBLEM-SOLVING APPROACH OF THE PERMUTATION IS SECURITIZATION AT HEARTAlexander Wendt, Asstistant Professor at the Univerity of Chicago, 1999. SOCIAL THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, p. 17.

Social kinds, including the state and state system, are in one sense objective facts or thing that relate to each other in a causal way, just like things in nature. However, social kinds are as much processes as they are things. And in treating them as if they were “things” it is important to see that we are also reifying them, taking a snapshot of them apart from the process by which they are sustained. Temporary reification is useful, and indeed we must bracket or take for granted certain processes simply to go about daily life. But permanent reification is problematic. Over-privileging a naturalistic, causal approach to social life leaves us susceptible to forgetting that social kinds are social, made of ideas instantiated in practice. And since there ideas are after all our ideas, if we forget what social kinds are social then we forget that we are their makers or authors. As a result, rather than experiencing social systems voluntarily, as artifacts of our design and intent, we experience them deterministically, as if they were forces of nature pressing upon us, as much in our control as the wind and the rain.


Statism K – Link – Social Progress

1. USING RHETORIC THAT PRESUMES THE EXISTENCE OF THE GOVERNMENT INHERENTLY LIMITS HUMAN FREEDOMMark Lindsay, “Identifying With The Enemy,” 1997, p. np., Accessed May 24, 2002, http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl50c.shtml

The words we use have a direct effect on the way we think. There is an intimate relation between our words and our thoughts. And if we are not careful, the words we use can limit our thoughts and our ability to produce the results we want. Ayn Rand once said, "No mind is better than the precision of its concepts." Many freedom-lovers continue to use words which limit their ability to use their freedom productively, especially when promoting it. I'm referring to statist fraud-words such as "country," "president," "law," "government," etc. Using these words keeps you locked in a collectivist mode of thinking. Many Libertarians are stuck in this position. Instead of simply leaping out of the collectivist way of thinking they waste their time, money and energy playing useless games with the statists. You can see the irony in this: trying to talk about individual freedom using collectivist terminology. No wonder they can't get their point across. It's a guaranteed no-win situation. Just by using these words - without qualifying them - you blind yourself to your own inborn freedom. In order to avoid this trap you need to shift to an individualistic mode of thinking, which includes using words in a way which reflects this orientation. In an individualistic framework, you think in terms of individual terrocrats rather than a gigantic, overwhelming "government." You think of freedom as emanating from the individual as opposed to being granted by (so-called) "government." You think in terms of freeing yourself instead of asking for "permission" from the (so-called) "government."

2. PROBLEM-SOLVING USING THE STATE FAILS AND MERELY PROPS UP POLITICAL WHIMSGuy Adams, public administration, University of Missouri, Columbia, and Danny Balfour, public administration, USC, UNMASKING ADMINISTRATIVE EVIL, May 1998, p. 136-158.

The modern approach to public policy and planning is: summarized best, and most commonly, in terms of the process of problem solving. That is, the purpose of public policy is to identify, develop, and implement solutions to an array of discrete social problems (Schon, 1993). Doing so requires a confluence of scientific method or technology (means) and political will or consensus (ends). This image of public policy as problem solving is realized only in those rather uncommon instances when the technology for addressing the problem is known and a political consensus exists on the goals of the policy. In such rare contexts, public administrators can rationally predict outcomes, focus on optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of their processes and programs, and be held accountable for their performance (Christensen 1985). In effect they can solve policy problems by following scientifically or rationally established procedures. In most social policy arenas, this image of public policy as problem solving is largely a fiction. Public policy as problem solving has its roots in the modern, scientific worldview that seeks to bend nature and society to the will of scientific method and technology (Bauman, 1989; Keller, 1985).


Statism K – Impact – Nuclear War

1. STATISM SEEKS TO DESTROY HUMANITY, JUSTICE, AND LIFEMikhail Bakunin, famous anarchist, THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BAKUNIN, 1953, http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bakunin/sp000934.html

The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle - a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak - and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighborhood States - it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice. Such is in its stark reality the sole morality, the sole aim of the State. It worships God himself only because he is its own exclusive God, the sanction of its power and of that which it calls its right, that is, the right to exist at any cost and always to expand at the cost of other States. Whatever serves to promote this end is worthwhile, legitimate, and virtuous. Whatever harms it is criminal. The morality of the State then is the reversal of human justice and human morality. This transcendent, super-human, and therefore anti-human morality of States is not only the result of the corruption of men who are charged with carrying on State functions. One might say with greater right that corruption of men is the natural and necessary sequel of the State institution. This morality is only the development of the fundamental principle of the State, the inevitable expression of its inherent necessity. The State is nothing else but the negation of humanity; it is a limited collectivity which aims to take the place of humanity and which wants to impose itself upon the latter as a supreme goal, while everything else is to submit and minister to it.

2. GOVERNMENT POWER IS IMMORAL AND CAUSES NUCLEAR WARGeorge Kateb, professor of politics, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 170.

The government becomes all-observant, all-competent; it intervenes everywhere; and as new predicaments arise in society, it moves first to define and attempt a resolution of them. My proposed idea is that as this tendency grows-and it is already quite far advanced-people will, to an increasing degree, come to accept the government as a state. The tendency of executive officials (and some in the legislative and judicial -branches) to conceive of government as a state will thus be met by the tendency of people to accept that conception. People's dependence on it will gradually- condition their attitudes and their sentiments. Looking to it, they must end by looking up to it. I believe the "logic" of this, tendency, as we say, is that officials become confirmed in their sense that they, too (like their counterparts in unfree societies), may dispose of the fate of the people. Entrusted with so much everyday power, the entire corps of officials must easily find confirmation for the rationalization of the use of nuclear weapons proposed by the foreign-policy sector of officialdom. There may be a strong, if subterranean, bond between the state as indispensable to all relations and transactions in everyday society, and the state as entitled to dispose of the fate of society in nuclear war. Even though officials receive no explicit confirmation of this bond by the people. Under pressure, however, a people that habitually relies on the state may turn into a too easily mobilizable population: mobilizable but otherwise immobile. My further sense is that a renewed understanding of the moral ideas of individualism is vital to the effort to challenge state-activism.

3. DOMESTIC TYRANNY MAKES NUCLEAR USE MORE LIKELYGeorge Kateb, professor of politics, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 169-170.

I have said that statism is one of the main ideas that are implied in official (and lay) rhetoric rationalizing the use of nuclear weapons. But the role of statism in the nuclear situation is not confined to this function. In another form it makes another contribution. The form is best called--once again a French name is most apt-- dirigisme, the unremitting direction by the state of all facets of life. Let us translate the word as "state-activism." The contribution is indirect but insidious and pervasive, and consists of the general tendency to leave citizens in a condition of dependence that borders on helplessness. The virulent practitioners of state-activism are, of course, the police-state: Tyranny, Despotism, and totalist rule in all their varieties. Whenever a nuclear power is also one of the latter regimes, then the disposition among a compliant population is to get used to the idea that the state, as the source of practically all benefits and penalties-all those outside the intimate sphere and many inside it-has the right to dispose of the fate of the people in


any way it sees fit. The way it sees fit seems -the unavoidable way. Such compliance strengthens the readiness of officials to think seriously about using nuclear weapons. Just as the people are used to the idea that the state has the right to dispose of their fate, so the state gets used to the idea that it may even use nuclear weapons in disposing of its people's fate.


Statism K – Impact – Nuclear Extinction

1. EACH FAILURE TO RESIST THE STATE RISKS NUCLEAR EXTINCTION George Kateb, Professor of Political Science, Princeton, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 47.

One task of a renewed and revised individualism is to challenge everyday state-activism. Remote as the connection may seem, the encouragement of state-activism, or the failure to resist it, contributes to nuclear statism, and thus to the disposition to accept and inflict massive ruin and, with that, the unwanted and denied possibility of extinction. In the nuclear situation, one must be attentive to even remote connection that may exist between human activity and human extinction. There are no certainties of analysis on these possible connections. And so far the worst speculative connection is not exemplified in American society. I only mean to refer to the hypothesis offered independently first by Hannah Arendt and then by Michel Foucault; namely, that where the state is regarded both by itself and by the population not as a mere protector of life against domestic or foreign violence but as the source of contented and adjusted and regularized life (through its welfarist policies and other interventions), it is subtly empowered to take the next step and become the source of mass death. What it gives it can take away, like God. But though still short of this extreme, American society is full of serious tendencies of state-activism that indirectly cooperate with the possibility of extinction.

2. DEPENDENCE ON THE STATE INCREASES NUCLEAR THREATSGeorge Kateb, Professor of Political Science, Princeton, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 35.

I have said that statism is one of the main ideas that are implied in official (and lay) rhetoric rationalizing the use of nuclear weapons. But the role of statism in the nuclear situation is not confined to this function. 'In another form it makes another contribution. The form is best called--once again a French name is most apt-- dirigisme, the unremitting direction by the state of all facets of life. Let us translate the word as "state-activism." The contribution is indirect but insidious and pervasive, and consists of the general tendency to leave citizens in a condition of dependence that borders on helplessness. The virulent practitioners of state-activism are, of course, the police-state. Tyranny. Despotism, and totalist rule in all their varieties. Whenever a nuclear power is also one of the latter regimes, then the disposition among a compliant population is to get used to the idea that the state, as the source of practically all benefits and penalties-all those outside the intimate sphere and many inside it-has the right to dispose of the fate of the people in any way it sees fit. The way it sees fit seems -the unavoidable way. Such compliance strengthens the readiness of officials to think seriously about using nuclear weapons. Just as the people are used to the idea that the state has the right to dispose of their fate, so the state gets used to the idea that it may even use nuclear weapons in disposing of its people's fate.

3. STATISM IS AN INFINITE RISK – STATES WILL USE NUCLEAR WEAPONSGeorge Kateb, Professor of Political Science, Princeton, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 39.

Schell's work attempts to force on us an acknowledgment that sounds far'-fetched and even ludicrous; an acknowledgment that the possibility of extinction is carried by any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how limited or how seemingly rational or morally justified. He himself acknowledges that there is a difference between possibility and certainty. But in a matter that is more than a matter, more than one practical matter in a vast series of practical matters, in the "matter" of extinction, we -are obliged to treat a possibility-a genuine possibility-as a certainty. Humanity is not to take any step that contains even the slightest risk of extinction. The doctrine of no-use is based on the possibility of extinction. Schell's perspective transforms the subject. He takes us away from the and stretches of strategy and asks us to feel continuously, if we can, and feel keenly if only for an instant now and then, how utterly distinct the nuclear world is. Nuclear discourse must vividly register that distinctiveness. It is of no moral account that extinction may be only a slight possibility. No one can say how great the possibility is, but no one has yet credibly denied that by some sequence or other a particular use of nuclear weapons may lead to human and natural extinction. If it is not impossible it must be treated as certain: the loss signified by extinction nullifies all calculations of probability as it nullifies all calculations of costs and benefits.


Statism K – Impact – Individual Rights

1. THE STATE ROBS ONE OF A RIGHT TO AN INDIVIDUAL LIFEEmma Goldman, influential anarchist, THE INDIVIDUAL, SOCIETY AND THE STATE, 1940, p. np., Accessed May 26, 2002, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/goldmanindiv.html

The State, every government whatever its form, character or color--be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or Bolshevik-- is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it. Whatever changes it undergoes are always the result of pressure exerted upon it, pressure strong enough to compel the ruling powers to submit peaceably or otherwise, generally "otherwise"--that is, by revolution. Moreover, the inherent conservatism of government, of authority of any kind, unavoidably becomes reactionary. For two reasons: first, because it is in the nature of government not only to retain the power it has, but also to strengthen, widen and perpetuate it, nationally as well as internationally. The stronger authority grows, the greater the State and its power, the less it can tolerate a similar authority or political power along side of itself. The psychology of government demands that its influence and prestige constantly grow, at home and abroad, and it exploits every opportunity to increase it. This tendency is motivated by the financial and commercial interests back of the government, represented and served by it. The fundamental raison d'etre of every government to which, incidentally, historians of former days willfully shut their eyes, has become too obvious now even for professors to ignore. The other factor which impels governments to become even more conservative and reactionary is their inherent distrust of the individual and fear of individuality. Our political and social scheme cannot afford to tolerate the individual and his constant quest for innovation. In "self-defense" the State therefore suppresses, persecutes, punishes and even deprives the individual of life. It is aided in this by every institution that stands for the preservation of the existing order. It resorts to every form of violence and force, and its efforts are supported by the "moral indignation" of the majority against the heretic, the social dissenter and the political rebel--the majority for centuries drilled in State worship, trained in discipline and obedience and subdued by the awe of authority in the home, the school, the church and the press. The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life.

2. APPROVING ANY ACTION THAT INVOKES STATE CONTROL IS STATIST AND MUST BE REJECTEDMax T. O’Connor, editor, EXTROPY, Winter 1990, p. np., Accessed May 25, 2002, http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07d.shtml

The person who uses the power of a "State" agency unjustly against someone (rent control, for example) is being statist. Anyone voting for, verbally supporting, or turning a blind eye to statism is thereby statist. In so far as there is any sense to talk of "the State" then, it is talk of statist behavior. And this is not confined to easily specifiable individuals. We may all be statist at times. Perhaps even the least statist of us sometimes choose statism in order to protect ourselves against worse behavior by others. In a corrupt system, behavior that you would otherwise reject may be the only rational course of action. This is the tragedy of the institutional effects of statism. For example, in a socialist country where everything is owned by "the State" (everything is run in a statist manner), you may face the choice of working in a statist institution or starving. In this country, if you wish to mail a letter first class, you must choose between the "government" monopoly or nothing. What are you to do?


Statism K – Alternative – Rejection

1. INDIVIDUAL REJECTION OF STATISM STOPS EXTINCTIONGeorge Kateb, professor of politics, DISSENT, Spring 1986, p. 172.

By continuously expanding the scope of governmental activity, these tendencies work against one of the principal constituent elements of individualism, the idea that each person should be subject to the smallest possible amount of government regulation that goes beyond insuring the obligation that binds individuals as well as the government: the acknowledgment of and respect for rights. Indeed, the protection of rights and the restriction of governmental activity are jointly at the service of a free life. One's life is not supposed to be arranged or designed by government nor have meaning or coherence given to it by government; nor is one supposed to be helped too much, or saved from oneself, or looked at closely or continuously. One is supposed to be free, autonomous, self-reliant. Individual rights are not always abridged when government acts to substitute itself for the individual and tries to lead our lives for us. Government may abide by the constitutional limitations on itself, and nevertheless fill up too many vacant places in a person's life, thus leaving too little raw material out of which a person develops on his or her own. This ideal of free being is under relentless attack; but the attack could no score its successes unless we cooperated. In cooperating we forget the ideal, or let preliminary aspects of it like the pursuit of interests and self-regarding claims, exhaustively define the whole ideal. The very notion of rights becomes bloated because of obsession with interests and claims and turns false to itself. Resistance must be offered from within the ideal, not from collectivism or communitarianism, which are both on the side of making a people systematically docile and ready for mobilization. Even if nuclear weapons did not exist, and there were no possibility of extinction, the fight against state-activism would have to be carried on. But the link between state-activism and extinction suggests itself, and a cultivated individualism must be enlisted against such activism and in behalf of avoiding massive ruin and the possibility of extinction.

2. REJECTING LINGUISTIC CALLS UPON THE STATE IS THE ONLY WAY TO ACHIEVE AUTONOMYFrederick Mann, founder of Terra Libra and Libertarian, “The Anatomy Of Slavespeak,” 1997, p. np., http://therealmidori.tripod.com/slavespeak02.html

Consider the possibility that inducing people to accept and use Slavespeak words is the most destructive form of deep-cheating -- that has resulted in over a hundred million people being slaughtered during the Twentieth Century. And that by your continued unconsidered use of Slavespeak words, you participate in, reinforce, and perpetuate this most destructive deep-cheating and the resulting slaughter. [I realize that in order to communicate to people at all, you often have to use Slavespeak words as if valid, otherwise you'll quickly lose your audience and they'll just think you're crazy. You can develop the ability to subtly, strongly, or viciously challenge terrocrat concepts/words, depending on the appropriateness indicated by the level of freedom knowledge and sophistication your audience.] Once you realize the extent to which, at bottom, the entire political/legal system is a word-game; a relatively fixed word-game; in the words of Jonathan Swift, a word-game, "hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to Rotation"; a word-game in the words of Jeremy Bentham such that: "Look to the letter, you find nonsense -- look beyond the letter, you find nothing" -- once you realize the nature of the word-game designed to enslave you, then you can create your own superior word-game to beat the system and, in the words of the libertarian friend I met in Luxembourg, "I live my life out of a context of liberty, a libertarian enclave, an anarcho-libertarian enclave. I carry it with me like an aura." To ultimately remove the terrocrats' power, a critical mass of individuals would have to reclassify as invalid in their brains the statist Slavespeak concepts/words, and stop providing intellectual/conceptual support to the terrocrats "by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine sounds and motions they learned from others" -- in the words of Ayn Rand. Repeat after me (!): They are not a huge omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent (falsely-called) "government" -- they are individual terrocrats, often not the brightest, not the most competent, not the most hard-working. As Harry Browne said in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, it's a myth to believe that they can prevent you from being free. "From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourself if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place your hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but


merely that you support [it] him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."


Statism K – Alternative – A2: Permutation

1. STATIST POLICY IS MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WITH THE CRITIQUERoger Kropotkin, anarchy theorist, “Instead of a Primer,” INFOSHOP, December 4, 2001, p. np., Accessed May 25, 2002, http://www.infoshop.org/texts/primer.html

Every political philosophy contains a set of principles. These are perspectives and practices that are not negotiable; they are the foundational definitions that make the philosophy distinct from others. Anarchist principles are derived from the premises and theories of anarchism, as well as the methodology of critical thinking, and they reinforce each other. The principles that come out of anarchist theory are the following: Direct Action. This term has become twisted and misused by various political activists in the past 30 years. In its original anarchist meaning, the term refers to any action undertaken without the permission, and outside the interest of, governmental institutions. It can refer to volunteering with Food Not Bombs, going on strike (especially without the approval of a union), shoplifting, or setting up a micro-powered radio station. It doesn’t mean engaging in civil disobedience in cooperation with the police; it doesn’t mean breaking the law or breaking a window if the intention is merely to register public disapproval of some governmental policy. Breaking things can be examples of direct action—but the intention behind these acts are what is important, not the acts themselves. Direct action has nothing to do with pressuring any part of a government to alter a policy; it is by definition anti-statist. Attempting to alter a government policy is called lobbying; it is aimed at representatives, and so cannot be direct action. Presenting a list of demands or protesting a particular policy, in the hopes of getting noticed by the state (whose rulers will then somehow change something about the way it operates), is never direct action, even if the means used to pressure legislators are illegal. Direct action is when we do things for ourselves, without begging, asking, or demanding that someone in authority help us.

2. WITHOUT INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY, STATISM IS INEVITABLEFulton Huxtable, political philosophy professor, “Fatal Blindness,” 1998, http://www.fatalblindness.com/index.htm

The struggle today is the same as it has always been throughout all ages: it is between those who wish to live in freedom—and—those who wish to take it away from you. As you will see, you must stand consistently on one side or the other in this struggle. To stand somewhere in the middle between an aspiring tyrant and his victims is to aid the would-be dictator and betray his victims, and in the process, yourself, since your freedom will also be destroyed. For those who wish to fight for freedom on the battlefield of ideas, intellectual consistency is essential. Anything less than this will result in the ultimate triumph of statism and the defeat of liberty. This battle is not to be fought by those misguided militia groups. This is not a call to arms, but a call to minds, to ideas. This is a call to end, once and for all, mankind’s nightmare of being tormented by statists, those who use force, not reason, to deal with others.

3. WORKING WITHIN THE SYSTEM PREVENTS DIRECT ACTION AND INCREASES MISERYThe Anarchist Media Group, ANARCHY IN ACTION, 1988, http://anarchy1.tripod.com/action.htm

Another common area of anarchist activity is getting involved in local campaigns. These may be useful in developing organisation and awareness and can have the virtue of making people think about political issues. A campaign against the closure of a local hospital, for instance, raises questions about who controls the hospitals and for whose benefit? Unfortunately, people are often led astray by their illusions about `democracy' and politicians, and wind up getting fobbed off or conned. This can result in disillusionment and apathy. The role of the anarchist is to try and make sure that it results instead in anger at the authorities and promotes direct action. It is often difficult to find a balance between getting involved in immediate reforms (hence encouraging a false belief in the State as a benevolent force) and examining the long term implications of what you do. If you let your feelings run riot you will end up in reformism, desperate to remove the squalor you discover in society. This is understandable, but works against removing the roots of the squalor. To improve the system is to strengthen it and thus in the long run increase human misery. When local conditions become atrocious, riots break out. Chief Constable Oxford of Liverpool recently described local riots in Brixton, Liverpool, and so on, as "organised anarchy". It seems unlikely, however, that they stemmed from anything but pure frustration.


Securitization Good – War

Security Rhetoric Fosters The Elimination Of Permanent WarYaseen Noorani, Asst. Professor of Near East Studies at the University of Arizona, Tuscon, 2005, “The Rhetoric of Security,” The New Centennial Review, 5.1, pp.13-14

I will argue that the symmetrical externality of the United States and terrorism to the world order lies at the foundation of the rhetoric of security by which the U.S. government justifies its hegemonic actions and policies. This rhetoric depicts a world in which helpless, vulnerable citizens can achieve agency only through the U.S. government , while terrorist individuals and organizations command magnitudes of destructive power previously held only by states. The moral-psychological discourse of agency and fear, freedom and enslavement invoked by this rhetoric is rooted in both classical liberalism and postwar U.S. foreign policy. The war of "freedom" against "fear" is a psychic struggle with no specific military enemies or objectives. It arises from the portrayal of the United States as an autarkic, ideally impermeable collective agent that reshapes the external world in its own image. The war of freedom against fear thereby justifies measures said to increase the defenses and internal security of the United States as well as measures said to spread freedom and democracy over the world. Now that the destructive capacity of warlike individuals can threaten the world order, the power of the United States must be deployed in equal measure to neutralize this threat throughout the world. The world as a whole now comes within the purview of U.S. disciplinary action. Any manifestation of the state of war, terrorist activity, anywhere in the world, is now a threat to the existence of the United States and to world peace. There is no "clash of civilizations," but the Middle East, as the current site of the state of war, is the primary danger to the world and must be contained, controlled, and reshaped. The symmetrical externality of the United States and terrorism to the world order, then, allows its rhetoric to envision a historic opportunity for mankind—the final elimination of the state of war from human existence, and fear from the political psyche. This will be achieved, however, only by incorporating the world order into the United States for the foreseeable future.

Benevolent Action Based On Security And Imperialism Undermines Liberation Of The Oppressed And Denies SolidarityMartin Shaw, professor of international relations at University of Sussex, April 7, 2002, “Uses and Abuses of Anti-Imperialism in the Global Era, http://www.martinshaw.org/empire.htm

It is worth asking how the politics of anti-imperialism distorts Western leftists' responses to global struggles for justice. John Pilger, for example, consistently seeks to minimise the crimes of Milosevic in Kosovo, and to deny their genocidal character - purely because these crimes formed part of the rationale for Western intervention against Serbia. He never attempted to minimise the crimes of the pro-Western Suharto regime in the same way. The crimes of quasi-imperial regimes are similar in cases like Yugoslavia and Indonesia, but the West's attitudes towards them are undeniably uneven and inconsistent. To take as the criterion of one's politics opposition to Western policy, rather than the demands for justice of the victims of oppression as such, distorts our responses to the victims and our commitment to justice. We need to support the victims regardless of whether Western governments take up their cause or not; we need to judge Western power not according to a general assumption of 'new imperialism' but according to its actual role in relation to the victims. The task for civil society in the West is not, therefore to oppose Western state policies as a matter of course, à la Cold War, but to mobilise solidarity with democratic oppositions and repressed peoples, against authoritarian, quasi-imperial states. It is to demand more effective global political, legal and military institutions that genuinely and consistently defend the interests of the most threatened groups. It is to grasp the contradictions among and within Western elites, conditionally allying themselves with internationalising elements in global institutions and Western governments, against nationalist and reactionary elements. The arrival in power of George Bush II makes this discrimination all the more urgent. In the long run, we need to develop a larger politics of global social democracy and an ethic of global responsibility that address the profound economic, political and cultural inequalities between Western and non-Western worlds. We will not move far in these directions, however, unless we grasp the life-and-death struggles between many oppressed peoples and the new local imperialisms, rather than subsuming all regional contradictions into the false synthesis of a new Western imperialism.


Securitization Good – Terrorism/War

Security Discourse Is Key To Prevent Terrorism And ExtinctionYaseen Noorani, Asst. Professor of Near East Studies at the University of Arizona, Tuscon, 2005, “The Rhetoric of Security,” The New Centennial Review, 5.1, pp.13-41

The Bush administration perpetually affirms that the war against terrorism declared in response to the attacks of September 2001 is "different from any other war in our history" and will continue "for the foreseeable future." This affirmation, and indeed the very declaration of such a war, belongs to a rhetoric of security that predates the Bush administration and which this administration has intensified but not fundamentally altered. Rhetorically speaking, terrorism is the ideal enemy of the United States, more so than any alien civilization and perhaps even more so than the tyrannies of communism and fascism, terrorism's defeated sisters. This is because terrorism is depicted in U.S. rhetoric not as an immoral tactic employed in political struggle, but as an immoral condition that extinguishes the possibility of peaceful political deliberation. This condition is the state of war, in absolute moral opposition to the peaceful condition of civil society. As a state of war, terrorism portends the dissolution of the civil relations obtaining within and among nations, particularly liberal nations, and thus portends the dissolution of civilization itself. Terrorism is therefore outside the world order, in the sense that it cannot be managed within this order since it is the very absence of civil order. For there to be a world order at all, terrorism must be eradicated. In prosecuting a world war against the state of war, the United States puts itself outside the world order as well. The Bush administration affirms, like the Clinton administration before it, that because the identity of the United States lies in the values that engender peace (freedom and democracy), the national interests of the United States always coincide with the interests of the world order. The United States is the animus of the world order and the power that sustains it. For this reason, any threat to the existence of the United States is a threat to world peace itself, and anything that the United States does to secure its existence is justified as necessary for the preservation of world peace. In this way, the existence of the United States stands at the center of world peace and liberal values, yet remains outside the purview of these values, since when under threat it is subject only to the extra-moral necessity of self-preservation.

Just rejecting security politics reproduces sovereighnty and exploitation. Only political action can end global oppressionAnna M. Agathangelou, Dir. Global Change Inst. And Women’s Studies Prof at Oberlin, and L.H.M. Ling,Institute For Social Studies at The Hague, Fall 1997, “Postcolonial Dissidence within Dissident IR: Transforming Master Narratives of Sovereignty in Greco-Turkish Cyprus,” Studies in Political Economy, v. 54, pp. 7-8

Yet, ironically if not tragically, dissident IR also paralyzes itself into non-action. While it challenges the status quo, dissident IR fails to transform it. Indeed, dissident IR claims that a “coherent” paradigm or research program — even an alternative one — reproduces the stifling parochialism and hidden powermongering of sovereign scholarship. “Any agenda of global politics informed by critical social theory perspectives,” writes Jim George “must forgo the simple, albeit self-gratifying, options inherent in readymade alternative Realisms and confront the dangers, closures, paradoxes, and complicities associated with them. Even references to a “real world, dissidents argue, repudiate the very meaning of dissidence given their sovereign presumption of a universalizable, testable Reality. What dissident scholarship opts for, instead, is a sense of disciplinary crisis that “resonates with the effects of marginal and dissident movements in all sorts of other localities.” Despite its emancipatory intentions, this approach effectively leaves the prevailing prison of sovereignty intact. It doubly incarcerates when dissident IR highlights the layers of power that oppress without offering a heuristic, not to mention a program, for emancipatory action. Merely politicizing the supposedly non-political neither guides emancipatory action nor guards it against demagoguery. At best, dissident IR sanctions a detached criticality rooted (ironically) in Western modernity. Michael Shapiro, for instance, advises the dissident theorist to take “a critical distance” or “position offshore’ from which to “see the possibility of change.” But what becomes of those who know they are burning in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like while the esoteric dissident observes “critically” from offshore? What hope do they have of overthrowing these shackles of sovereignty? In not answering these questions, dissident IR ends up reproducing despite avowals to the contrary, the sovereign outcome of discourse divorced from practice, analysis from policy, deconstruction from reconstruction, particulars from universals, and critical theory from problem-solving.


Securitization Good – Predictions Key

Denying Security Predictions Creates A Flood Of Uncertainty And Policy ParalysisMichael Fitzsimmons, defence analyst in Washington DC., Winter 2006-2007, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning,”Survival, Vol 48, no 4, pp. 136-37

Admittedly, the role played by strategic uncertainty in the decision-making processes at the highest levels in this case is speculative. And, to be fair, neither of the two previous QDRs was notable for codification of difficult choices either. There are considerable inertial political forces, both inside and outside the Pentagon, that slow efforts to implement major programmatic change. Nevertheless, the gap between the QDR’s aspiration and its achievement in terms of driving transformational change raises the questions: might different choices have been made if advocates for change could have mustered stronger arguments about the potential bases for making controversial trade-offs? And on what grounds might advocates of paring back procurement of expensive weapon systems have justified their views, if not the diminishing likelihood of conventional conflict with peer or near-peer military competitors? But, if claims about differential likelihoods of various types of major military contingencies are drowned out by the noise of uncertainty, then the intellectual grounds for debating strategic choice become quite slippery. In the process, strategic choice becomes more susceptible than it would otherwise be to the dynamics of bureaucratic political power.

Criticizing Realist Predictions Distract Us From Real World Political ProblemsPatrick Thaddeus Jackson, American University and Daniel H. Nexon, Georgetown University, 2009, “Paradigmatic Faults in International Relations Theory,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 53, pp. 907–930

Perhaps the most well-known instance of this kind of boundary-demarcation occurs in the debates surrounding ‘‘realism’’ in international relations theory. The proliferation of countless lists of the ‘‘core commitments’’ of a realist ‘‘paradigm’’—by adherents and critics alike—shifts the focus of scholarship away from any actual investigation of whether these commitments give us meaningful leverage on the phenomenal world, and instead promotes endless border skirmishes about who is and is not a realist (Legro and Moravcsik 1999), whether predictions of balancing are central to the ‘‘realist paradigm’’ (Vasquez 1998:261–65), and so forth. Such debates and demarcations not only distract us from the actual study of world politics, but also harm disputes over international relations theory by solidifying stances that ought to remain open to debate and discussion.

Iraq Proves Lack Of Clear Predictions Can Undermine LeadershipMichael Fitzsimmons, defence analyst in Washington DC., Winter 2006-2007, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning,”Survival, Vol 48, no 4, pp. 136-37

If the effects of stressing uncertainty were limited to contradictory statements in strategic-planning documents and speeches, the harm would be small and redress would be of largely academic interest. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that these effects extend beyond the rhetorical domain. Three examples illustrate problems arising from an aversion to prediction in strategic planning. Current nuclear-weapons policy and posture illustrate the strategic costs that uncertainty can exact in the form of keeping options open. The 2006 QDR shows how uncertainty can inhibit clear strategic choice in the allocation of resources. Finally, the use of intelligence and expert advice in planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq shows how uncertainty can actually serve to privilege pre-conceptions over analysis and thereby undermine strategic flexibility.

Details are key. We cannot just dismiss all securityMaurizio Lazzarato, Professor at the University of Paris,sociologist and social theorist and a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes, March 15, 2008, “Biopolitics/Bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity,” Translated by Arianna Bove and Erik Empson, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fplazzarato2.htm

Security intervenes in possible events rather than facts. It therefore refers to what is aleatory, temporal and in course of development. Finally, security, unlike discipline, is a science of details. To adapt a citation from “Security, territory and population”, we could say that the things that concern security are those of each instant,


whilst what concern the law are definitive and permanent things. Security is concerned with small things, whilst the law deals with the important issues. Security is always concerned with the details.


Securitization Good – Empowering

Rejecting Security Discourse Robs Marginalized Groups Of Agency And Makes Us Passive Recipients Of ElitesMatt McDonald, University of Warwick, UK, 2008, “Securitization and the Construction of Security, “European Journal of International Relations, vol. 14, pp.563-586

The question of which actors’ representations are viewed as significant within this framework, however, entails important normative commitments and has important normative implications. Put simply, the securitization framework focuses on articulations capable of leading to change in practice, with the default position being a focus on the ‘securitizations’ of political leaders who are able to achieve a wide audience in their statements and interventions, and who are able to marshal the resources of the state to respond to the existential threat. As Wæver (1995: 57) argues, ‘security is articulated only from a specific place, in an institutional voice, by elites’. Such a focus serves to marginalize the experiences and articulations of the powerless in global politics, presenting them at best as part of an audience that can collectively consent to or contest securitizing moves, and at worst as passive recipients of elite discourses.

Criticizing “Security” Discourse Neglects It As A Tool Of Empowerment For SomeMatt McDonald, University of Warwick, UK, 2008, “Securitization and the Construction of Security, “European Journal of International Relations, vol. 14, pp.563-586

Second, a range of important questions and dynamics are neglected within the framework, including most prominently the questions of why particular representations of threat resonate with particular communities, and how particular actors are either empowered or marginalized in ‘speaking’ security. The goal of noting this neglect is twofold. First and most importantly, it is to suggest that the securitization framework should not be viewed as shorthand for the broader construction of security. Second, it is to raise questions about whether the framework itself captures the most important dynamics of that which it is trying to explain.

Representations Of Threats Demand Attention To Particular ContextsMatt McDonald, University of Warwick, UK, 2008, “Securitization and the Construction of Security, “European Journal of International Relations, vol. 14, pp.563-586

Representations of threat — pivotal to Schmittian security politics — can of course be viewed as constitutive of security and identity. As Simon Dalby has argued, the designation of that from which we need to be protected is crucial in telling us ‘who we are, what we value and what we are prepared to countenance to protect our self-preferred identities’ (Dalby, 2002: xxx). But is this the only way in which security is constructed, and what do we miss through focusing only on the designation of threat? I suggest here that while central, a focus on the designation of threat alone risks missing much about the construction of security, especially through privileging the ‘content’ of security over its meaning in particular contexts.

Using Speech Acts As A Universal Framework Downplays ContextMatt McDonald, University of Warwick, UK, 2008, “Securitization and the Construction of Security, “European Journal of International Relations, vol. 14, pp.563-586

Related to the above focus on the role of linguistic practices, it is also possible to argue that the securitization framework is problematically narrow in its focus on the speech act relative to the social and political context in which the act itself occurs. Indeed, this is a problem acknowledged (but not fundamentally redressed) in Buzan et al. (1998). Put simply, in developing a universal framework for the designation or construction of threat through speech acts the Copenhagen School ultimately downplays the importance of contextual factors — such as dominant narratives of identity — that condition both patterns of securitization and the broader construction of security. This is particularly curious given that Wæver has explored these contexts in detail elsewhere, linking security perspectives and actions to narratives of history and identity in European contexts (Wæver, 1996; Hansen and Wæver, 2001).


A2: Statism K – Alternative Fails – Rejection

1. ONLY TARGETED RESISTANCES LIKE THE PLAN ARE EFFECTIVELawrence Kritzman, professor, Dartmouth, FOUCAULT: POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE, 1988, p. xiv-xvi.

Foucault ostensibly shifts emphasis away from the messianic Sartrean discourse on revolution and global transformation to those technologies of control that constitute the fabric of all social institutions and form the basis of our modern political warfare. If power is dispersed in a multiplicity of networks, resistance can only be realized through a series of localized strategies. “The overthrow of these micro-powers does not obey the law of all or nothing. Unlike Sartre, for instance, who supported the Maoist concept of popular justice through the institution of revolutionary courts, Foucault expressed an unquestionable distrust for such a system since it “reintroduced the ideology of the penal system into popular practice.” Instead of opting for revolutionary justice as a panacea for social ills, Foucault regarded it as but one more example of the social reification derived from the bourgeois inspired penal system. Foucault’s innate distrust of this revolutionary idealism stems from his attempt to situate the “alternative courts” within the parameters of that humanist myth which subscribes to the belief that popular inquiry can produce objective truth. Accordingly, he sees his function here too as one of problematizing the presuppositions of utopian dreams by liberating the power of truth from the forms of hegemony that imprison it. In Foucault’s praxis the intellectual does not act upon the general will to bring about the creation of an “open society.” Gone is the utopian dream of an idyllic, rational, democratic state in which alienation disappears; gone too is the so-called ideal continuity of history and with it a destiny that is controlled by a regulatory teleological movement. In essence Foucault’s critical vision portrays a new kind of intellectual for whom the transcendent laws of political ideologies are greeted with increased scepticism. He argues, in effect, that we must no longer analyze modern politics as a congealed and essentialized conflict between master and rebel, but rather as a dispersed and indefinite field of power relations or strategies of domination.

2. ACTION MUST TAKE PLACE THROUGH A GOVERNMENT TO BE EFFECTIVELawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE, 1992, p. 391-393.

The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance, understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them.

3. THE CRITIQUE OF STATISM GOES NOWHERE AND PREVENTS GOOD ACTIONPaul Goble, nqa, “The Consequences Of Depoliticization,” RADIO FREE EUROPE, October 12, 1998, http://www.rferl.org/newsline/1998/10/5-NOT/not-121098.html

First, as people turn away from the state as the source of support, they inevitably care less about what the state does and are less willing to take action to assert their views. That means that neither the state nor the opposition can mobilize them to take action for or against anything. As a result, the opposition cannot easily get large numbers of people to demonstrate even if the opposition is taking positions that polls suggest most people agree with. And the government cannot draw on popular support even when it may be doing things that the people have said they want. That means that the size of demonstrations for or against anything or anyone are an increasingly poor indicator of what the people want or do not want the state to do. Second, precisely because people are focusing on their private lives and taking responsibility for them, they are likely to become increasingly upset when the state attempts to intervene in their lives even for the most benign purposes, particularly if it does so in an ineffective manner. Such attitudes, widespread in many countries and important in limiting the power of state institutions, nonetheless pose a particular danger to countries making the transition from communism to democracy. While those views help promote


the dismantling of the old state, they also virtually preclude the emergence of a new and efficient one. As a result, these countries are often likely to find themselves without the effective state institutions that modern societies and economies require if they are to be well regulated.


A2: Statism K – Reformism Good

1. SOME STATE POWER IS NECESSARY TO FIGHT WORSE OPPRESSIONNoam Chomsky, professor, MIT, CANADIAN DIMENSION, May 15, 1997, p. np.

By visions, I mean the conception of a future society that animates what we actually do, a society in which a decent human being might want to live. By goals, I mean the choices and tasks that are within reach, that we will pursue one way or another guided by a vision that may be distant and hazy. On all such matters, our knowledge and understanding are shallow; as in virtually every area of human life, we proceed on the basis of intuition and experience, hopes and fears. Goals involve hard choices with very serious human consequences. Goals and visions can appear to be in conflict, and often are. There's no contradiction in that, as I think we all know from ordinary experience. Let me take my own case, to illustrate what I have in mind. My personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones. According to this anarchist vision, any structure of hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden of justification, whether it involves personal relations or a larger social order. If it cannot bear the burden - sometimes it can - then it is illegitimate and should be dismantled. I share that vision, though it runs directly counter to my goals. My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to 'roll back' the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because if offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. In today's world, I think, the goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participation - and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society; if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.

2. THE ONLY WAY TO DEFEAT STATISM IS THROUGH THE GOVERNMENTNoam Chomsky, professor, MIT, POWERS AND PROSPECTS: REFLECTIONS ON HUMAN NATURE, 1996, p. np.

Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the despised public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs. That defect is intolerable to the masters, who now feel, with some justification, that changes in the international economic and political order offer the prospects of creating a kind of 'utopia for the masters', with dismal prospects for most of the rest. It should be unnecessary to spell out here what I mean. The effects are all too obvious even in the rich societies, from the corridors of power to the streets, countryside, and prisons. For reasons that merit attention but that lie beyond the scope of these remarks, the rollback campaign is currently spearheaded by dominant sectors of societies in which the values under attack have been realized in some of their most advanced forms, the English-speaking world; no small irony, but no contradiction either.

3. AN IDEALISTIC CRITIQUE OF STATISM IS ALIENATING AND INEFFECTIVEDave Neal, nqa, ANARCHISM: IDEOLOGY OR METHODOLOGY, September 17, 1997, p. np., Accessed May 25, 2002, http://liberatetheobsessed.tripod.com/id31.htm

The anarchist holds that the working person is ready in the here and now for social revolution, in terms of inclination and instinct -- people want to be free; they want an improvement in their circumstances and quality of life. People don't want to be slaves -- those in power spend much time convincing people that they're free when, in fact, they aren't. We believe that everyone values their freedom, whereas the Anarchist holds that the working people are too racist, sexist, apathetic, homophobic to "get the message" -- they view the masses with almost Marxist contempt. In fact, when things don't go the Anarchists' way, they blame everyone but themselves, which accounts for the isolation and elitism of the left wing -- you working people are just "too stupid/racist/sexist" to get their Lofty Ideas. With that attitude, you can see why working people ignore the radical left.


A2: Statism K – State Good – Morality

1. WITHOUT THE STATE THERE WOULD BE NO POSSIBILITY FOR ETHICSDavid Campbell, professor of international politics, University of Newcastle, MORAL SPACES: RETHINKING ETHICS AND WORLD POLITICS, 1999, p. 38.

In these terms, proximity could also signify the closeness of culture, the priority of time over space. But on other occasions the spatial dimension is there, notably when the third party enters. "In proximity a subject is implicated in a way not reducible to the spatial sense which proximity takes on when the third party troubles it by demanding justice.” Indeed, the major problem with the entry of the third party is that the disturbance of responsibility in the one-to-one relationship it creates requires justice. As Levinas argues, "[I]f there were only two people in the world, there would be no need for law courts because I would always be responsible for and before, the other." The justice required is, according to Levinas, a justice of laws, and courts, and institutions, which means that as soon as the third party enters, "the ethical relationship with the other becomes political and enters into a totalizing discourse of ontology." Moreover, the spatial dimension foregrounded by the third party's disturbance and the resultant need for justice is associated with the state. "Who is closest to me? Who is the Other?.. . We must investigate carefully. Legal justice is required. There is need for a state." Equally, in Otherwise Than Being, Levinas writes that "a problem is posited by proximity itself, which, as the immediate itself, is without problems. The extraordinary commitment of the other to the third party calls for control, a search for justice, society and the State.” Indeed, Levinas has an approving view of the state, regarding it as "the highest achievement in the lives of western peoples,” something perhaps attributable to his contestable interpretation of the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

2. THE STATE IS NECESSARY FOR MORALITY AND CANNOT BE ESCAPEDMichael Shapiro, professor of political science, University of Hawai’i, MORAL SPACES: RETHINKING ETHICS AND WORLD POLITICS, 1999, p. 50-51.

Yet, again, I would argue that the above discussion demonstrates that not only does Derridean deconstruction address the question of politics, especially when Levinasian ethics draws out its political qualities, it does so in an affirmative antitotalitarian manner that gives its politics a particular quality, which is what Critchley and others like him most want (and rightly so, in my view). We may still be dissatisfied with the prospect that Derridas account cannot rule out forever perverse calculations and unjust laws. But to aspire to such a guarantee would be to wish for the demise of politics, for it would install a new technology, even if it was a technology that began life with the markings of progressivism and radicalism. Such dissatisfaction, then, is not with a Derridean politics, but with the necessities of politics per se, necessities that can be contested and negotiated, but not escaped or transcended. It is in this context that the limits of the Levinasian supplement proposed by Critchley as necessary for deconstruction become evident. While it is the case that Levinas's thought is antagonistic to all totalizing forms of politics, recognizing the way that ontological totalitarianism gives rise to political totalitarianism, I argued above that the limit of its critical potential is exposed by the question of the state. In this regard, insofar as Derridean deconstruction requires the Levinasian supplement, that supplement itself needs to be supplemented, and supplemented with recognition of the manner in which deconstruction's affirmation of alterity deterritorializes responsibility, and pluralizes the possibilities for ethics and politics over and beyond (yet still including) the state.

3. THE STATE IS KEY TO THE EMPOWERMENT OF THE DISADVANTAGEDBarbara Epstein, professor, UC Santa Cruz, “Grassroots Environmental Change and Strategies for Social Change,” New Social Movement Network, February 28, 2000, http://www.interweb-tech.com/nsmnet/docs/epstein.htm

In the context of the right's campaign to dismantle the welfare state and align state policy with the interests of the rich, it seems appropriate for progressive social movements to turn back to the state as an arena of struggle, though without abandoning the effort to transform consciousness, without which any effective challenge to the right is unimaginable. Issues of political power, the distribution (and use) of resources, and of culture and ideology seem increasingly intertwined: environmentalism, for instance, addresses all three.


The demand of the toxics/environmental justice movement for a state that has more power to regulate the corporations, a state that is accountable to the public rather than the corporations. seems entirely appropriate, and possibly a basis for a broader demand that the state power over the corporations be reasserted and expanded, and that state power be exercised on behalf of public welfare and especially the welfare of those who are most vulnerable.


A2: Statism K – Alternative Fails – Totalizing

1. FOCUSING ON THE STATE IGNORES OBSCURES OTHER FORMS OF POLITICAL POWER Paul Wapner, assistant professor, American University, ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, Spring 1995, p. 64-65.

There is nothing wrong with being state-centric per se. The state is the predominant political institution on the planet and deserves significant attention and scholarly analysis. Moreover, in so far as the state, as the institution under which societies are organized, is unable to address global environmental challenges in a successful way, it is fruitful to conceptualize alternative political structures and institutions. Nonetheless, if one takes seriously the criticisms regarding statism, supra-statism and sub-statism outlined above, such emphasis on the institution of the state fails to do justice to the power of the political imagination as it reflects upon environmental issues. It unduly restricts the breadth and creativity of global environmental thinking. There is much more to politics than the activities of the state; and there is much more to politics than the design of governmental institutions. How people, as individuals and collectives, think and act with reference to the environment is not simply a matter of the kind of organizing structure within which they live. Numerous other factors, animated by diverse actors, shape and influence widespread practices. The practices of corporations, the influence of widely-held better systems, the predominant mode of economic activity and so forth significantly govern, as it were, the way people interact with the natural environment; and the degree of influence of each is not simply a function of governmental scale. Put differently, there is more to world politics than the state system or its institutional role. As Seyom Brown points out, the state-system is a subset of the global polity within which all practices that shape, manage and direct public life take place. By focusing on the state as the central orienting principle of world environmental politics, one bleaches out how mechanisms of governance unconnected and unamenable to state control shape widespread behaviour with reference to the environment.

2. THE BELIEF THAT WITHOUT A STATE PEOPLE WOULD BECOME GOOD IS FLAWEDPaul Wapner, assistant professor, American University, ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, Spring 1995,p. 66.

Finally, sub-statism suffers in so far as it assumes that people are essentially co-operative and ecologically-mindful, but become corrupted by the experience of living within large social structures. According to this assumption, if social life could simply be organized on a small-scale, the inherent ‘goodness’ of humans could naturally flourish. As Robyn Eckersley points out, however, the problem with this assumption is that it confuses the potential nature of humans with their essential nature. This conflation is simplistic and, to the degree that it underpins sub-statism, it places the entire perspective on theoretically shaky ground.

3. STATE POWER IS SELF-LIMITING IN A DEMOCRACYGeorge Kateb, professor of philosophy, THE INNER OCEAN: INDIVIDUALISM AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES, 1992, p. 37.

When people acknowledge, as they must, that some political authority (some government) is necessary – that life or social life or civilization would not be possible without it – the fact that it is regularly recreated invests the feeling of necessity with some mitigation and removes gratitude from the picture altogether. Although people cannot but choose to have political authority, they nevertheless choose those who wield it. Just by doing that they loosen authority’s hold: not, here, in the sense that the electoral system provides some general guidance on laws and public policies, but in the sense that there would be no political authority at all without the willing participation of the people in the electoral system. There would be no person or group who could properly claim it or confer it or validate it if the people did not take part. Imprecisely put, but not metaphorically, the electoral system is a form of people’s self-rule. If that is the case, the very nature of rule, of authority, is qualitatively different in representative democracies.

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