Aff Security Answers

Framing

A2: Security Epistemology

Lack of capital T truth doesn’t dent the necessity of logic and data. Incomplete knowledge is still useful.Sil ‘2k [Rudra Sil, assistance professor of Political Science @ the University of Pennsylvania. “Beyond boundaries?: disciplines, paradigms, and theoretical integration in International Studies. 2001. P. 161]In the end, there may be no alternative to relying on the judgment of other human beings, and this judgment is difficult to form in the absence of empirical findings. However, instead of clinging to the elusive idea of a uniform standard for the empirical validation of theories, it is possible to simply present a set of observational statements—whether we call it "data" or "narrative"—for the modest purpose of rendering an explanation or interpretation more plausible than the audience would allow at the outset. In practice, this is precisely what the most committed positivists and inter-pretivists have been doing anyway; the presentation of "logically consistent" hypotheses "supported by data" and the ordering of facts in a "thick" narrative are both ultimately designed to convince scholars that a particular proposition should be taken more seriously than others. Social analysis is not about final truths or objective realities,

but nor does it have to be a meaningless world of incommensurable theories where anything goes.

Instead, it can be an ongoing collective endeavor to develop, evaluate, and refine general inferences—be they in the form of models, partial explanations, descriptive inferences, or interpretations—in order to render them more "sensible" or "plausible" to a particular audience. In the absence of a consensus on the possibility and

desirability of a full-blown explanatory science of international and social life, it is important to keep as many doors open as possible. This does not require us to accept each and every claim without some sort of validation, but perhaps the community of scholars can be more tolerant about the kinds of empirical referents and logical propositions that are employed in validating propositions by scholars embracing all but the most extreme epistemological positions.

Empiricism Good

Empiricism creates accurate representations – our epistemology is soundLiu 96 (Xiuwu, Assistant Prof. Interdisciplinary Studies – Miami U. Ohio, “Western perspectives on Chinese higher education”, p. 22-24, Google Print)The pervious section goes to some lengths to underscore the plain fact that the studied society exists independently of studies of it. Constructivists may contend that I missed their point. They may say, for example, that they never doubted the independent existence of society and that the thrust of their position lies in denying that we can arrive at the Truth about any aspect of society. Their point about the perspectival nature of knowledge is well taken, and realist constructivism contains that insight. "Anything goes" is a realist or rationalist caricature of relativism (Geertz 1984; Putnam 1990; Rorty 1982) just as talk about Truth is a constructivist caricature of the epistemology of "old-fashioned" scholarship. What I call social ontological realism is part of the general philosophical position of ontological realism, which asserts the mind-independent existence of reality. It asserts the study-independent existence of society and, in cross-cultural inquiry, the study independent existence of other societies. I give it special emphasis for two reasons. First, the concept of social reality has been neglected in recent constructivist works. Sometimes constructivists imply or even insist that there is no reality except that which is represented (Lincoln and Guba 198, chap. 3). For example, in her survey of feminist methods in social research, Shulamit Reinharz discusses a prevalent attitude of feminist ethnographers toward “positivism.”13 Some feminist researchers continue to reject positivism [referring in this context to “testing or large-scale surveys”] as an aspect of patriarchal thinking that separates the scientist from the phenomenon under study. They repudiate the idea of a social reality “out there” independent of the observer. Rather, they think that social research should be guided by a constructivist framework in which researchers acknowledge that they interpret and define reality. (1992, 46)14 This position commits the epistemic fallacy in that it reduces social reality to what is known about it (Bhaskar 1989; Outhwaite 1987, 76). While scholarly understanding of social reality is, to use a catchphrase of hermeneutics, always already interpreted, social reality in itself has its own existence . Because that reality has its own existence, insufficient attention to it will result in unrealistic representations of it. Put differently, realist constructivism attends to both ontological and epistemological aspects of cross-cultural inquiry , redressing the balance brought about by constructivist thinking. How this may be done in one area of empirical cross-cultural studies will be shown in my analyses of Western studies of Chinese education. In the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of social science a prevalent position on ontological realism (usually called metaphysical realism) is that it is trivial or banal (Hesse 1992; McGinn 1995). This is because once the existence of specific entities (class, in social science, for example) is broached, the discussion becomes theory-laden.15 On the other hand, as Walker and Evers point out, “from the fact that all experience is theory-laden, that what we believe exists depends on what theory we adopt, it does not follow that all theories are evidentially equivalent or equally reasonable” (1988, 33). To reconcile these two insights for the present discussion, I suggest that in cross-cultural inquiry, ontological realism is not so trivial as has been deemed generally, where empirical checks are crucial to producing highly realistic representations of other societies.16 The objection that it is not so much the fact that another society has an independent existence but how that society exists that matters to empirical inquiry, though helpful, ignores the fact that the latter assumes the former. My second reason for emphasizing social ontological realism concerns the requirement that an adequate account of cross-cultural inquiry satisfactorily explains why some statements are realistic while others are not. As the remaining chapters of this book aim to show, in most cases the task is not deciding between an account that is realistic and another that is not. Rather, in actual inquiry, a scholar’s task amounts to choosing from a limited number of plausible accounts what she considers to be the most appropriate one. Nevertheless, in those limiting taken-for-granted cases, social ontological realism does make possible a distinction between realistic statements and unrealistic ones (unrealistic in the sense that they utterly fail to represent or belie an aspect of social reality within a given conteExt.). An adequate model for cross-cultural inquiry should account for these limiting cases.

A2: Ontology First

Ontology not first - questions of ethics are contingent and political, not ontological - their attempt to ground ethics in ontology leads to epistemic closure and prevents democratic challenges to existing relationships of violenceBeasley & Bacchi 7(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)How does our concept of ‘social flesh’ draw on, yet differ from, existing vocabularies? Following on from the second generation care ethicists we suggest that the ethico-political ideal of ‘social flesh’ is not so much to be understood as a moral quality, usually perceived in relation to individuals, but rather as a political ethic concerning existing and future practices, a political challenge specifically to the neo-liberal ethos of atomistic individualism. We do not stress ontology in this account of interconnection. Diprose argues – in keeping with Levinas – that embodied interconnection between self and other makes ‘being’ possible, is a fixed universal, and hence precedes history and politics. Ethical responsibility for the other, connectedness, becomes unquestionable and inescapable. We feel that

this reliance on ontology to do the work of social responsibility may be overly hopeful and may

also relegate important political debates to the sidelines , while framing embodied interconnection in strongly prescriptive and normative terms. While we agree, along with care

ethicists, that sociality is embodied (and consequently involves care), this is a very preliminary and thin ontological

foundation which does not presume in advance that forms of recognition which flow from it are

necessarily laudable or predictable, let alone self-evidently altruistic . While embodied interconnection is the preexisting condition of ‘being’ human and therefore of sociality,2 in concert with

Borgerson we are inclined to assert that what human beings do with this ontological state of

connection is not ontological . In other words, the ontological starting point of embodied interconnection

does get us very far. It does not entail a particular ethics . Rather ethics – a relation of responsibility – remains firmly in the realm of the political possibilities and political will within particular forms of sociality, a

matter of history.3 Hence, the question remains, what is to be done ? Like Borgerson, we think that an

overemphasis on the ontological leads to an ‘epistemic closure’ (Gordon, 2000: 145–7 in Borgerson,

2001: 183) and to an essentializing as fundamental and inevitable . This is importantly contingent

and a matter of political debate. Thus, at least at the level of the political imaginary, such an overemphasis

blocks the necessary and fruitful contestation required in order to undertake the democratic

project of overhauling neo-liberalism .

Ontological focus kills policy analysis needed to confront global challenges – the trade-off is real and ongoing in IR.Jarvis ‘2k Darryl Jarvis, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sydney. International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism. P. 2While Hoffman might well be correct, these days one can neither begin nor conclude empirical research without first discussing epistemological orientations and ontological assumptions. Like a vortex methatheory has engulfed us all and the question of “theory” which was once used as a guide to research is now the object of research. Indeed, for a discipline whose

purview is ostensible outward looking and international in scope, and at a time of ever encroaching globalization and transnationalism, International Relations has become increasingly provincial and inward looking. Rather than grapple with the numerous issues that confront peoples around the world, since the early 1980s the discipline has tended more and more toward obsessive self-examination. These days the politics of famine, environmental degradation, underdevelopment, or ethnic cleansing, let alone the cartographic machinations in Eastern Europe and the reconfiguration of the geo-global political-economy, seem scarcely to concern theorists of of international politics who define the urgent task of our time to be one of metaphysical reflection and epistemological investigation. Arguably, theory is no longer concerned with the study of international relations so much as the “manner in which international relations as a discipline and international relations as a subject matter, have been constructed. To be concerned with the latter is to be “on the cutting edge,” where novelty has itself become “an appropriate form of scholarship”

Belief in “infinite uncertainty” dooms us to paralysis – we can scenario construct based on the best available evidence to reach necessary conclusions. The alternative collapses hegemony.Oppenheimer 12 – Prof of Global Affairs@NYU Graduate Global Affairs Program, lifetime member CFR Michael F. Oppenheimer, “From Prediction to Recognition: Using Alternate Scenarios to Improve Foreign Policy Decisions”, in SAIS Review, v 32 n 1, 2012, MUSEWe, in America, could reduce uncertainty by excluding much of this complexity from our definition of U.S. policy interests. (Another approach to reducing uncertainty, “creating our own reality,” produces its own surprises.) For example, we could choose to view globalization as self-sustaining despite clear evidence to the contrary; much of the developing world as too ill-governed, resistant to our influence, or peripheral to our interests to be worth our attention; issues of the global commons as amenable to market-based solutions; rising powers as more threatening to—and thus contained by—immediate neighbors, therefore less threatening to us; and the risk of terrorism as low, and the cost-effectiveness of improved

homeland security vastly greater than regime change and state building. Neo-isolationism would, over the short term,

reduce the knowledge requirements of U.S. policy. At the same time, it would increase the likelihood that U.S. actions in the world would have somewhat more predictable effects and enable intelligence to focus on “known unknowns,” thus improving the accuracy and foresightedness of U.S. policy. Doing only what we have the knowledge to do well is

an important criterion to be weighed in making policy choices. But aligning U.S. policy with current knowledge would expose the country to great harm , invite adversaries to fill the gaps left by America’s retrenchment, and guarantee unpleasant surprises from outside the restrictively defined perimeter of our interests. This approach, popular among some neo-realist observers, has been rejected by administrations from both parties over

seventy years of Cold War and post Cold War history. The temptation [End Page 20] to engage actively in the global system,

and thus to encounter all the sources of uncertainty, complexity, surprise, and risk discussed above,

appears irresistible. Therefore, getting better at decision making in these contexts, as we deepen our knowledge about the world, is an unavoidable necessity . Sources of Surprise Surprise does not necessarily produce bad policy if decision makers are prepared to modify outdated assumptions given new information and are ready cognitively and strategically for a changed environment. Few of the surprises noted above appeared without leading indicators or even a few prescient observers. They were the result of the interaction of underlying trends unseen by experts. They were in part self-inflicted, representing a failure to recognize or properly weigh new information. They were the consequences of unchallenged mindsets, of an excess of certainty

confronting a dynamic world. Acute observation was lacking, not foresight. Furthermore, our subsequent reactions to surprise have often demonstrated more stubbornness than agility, thus magnifying the inherent limitations of foresight. As U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in describing the New York Fed’s reaction to the financial crisis, “Policy was always behind the curve, always chasing the escalating crisis.”1 Mirror imaging, wishful thinking, entrenched policy positions,

bureaucratic inertia, and lack of imagination have all played a part in the “intelligence failures” and policy missteps of the last twenty years. They have been on public display most recently in our extemporaneous

response to the Arab Spring and Europe’s too little, too late reaction to its sovereign debt crisis. These are the types of surprises that improved process can mitigate. Policymakers often bring unrecognized or unarticulated assumptions about the future into policy debates.2 These assumptions are derived from recent experience (which can produce misleading historical analogies or trend extrapolations), value preferences, time pressure (rewarding assumptions that are “good enough” to permit closure), mindsets based on theoretical or cultural biases, group-think, the political risks of dissent and demands of building a case for change (which create strong incentives to wring the greatest possible value out of current policy). Foreign policy debates proceed within a context of insecurity and uncertainty, which often encourages threat inflation and actions that produce self-fulfilling negative prophecies. U.S. policymakers are particularly susceptible to these tendencies, given multiple U.S. interests and the consequent thinning of intelligence and increased uncertainty. The magnitude of relative U.S. power in the world—which multiplies perceived threats—can blind us to the interests and perspectives of others and, when deployed carelessly, can produce massive unintended consequences. Ideas, theories, hypotheses, and historical analogies are all essential intellectual equipment for making sense of the stream of events. Policymakers cannot be agnostic about the way the world works. They must look for patterns, try to explain causation , separate relevant from peripheral

information, [End Page 21] reach conclusions, and make decisions—all in a timeframe imposed by events and often at odds with the deliberate processes of data gathering and hypothesis testing of academic and intelligence analysts. However, these mindsets can be disabling in the presence of rapid change and thus must be continuously reexamined in light of new data.3 The Surprising Arab Spring Embedded mindsets are a particular risk in the current international system, characterized as it is by intense internal and external pressures on all governments and intergovernmental institutions. The combination of globalization and extended economic crisis has tested systems premised on prosperity and interdependence, and some have proven too fragile to survive. The longer this period of austerity and economic insecurity lasts, the greater are the chances of further disintegration, particularly among states—both democratic and otherwise—with limited popular legitimacy and high ex-declining demand. We will have to deconstruct much of what we have learned about political economies during periods of economic growth and liberal hegemony, if we are to anticipate and respond successfully to further unraveling. Our experience at the Center for Global Affairs (CGA) at New York University (NYU), through several scenario workshops on pivotal countries, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, is that experts tend to underestimate the degree of future variability in the domestic politics of seemingly stable states.4 They tend to dismiss signs of current tension, minimizing the capacity and ambition of regime opponents and exaggerating the resilience of existing authority. This is the case across the Middle East, as it was with the Soviet Union and now Putin’s Russia. The point is not that

experts should be able to predict revolutionary events, rather that they often resist even a serious consideration of such possibilities, thus artificially narrowing the conversation, depriving policymakers of the combination of expertise and open-mindedness essential to early warning, and limiting the opportunity to test policies in the presence of such changes. This is remarkable given the centrality of the Middle East to U.S. interests, the sheer amount of

government [End Page 22] and academic attention devoted to watching it, and the potential costs of being unprepared for big changes. The Arab Spring has prompted some soul searching among Middle East experts. Gregory Gause, a widely respected academic specialist on the Arab world, observed in the July–August 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the vast majority of academic specialists on the Arab world were as surprised as everyone else by the upheavals that toppled two Arab leaders last summer and now threaten several others.”5 His explanation, broadly, is that the long period of authoritarian rule focused experts’ attention on explaining the persistence of these regimes, rather than on their vulnerability, and generated policy advice to bet on their continued survival. In emphasizing the strength of the military-security complex and state control over the economy, they missed the growing professionalism of some Arab armies (in Egypt and Tunisia) and the rising influence of a new business class, benefiting from economic reforms and globalization and thus less dependent on regime patronage. As a result, experts “underestimated the popular revulsion to the corruption and crony privatization that accompanied the reforms.”6 They also missed the power of cross-border Arab identity, thus failing to anticipate the contagion that was, and continues to be, a remarkable attribute of the ongoing revolution in the Arab world. Gause concludes that, while explaining stability was an important task, “it led some of us to underestimate the forces for change that were bubbling below, and at times above, the surface of Arab politics.”7 He calls not for precise—a guarantee of being wrong—but for greater humility, a thorough and open re-examination of assumptions on key drivers of Arab politics like the role of the military, the effects of economic change, and the importance of Arab identity. We should not presume to control these forces for change, because they originate “in indigenous economic, political and social factors whose dynamics were extremely hard to forecast.” Gause’s self-criticism is refreshing, useful, and rare. But beyond the misestimation of particular shifts in the domestic politics of Egypt lies the broader question of why experts working in an area so important to American security should have so thoroughly focused on regime stability. And, if this is a tendency associated with experts generally, how can we reduce the chances of being blindsided because of assumptions of stability that are suddenly proven wrong by events on the ground? Taleb and Blyth,8 writing in the May–June issue of Foreign Affairs, suggest that the events in Egypt are a classic example of a “Black Swan,” an event (or series of events) both inevitable and unpredictable: inevitable, because systems operating in dynamic environments that prohibit incremental adjustments to change guarantee themselves some form of shock; unpredictable, because such shocks can be precipitated by an infinite variety of events, some seemingly trivial. Since these conditions are not confined to Egypt or to the Middle East, the suggestion is to expect and prepare for the unexpected, not by predicting the inherently unpredictable, but by imagining such events (within the bounds of plausibility) and then looking for evidence that they may be forthcoming. [End Page 23] The emphasis on explaining continuity, referred to by Gause, raises another possibility, namely a preference for stability among policy-oriented Middle East experts. The reasons are obvious: a well-justified fear among policymakers of the consequences of revolutionary change, with the resulting opportunities for Islamists and for Iran; and a level of comfort with Arab dictators amenable to U.S. influence, prepared to deal with Israel, and seemingly able to maintain effective control over their territory. These policy preferences shape the incentive structure for experts eager to influence the debate. They establish a range of acceptable analyses that brilliantly argue the case for continued stability but often miss the tipping points. It is always safer to extrapolate, and, most of the time, more accurate as well. Imagining discontinuous change is intellectually challenging and can be professionally risky—better to be correct most of the time, and, when spectacularly wrong, to have lots of company. Finally, there is a disconnect between assessments of stability at the state level and the global political economy. The world faces an enlarged supply of economic and political stress resulting from globalization and its mismanagement, and regimes that are unable to adjust to these stresses are especially vulnerable to sudden political change. With all the growth benefits of globalization, we have tended to ignore its disruptive effects and failed to connect these effects with individual states already suffering from homegrown problems, including youth unemployment, income inequality, government corruption, and concentration of political power—especially in the Middle East. Volatility, economic insecurity, and rapid shifts in competitiveness are conditions of the market-driven globalization to which all states are subject. Badly governed states can often ride out these storms but are more vulnerable when the global economy suffers from extended weakness. Expectations of upheaval are not as far-fetched as long-running stability and global prosperity make them appear, an observation that applies to the Middle East as well as to the latest list of global winners, the so-called BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Mysterious Russia The impact of globalization on authoritarian and autarchic political economies in the process of liberalization is a story not confined to Egypt. The [End Page 24] extraordinary, spontaneous protests among mostly middle class urbanities in Russia—in response to fraudulent parliamentary elections—appears to be a “protest vote” against Putin’s presidential run and suggests growing impatience with top-down governance, particularly when concentrated power produces highly unequal economic gains and flagrant corruption. The capacity to organize and sustain such leaderless movements, largely through social networking, has been amply demonstrated in Egypt, and now possibly in Russia. The mobilization of the Russian middle class is likely to continue at least through the presidential elections in March, and has the potential to fundamentally alter Russian politics. The contagious effects of protests in one country, especially when they reveal the fragility of previously unchallengeable power, is also a product of globalization, as is the vulnerability of authoritarian governments of partially globalized states to economic sanctions, should they respond to popular protests with violence. There remains much skepticism among experts about political change “from below” in Russia, as there was in Egypt. From Peter the Great to “the vanguard of the proletariat” to perestroika and glasnost, change in Russia has been a top-down process. When the CGA ran the alternate scenario conference on Russia in February 2010, the many experts around the table were generally dismissive of the possibility of political change through popular revolt, though the group did develop one plausible future scenario that anticipated an elite led economic liberalization motivated by growing concern, especially in the regions, over Russia’s resource-dependent, inefficient, and globally uncompetitive economy: A struggle for dominance between reformist and conservative elements results in a stalemate, reducing the government’s ability to address economic challenges. Fueled by the dynamism of a new generation of entrepreneurs and capital from Moscow, new enterprises emerge in a number of Russia’s regions, symbolizing Russia’s economic rebirth and the beginning of political pluralism.9 Recent events suggest that this economically driven, regionally centered, incremental reform scenario may be too conservative. The global system is experiencing a growth in populism, a response to increasing inequalities within states, falling incomes resulting from continuing economic stagnation, and arbitrary political authority. States, rich and poor, democratic [End Page 25] and authoritarian, have felt the sting of increased political activism, and, after a long hiatus, economic justice is back in the debate. Putinism, facing a newly self-empowered middle class with its suddenly shaky legitimacy, may turn out to be one more in a series of transient Russian experiments on the way towards genuine economic and political modernization. Alternate Scenarios and the Reduction of Surprise Multiple scenarios10 are designed to challenge the mindsets policymakers bring into debates by presenting alternate narratives that capture less conventional but plausible views of the future. They are not predictive. Quite the contrary, they are intended to deconstruct predictions that force-fit analysis to preferences or other forms of bias. In doing so, they can reveal dubious assumptions, conveniently overlooked policy trade-offs, and future “wild card” events or trends that can invalidate current policies and pose new challenges. They can open up alternate ways of interpreting available intelligence, retarget intelligence to clarify new uncertainties, and make decision makers more receptive to early warning signs of new trends.11 Multiple scenarios are constructed with the goals of insight and improved recognition, not replacement of the prevailing paradigm with a new conventional wisdom equally subject to degradation. Witness the event-driven and transitory character of post-Cold War intellectual commentary: the decade of the nineties, variously described as threat-less, flat, global, the end of history; the following half-decade, as pervasively insecure, a perfect storm of terror, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), rogue states; and the more recent emphasis on declining relative American power. This most recent contender for intellectual primacy spans observers as disparate as Robert Kagan,12 Fareed Zakaria,13 John Ikenberry (“In the decades to come, America’s unipolar power will give way to a more bipolar, multipolar, or decentralized distribution of power”14), and the National Intelligence Council (NIC).15 This consensus now confronts the global economic crisis, which, in the dominant view, accelerates the erosion of unipolarity.16 However, the crisis can easily cut in the opposite direction, undermining [End Page 26] governance and power in “rising” states and regional institutions now experiencing dramatic reductions in growth, while reinforcing states with strong and diversified economies, robust civil society, and legitimate political institutions capable of innovative and pragmatic responses to economic stress. Alternate scenarios are designed as believable narratives describing how very different futures could emerge from current circumstances, with markedly different consequences for U.S. interests and policies. They thus serve to expose the alternate paths already discernible in the present, sharpen debate about prevailing trends, and reveal the limit of extant conventional wisdom about the future and our place in it. With the plausibility of distinctive futures established, they can serve as alternate platforms for evaluating the sustainability of current policies and testing the effectiveness of new approaches. The principle objective then is to improve observation of a rapidly changing and complex reality and to encourage early recognition of emerging trends that may shift the ground under current policies.17 The scenario conversation is informed by theory but not committed to a single paradigm. Indeed, it is consciously designed as a dialogue across theoretical boundaries, disciplines and cultures. Participants are encouraged to step back from their assumptions, exercise their imaginations to envision new trends from fragmentary data, and invent “wild card” events that combine plausibility with impact. The process avoids the extremes of groundless speculation and categorical theory-driven pronouncements about the future. By leveraging knowledge (not everything is uncertain)18 without exaggerating our foresight,

we can hope to narrow uncertainty, reduce surprise, eliminate implausible futures, identify policies that “work” across a range of future conditions, and help policymakers manage risk. Scenario Process The scenario construction process should be interactive; in effect, a structured “brainstorm” among experts and policymakers of diverse professional backgrounds, nationalities, and skill sets. This diversity reflects the fact that major, unanticipated change is often a product of trends and events from different domains of activity intersecting in unpredictable ways.

A dialogue limited to international relations experts and policymakers may be circumscribed by traditional international relations theory, which places many forces for change outside of the dominant models (technology, ideational change, economic variables, demographics, climate change.) A dialogue among Americans of diverse skill sets may still fall short on local knowledge, particularly for countries historically peripheral to U.S. interests. A special contemporary liability of our vast power is indifference toward the views and interests of others, often manifested in America-centric assumptions of how others behave (“mirror imaging”). Broadly, two approaches exist for scenario generation. “Bottom-up” approaches begin with research on drivers of change, an assessment of their importance, the extent of future variability, and their sensitivity to interaction [End Page 27]

with other drivers. The process proceeds to general discussion of potential futures arising from the interaction of important drivers (such as population, resources, environment, governance, growth, poverty, internal dynamics, and cross-border conflicts). These scenario fragments are fleshed out in conversation, and then assessed for significance, lack of redundancy, and plausibility (with the last criterion very loosely applied). The goal is to arrive at scenario concepts that are judged sufficiently important, believable, and different as to warrant further examination. The group then proceeds to create narratives for each concept, beginning with present circumstances and including discrete events, trend developments, policy decisions, and their consequences, working toward a convincing case for the scenario’s end point. The author has used this bottom-up approach in his work for the U.S. intelligence community, which has the very difficult job of producing analyses relevant to policy without being explicit about the policy contributions to, and

consequences of, potential futures. It is also the approach in our current project on alternate futures for pivotal countries. Longer time-frames may call for such an approach, given expanded indeterminacy and widened policy choice. The approach may still miss future developments relevant to current policy but is more likely to capture potential structural change and policy-forcing developments. “Top-down” approaches target policy impacts and choices more directly. Here, the process may begin with an examination of the assumptions underlying current policies that fail to explain unfolding events and then test those assumptions against alternate, plausible futures. It may select potential scenarios that are overlooked, or willfully ignored, by current policy as politically incorrect or too challenging to contemplate. Such an approach lends itself to extemporaneous exercises occasioned by new information or policy reviews and may succeed in producing results more directly relevant to current policy, though less likely to capture longer-term, structural changes. Individual country scenario exercises allow for specification of the policy problem and thus lend themselves to this approach.19 An example would be a scenario exercise the author organized at CGA in 2007 on the future of Iraq after U.S withdrawal,20 which we assumed at that time would occur around 2010. The central policy question was, and remains, how lasting an effect would our presence have, and if transitory, what plausible configurations might emerge for Iraq and the region? Three scenarios resulted from the discussions: National Unity Dictatorship: A nationalist leader emerges from the chaos of Iraq, a leader who is sufficiently independent of external players—the U.S., Iran, al-Qaeda, Arab governments—to establish credibility as a unifying figure. Contained Mess: As Iraq disintegrates into all-out civil war, neighboring countries—understanding the potential for contagion, radicalization, and the threat to their regimes—manage to act collectively to avoid the worst case even as they pursue proxy war on Iraqi territory. [End Page 28] Contagion: Iraq’s civil war spreads to adjoining states through refugee flows, growing radicalization of Arab populations, escalating terrorism, and the deliberate efforts of regional rivals to destabilize other governments. Rereading this study in light of recent sectarian strife in Iraq prompts several conclusions. There is a good chance that democracy and stability in Iraq are incompatible, and that continued insistence on democracy in this divided, still traumatized state contributes to disintegration. It suggests the importance of thinking about U.S. policy going forward without the favorable assumptions that animated the original invasion, a very difficult thing to do given our ten-year investment in the policy. It also suggests the vital importance of planning now for the strong possibility that our choices will fall between accepting, if not encouraging, a national unity dictatorship, hopefully of a more benign nature than the previous one, or trying to assemble a regional containment coalition (“contained mess”), understanding that this has been rendered less plausible by the Arab Spring and new governments more attuned to, or preoccupied with resisting, popular opinion. These choices, unpalatable as they seem, gain in appeal as we contemplate the damage of scenario three, “contagion.” Given the contingent and uncertain shape of emergent reality and the goal of creating value for policymakers, the durability of any particular set of alternate scenarios will be limited. Large, formal scenario studies have their place, especially those

focused on the more distant future—the NIC reports are examples. But, by and large, the scenarios will begin to lose their direct relevance to policy unless they are embedded in an ongoing process of hypothesis testing and policy re-evaluation against incoming information and analysis. New data and insight may broadly confirm one scenario, invalidate another, suggest new scenarios to consider, reveal the impacts—intended or not—of previous policy decisions, call for additional research or data collection to clarify uncertainties, and alter the mix of policy options. In the best of circumstances, this way of thinking about policy occurs

spontaneously; the formal scenario process provides greater discipline and structure to policy debates, thus increasing the likelihood that such thinking will be employed. Scenario development should ideally be sited in the policy agencies themselves and at the NIC, with extensive “outside” participation. The National Security Council, the National Economic Council, Policy Planning at the Department of State could all assemble the appropriate mix of expertise, imagination, and policy savvy needed to do this well. With the support of the Carnegie Corporation, the CGA has done five such exercises on pivotal countries, including China, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Pakistan. Earlier studies covered Iran and Iraq. Critical to success in these exercises was assembling the right mix of skill sets, points of view, and nationality. The idea is to organize a conversation on the key interactions that can precipitate change. In the case of the Middle East, these intersections might include the effects of global financial volatility and economic stagnation on employment and income, population growth and youth unemployment on political mobilization, political change in one country on changes in others, and economic reform and the emergence of [End Page 29] new elites on regime legitimacy and resilience. Out of such a process one could imagine at least three plausible alternate scenarios emerging for the Arab world: moderate Islamic democracies, consciously modeled on Turkey; authoritarian coalitions of Islam and the military; and internal and regional sectarian

fragmentation. Conclusion This paper has argued that alternate scenarios can be of great value to policymakers confronting rapid change, uncertainty, and high risk. Alternate scenarios present plausible and distinctive futures that challenge embedded mindsets, suggest different paths by which events may unfold, and improve early recognition of emerging trends. By engaging the future, they avoid the equally hazardous extremes of infinite uncertainty (which can produce paralysis or willful disregard for what we do know) and excessive certainty (with the attendant risks of ill-conceived actions and

unintended consequences). Promoting a continuous process of scenario construction and deconstruction and embedding such a process in policy formulation would improve the quality of foreign policy decisions taken, inevitably, in uncertainty.

Focus on ontology is violent, causes passivity, and makes exploitation worseGraham ‘99(Phil, Graduate School of Management, University of Queensland, Heidegger’s Hippies: A dissenting voice on the “problem of the subject” in cyberspace, Identities in Action! 1999, http://www.philgraham.net/HH_conf.pdf)Societies should get worried when Wagner’s music becomes popular because it usually means that distorted interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not far away. Existentialists create problems about what is, especially identity (Heidegger 1947). Existentialism inevitably leads to an authoritarian worldview: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-

creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without a goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself – do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides! (Nietzsche 1967/1997). Armed with a volume of Nietzsche, some considerable oratory skills, several Wagner records, and an existentialist University Rector in the form of Martin Heidegger, Hitler managed some truly astounding feats of strategic identity engineering (cf. Bullock, 1991). Upon being appointed to the Freiberg University, Heidegger pronounced the end of thought, history, ideology, and civilisation: ‘No dogmas and ideas will any longer be the laws of your being. The Fuhrer himself, and he alone, is the present and future reality for Germany’ (in Bullock 1991: 345). Heidegger signed up to an ideology-free politics: Hitler’s ‘Third Way’ (Eatwell 1997). The idealised identity, the new symbol of mythological worship, Nietzsche’s European Superman, was to rule from that day hence. Hitler took control of the means of propaganda: the media; the means of mental production: the education system; the means of violence: the police, army, and prison system; and pandered to the means of material production: industry and agriculture; and proclaimed a New beginning and a New world order. He ordered Germany to look forward into the next thousand years and forget the past. Heidegger and existentialism remain influential to this day, and history remains bunk (e.g. Giddens4, 1991, Chapt. 2). Giddens’s claims that ‘humans live in circumstances of … existential contradiction’, and that ‘subjective death’ and ‘biological death’ are somehow unrelated, is a an ultimately repressive abstraction: from that perspective, life is merely a series of subjective deaths, as if death were the ultimate motor of life itself (cf. Adorno 1964/1973). History is, in fact, the simple and straightforward answer to the “problem of the subject”. “The problem” is also a handy device for confusing, entertaining, and selling trash to the masses. By emphasising the problem of the ‘ontological self’ (Giddens 1991: 49), informationalism and

‘consumerism’ confines the navel-gazing, ‘narcissistic’ masses to a permanent present which they self-consciously sacrifice for a Utopian future (cf. Adorno 1973: 303; Hitchens 1999; Lasch 1984: 25-59). Meanwhile transnational businesses go about their work, raping [ruining] the environment; swindling each other and whole nations; and inflicting populations with declining wages, declining working conditions, and declining social security. Slavery is once again on the increase (Castells, 1998; Graham, 1999; ILO, 1998). There is no “problem of the subject”, just as there is no “global society”; there is only the mass amnesia of utopian propaganda, the strains of which have historically accompanied revolutions in communication technologies. Each person’s identity is, quite simply, their subjective account of a unique and objective history of interactions within the objective social and material environments they inhabit, create, and inherit. The identity of each person is their most intimate historical information, and they are its material expression: each person is a record of their own history at any given time. Thus, each person is a recognisably material, identifiable entity: an identity. This is their condition. People are not theoretical entities; they are people. As such, they have an intrinsic identity with an intrinsic value. No amount of theory or propaganda will make it go away. The widespread multilateral attempts to prop up consumer society and hypercapitalism as a valid and useful means of sustainable growth, indeed, as the path to an inevitable, international democratic Utopia, are already showing their disatrous cracks. The “problem” of subjective death threatens to give way, once again, to unprecedented mass slaughter. The numbed condition of a narcissistic society, rooted in a permanent “now”, a blissful state of Heideggerian Dasein, threatens to wake up to a world in which “subjective death” and ontology are the least of all worries.

A2: Ethics

Moral absolutism creates tunnel vision, bad action and irrelevant educationIsaac ‘2 (Jeffrey C. Isaac, professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale, Spring 2002, Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. ProquestAs writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain

violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

Institutions First

Governments’ obey institutional logics that exist independently of individuals and constrain decisionmaking – that’s true regardless of this debateWight – Professor of IR @ University of Sydney – 6(Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology, pgs. 48-50

One important aspect of this relational ontology is that these relations constitute our identity as social actors. According to this relational model of societies, one is what one is, by virtue of the relations within which one is embedded. A worker is only a worker by virtue of his/her relationship to his/her employer and vice versa. ‘Our social being is constituted by relations and our social acts presuppose them.’ At any particular moment in time an individual may be implicated in all manner of relations, each exerting its own peculiar causal effects. This ‘lattice-work’ of relations constitutes the structure of particular societies and endures despite

changes in the individuals occupying them . Thus, the relations, the structures, are ontologically distinct from the individuals who enter into them. At a minimum, the social sciences are concerned with two distinct, although mutually interdependent, strata. There is an ontological difference between people and structures: ‘people are not relations, societies are not conscious agents’. Any attempt to explain one in terms of the other should be rejected. If there is an ontological difference between society and people, however, we need to elaborate on the relationship between them. Bhaskar argues that we need a system of mediating concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxis into which active subjects must fit in order to reproduce it: that is, a system of concepts designating the ‘point of contact’ between human agency and social structures. This is known as a ‘positioned practice’ system. In many respects, the idea of ‘positioned practice’ is very similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Bourdieu is primarily concerned with what individuals do in their daily lives. He is keen to refute the idea that social activity can be understood solely in terms of individual decision-

making , or as determined by surpa-individual objective structures. Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus can be viewed as a bridge-building exercise across the explanatory gap between two extremes. Importantly, the notion of a habitus can only be understood in relation to the concept of a ‘social field’. According to Bourdieu, a social field is ‘a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined’. A social field, then, refers to a structured system of social positions occupied by individuals and/or institutions – the nature of which defines the situation for their occupants. This is a social field whose form is constituted in terms of the relations which define it as a field of a certain type. A habitus (positioned practices) is a mediating link between individuals’ subjective worlds and the socio-cultural world into which they are born and which they share with others. The power of the habitus derives from the thoughtlessness of habit and habituation, rather than consciously learned rules. The habitus is imprinted and encoded in a socializing process that commences during early childhood. It is inculcated more by experience than by explicit teaching. Socially competent performances are produced as a matter of routine, without explicit reference to a body of codified knowledge, and without the actors necessarily knowing what they are doing (in the sense of being able adequately to explain what they are doing). As such, the habitus can be seen as the site of ‘internalization of reality and the externalization of internality.’ Thus social practices are produced in, and by, the encounter between: (1) the habitus and its dispositions;

(2) the constraints and demands of the socio-cultural field to which the habitus is appropriate or within; and (3) the dispositions of the individual agents located within both the socio-cultural field and the habitus. When placed within Bhaskar’s stratified complex social ontology the model we have is as depicted in Figure 1. The explanation of practices will require all three levels. Society, as field of relations, exists prior to, and is independent of, individual and collective understandings at any particular moment in time; that is, social action requires the conditions for action. Likewise, given that behavior is seemingly recurrent, patterned, ordered, institutionalised, and displays a degree of stability over time, there must be sets of relations and rules that govern it. Contrary to individualist theory, these relations, rules and roles are not dependent upon either knowledge of them by particular individuals, or the existence of actions by particular individuals; that is, their explanation cannot be reduced to

consciousness or to the attributes of individuals . These emergent social forms must possess emergent powers. This leads on to arguments for the reality of society based on a causal criterion. Society, as opposed to the individuals that constitute it, is, as Foucault has put it, ‘a complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of reaction, its regulations as well as its possibility of disturbance. This new reality is society…It becomes necessary to reflect upon it, upon its specific characteristics, its constants and its variables’.

Extinction First

Existence Before Ontology

Existence is a pre-requisite to ontology.Wapner ‘3 Paul, Associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University, DISSENT, Winter, http://www.dissentmgazine.org/menutest/artiles/wi03/wapner.htmThe third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world. Postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn't mastery exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain? Doesn't postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world? What else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response: yes, recognizing the social construction of "nature" does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, hut how would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn't speak; rather, some person always speaks on nature's behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings wc ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation.

Extinction Focus Good

Elevating Human extinction to a real possibility encourages a new social ethic to solve conflicts and create meaning to life.Epstein and Zhao 9 [Richard J. Epstein and Y. Zhao, Laboratory of Computational Oncology,Department of Medicine,University of Hong Kong, Professorial Block, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong. “The Threat That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Human Extinction”. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 52, number 1 (winter 2009):116–25. Project Muse.-Final ends for all species are the same, but the journeys will be different. If we cannot influence the end of our species, can we influence the journey? To do so—even in a small way—would be a crowning achievement for human evolution and give new meaning to the term civilization. Only by elevating the topic of human extinction to the level of serious professional discourse can we begin to prepare ourselves for the challenges that lie ahead. The difficulty of the required transition should not be underestimated. This is depicted in Table 3 as a painful multistep progression from the 20th-century philosophical norm of Ego-Think—defined therein as a short-term state of mind valuing individual material self-interest above all other considerations—to Eco-Think, in which humans come to adopt a broader Gaia-like outlook on themselves as but one part of an infinitely larger reality. Making this change must involve communicating the non-sensationalist message to all global citizens that “things are serious” and “we are in this together”—or, in blunter language, that the road to extinction and its related agonies does indeed lie ahead. Consistent with this prospect, the risks of human extinction—and the cost-benefit of attempting to reduce these risks—

have been quantified in a recent sobering analysis (Matheny 2007). Once complacency has been shaken off and a sense of collective purpose created, the battle against self-seeking anthropocentric human instincts will have only just begun. It is often said that human beings suffer from the ability to appreciate their own mortality—an existential agony that has given rise to the great religions— but in the present age of religious decline, we must begin to bear the added burden of anticipating the demise of our species. Indeed, as argued here, there are compelling reasons for

encouraging this collective mind-shift. For in the best of all possible worlds, the realization that our species has long-term survival criteria distinct from our short-term tribal priorities could spark a new social ethic to upgrade what we now all too often dismiss as “human nature” (Tudge 1989).

A2 Impact/Alternative

There’s no root cause of conflict and threat construction is inevitable – even if security is socially constructed, states use balance of power and deterrence to make foreign policy calculationsMoore ’04 Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential appointee, & Honorary Editor of the American Journal of International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton Moore, page 27-31.As so broadly conceived, there is strong evidence that deterrence , that is, the effect of external factors on the decision to go to war, is the missing link in the war/peace equation . In my War/Peace Seminar, I have undertaken to examine the level of deterrence before the principal wars of the twentieth century. 10 This examination has led me to believe that in every case the potential aggressor made a rational calculation that the war would be won, and won promptly.11 In fact, the longest period of time calculated for victory through conventional attack seems to be the roughly six reeks predicted by the German General Staff as the time necessary ) prevail on the Western front in World War I under the Schlieffen Plan. Hitler believed in his attack on Poland that Britain and France could not take the occasion to go to war with him . And he believed his 1941 Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union that “[w]e have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."12 In contrast, following Hermann Goering's failure to obtain air superiority in the Battle of Britain, Hitler called off the invasion of Britain and shifted strategy to the nighttime bombing of population centers, which became known as the Blitz, in a mistaken effort to compel Britain to sue for peace. Calculations in the North Korean attack on South Korea and Hussein’s attack on Kuwait were that the operations would be completed in a matter of days. Indeed, virtually all principal wars in the twentieth century, at least those involving conventional invasion, were preceded by what I refer to as a "double deterrence absence ." That is, the potential aggressor believed that they had the military force in place to prevail promptly and that nations that might have the military or diplomatic power to prevent this were not dined to intervene. This analysis has also shown that many of the perceptions we have about the origins of particular wars are flatly wrong. Anyone who seriously believes that World War I was begun by competing alliances drawing tighter should examine the al historical record of British unwillingness to enter a clear military alliance with the French or to so inform the Kaiser!

Indeed, this pre-World War I absence of effective alliance and resultant war contrasts sharply with the laterrobust NATO alliance and absence of World War III.14 Considerable other evidence seems to support this historical analysis as to the importance of deterrence. Of particular note, Yale Professor Donald Kagan, a preeminent United

States historian who has long taught a seminar on war, published in 1995 a superb book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace.15 In this book heconducts a detailed examination of the Peloponnesian War, World War I, Hannibal's War, and World War II, among other case studies. A careful reading of these studies suggests that each war could have been prevented by achievable deterrence and that each occurred in the absence of such deterrence.16 Game theory seems to offer yet further support for the proposition that appropriate deterrence can prevent war. For example, Robert Axelrod's famous 1980s experiment in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, which is a reasonably close proxy for many conflict settings in international relations, repeatedly showed the effectiveness of a simple tit for tat strategy.17 Such a strategy is at core simply a basic deterrent strategy of influencing behavior through incentives. Similarly, much of the game-theoretic work on crisis bargaining (and danger of asymmetric information) in relation to war a nd the democratic peace assumes the importance of deterrence through communication of incentives.18 The well-known correlation between war and territorial contiguity seems also to underscore the importance of deterrence and is likely principally a proxy for levels of perceived profit and military

achievability of aggression in many such settings. It should further be noted that the democratic peace is not the only significant correlation with respect to war and peace, although it seems to be the most robust. Professors Russett and Oneal, in recently exploring the other elements of the Kantian proposal for "Perpetual Peace," have also shown a strong and statistically significant correlation between economically important bilateral trade between two nations and a reduction in the risk of war between them. Contrary to the arguments of "dependency theorists," such economically important trade seems to reduce the risk of war regardless of the size relationship or asymmetry in the trade balance between the two states. In addition, there is a statistically significant association between economic openness generally and reduction in the risk of war, although this association is not as strong as the effect of an economically important bilateral trade relationship.° Russett and Oneal also show a modest independent correlation between reduction in the risk of war and higher levels of common membership in international organizations.20 And they show that a large imbalance of power between two states significantly lessens the risk of major war between them.21 All of these empirical findings about war also seem to directly reflect incentives; that is, a higher level of trade would, if foregone in war, impose higher costs in the aggregate than without such trade,22 though we know that not all wars terminate trade. Moreover, with respect to trade, a, classic study, Economic Interdependence and War, suggests that the historic record shows that it is not simply aggregate levels of bilateral trade that matters, but expectations as to the level of trade into the future.23 This directly implicates expectations of the war decision maker as does incentive theory, and it importantly adds to the general finding about trade and war that even with existing high levels of bilateral trade, changing expectations from trade sanctions or other factors affecting the flow of trade can directly affect incentives and influence for or against war. A large imbalance of power in a relationship rather obviously impacts deterrence and incentives. Similarly, one might incur higher costs with high levels of common membership in international organizations through foregoing some of the heightened benefits of such participation or otherwise being presented with different options through the actions or effects of such organizations. These external deterrence elements may also be yet another reason why democracies have a lower risk of war with one another. For their freer markets, trade, commerce, and international engagement may place them in a position where their generally higher level of interaction means that aggression will incur substantial opportunity costs. Thus, the "mechanism" of the democratic peace may be an aggregate of factors affecting incentives, both external as well as internal factors. Because of the underlying truth in the relationship between higher levels of trade and lower levels of war, it is not surprising that theorists throughout human history, including Baron de Montesquieu in 1748, Thomas Paine in 1792, John Stuart Mill in 1848, and, most recently, the founders of the European Union, have argued that increasing commerce and interactions among nations would end war. Though by themselves these arguments have been overoptimistic, it may well be that some level of "globalization" may make the costs of war and the gains of peace so high as to powerfully predispose to peace. Indeed, a 1989 book by John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday,24 postulates the obsolescence of major war between developed nations (at least those nations within the "first and second worlds") as they become increasingly conscious of the rising costs of war and the rising gains of peace. In assessing levels of democracy, there are indexes readily available, for example, the Polity III25 and Freedom House 26 indexes. I am unaware of any comparable index with respect to levels of deterrence that might be used to test the importance of deterrence in war avoidance?' Absent such an accepted index, discussion about the importance of deterrence is subject to the skeptical observation that one simply defines effective deterrence by whether a war did or did not occur. In order to begin to deal with this objection and encourage a more objective methodology for assessing deterrence, I encouraged a project to seek to develop a rough but objective measure of deterrence with a scale from minus ten to plus ten based on a large variety of contextual features that would be given relative weighting in a complex deterrence equation before applying the scaling to different war and nonwar settings.28 On the disincentive side of the scale, the methodology used a weighted calculation of local deterrence, including the chance to prevent a short- and intermediate-term military victory, and economic and political disincentives; extended deterrence with these same elements; and contextual communication and credibility multipliers. On the incentive side of the scale, the methodology also used a weighted calculation of perceived military, economic, and political benefits. The scales were then combined into an overall deterrence score, including, an estimate for any effect of prospect theory where applicable.2 This innovative first effort uniformly showed high deterrence scores in settings where war did not, in fact, occur. Deterring a Soviet first strike in the Cuban Missile Crisis produced a score of +8.5 and preventing a Soviet attack against NATO produced a score of +6. War settings, however, produced scores ranging from -2.29 (Saddam Hussein's decision to invade Kuwait in the Gulf War), -2.18 (North Korea's decision to invade South Korea in the Korean War), -1.85 (Hitler's decision to invade Poland in World War II), -1.54 (North Vietnam's decision to invade South Vietnam following the Paris Accords), -0.65 (Milosevic's decision to defy NATO in Kosovo), +0.5 (the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor), +1.25 (the Austrian decision, egged on by Germany, to attack Serbia, which was the real beginning of World War I), to +1.75 (the German decision to invade Belgium and France in World War I). As a further effort at scaling and as a point of comparison, I undertook to simply provide an impressionistic rating based on my study of each pre-crisis setting. That produced high positive scores of +9 for both deterring a Soviet first strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis and NATO's deterrence of a Warsaw Pact attack and even lower scores than the more objective effort in settings where wars had occurred. Thus, I scored North Vietnam's decision to invade South Vietnam following the Paris Accords and the German decision to invade Poland at the beginning of World War II as -6; the North Korean/Stalin decision to invade South Korea in the Korean War as -5; the Iraqi decision to invade the State of Kuwait as -4; Milosevic's decision to defy NATO in Kosovo and the German decision to

invade Belgium and France in World War I as -2; and the Austrian decision to attack Serbia and the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor as -1. Certainly even knowledgeable experts would be likely to differ in their impressionistic scores on such pre-crisis settings, and the effort at a more objective methodology for scoring deterrence leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, both exercises did seem to suggest that deterrence matters and that high levels of deterrence can prevent future war. Following up on this initial effort to produce a more objective measure of deterrence, two years later I encouraged another project to undertake the same effort, building on what had been learned in the first

iteration. The result was a second project that developed a modified scoring system, also incorporating local deterrence, extended deterrence, and communication of intent and credibility multipliers on one side of a scale, and weighing these factors against a potential aggressor's overall subjective incentives for action on the other side of the scale.3°

The result, with a potential range of -5.5 to +10, produced no score higher than +2.5 for eighteen major wars studied between 1939 and the 1990 Gulf War.31 Twelve of the eighteen wars produced a score of zero or below, with the 1950-53 Korean War at -3.94, the 1965-75 Vietnam War at -0.25, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War at -1.53, and the 1990-91 Gulf War at -3.83. The study concluded that in more than fifty years of conflict there was "no situation in which a regime elite /decision making body subjectively faced substantial disincentives to aggressive military action and yet attacked."32 Yet another piece of the puzzle, which may clarify the extent of deterrence necessary in certain settings, may also assist in building a broader hypothesis about war. In fact, it has been incorporated into the just-discussed efforts at scoring deterrence. That is, newer studies of human behavior from cognitive psychology are increasingly showing that certain perceptions of decision makers can influence the level of risk they may be willing to undertake, or otherwise affect their decisions.33 It now seems likely that a number of such insights about human behavior in decision making may be useful in considering and fashioning deterrence strategies. Perhaps of greatest relevance is the insight of "prospect theory," which posits that individuals evaluate outcomes with respect to deviations from a reference point and that they may be more risk averse in settings posing potential gain than in settings posing potential loss.34 The evidence of this "cognitive bias," whether in gambling, trading, or, as is increasingly being argued, foreign policy decisions generally, is significant. Because of the newness of efforts to apply a laboratory based "prospect theory" to the complex foreign policy process generally, and particularly ambiguities and uncertainties in framing such complex events, our consideration of it in the war/peace process should certainly be cautious. It does, however, seem to elucidate some of the case studies. In the war/peace setting, "prospect theory" suggests that deterrence may not need to be as strong to prevent aggressive action leading to perceived gain. For example, there is credible evidence that even an informal warning to Kaiser Wilhelm II from British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, if it had come early in the crisis before events had moved too far, might have averted World War I. And even a modicum of deterrence in Kuwait, as was provided by a small British contingent when Kuwait was earlier threatened by an irredentist Iraqi government in 1961, might have been sufficient to deter Saddam Hussein from his 1990 attack on Kuwait. Similarly, even a clear United States pledge for the defense of South Korea before the attack might have prevented the Korean War. Conversely, following the July 28 Austrian mobilization and declaration of war against Serbia in World War I, the issue for Austria may have begun to be perceived as loss avoidance, thus requiring much higher levels of deterrence to avoid the resulting war. Similarly, the Rambouillet Agreement may have been perceived by Milosevic as risking loss of Kosovo and his continued rule of Serbia and, as a result, may have required higher levels of NA-TO deterrence to have prevented Milosevic's actions in defiance. Certainly NATO's previous hesitant responses in 1995 against Milosevic in the Bosnia phase of the Yugoslav crisis and in 1998-99 in early attempts to deal with Kosovo did not create a high level of deterrence.35 One can only surmise whether the killing in Kosovo could have been avoided had NATO taken a different tack, both structuring the issue less as loss avoidance for Milosevic and considerably enhancing deterrence. Suppose, for example, NATO had emphasized that it had no interest in intervening in Serbia's civil conflict with the KLA but that it would emphatically take action to punish massive "ethnic cleansing" and other humanitarian outrages, as had been practiced in Bosnia. And on the deterrence side, it made clear in advance the severity of any NATO bombardment, the potential for introduction of ground troops if necessary, that in any assault it would

pursue a "Leadership Strategy" focused on targets of importance to Milosevic and his principal henchmen (including their hold on power), and that it would immediately, unlike as earlier in Bosnia, seek to generate war crime indictments of all top Serbian leaders implicated in any atrocities. The point here is not to second-guess NATO's actions in Kosovo but to suggest that taking into account potential "cognitive bias," such as "prospect theory," may be useful in fashioning effective deterrence. "Prospect theory" may also have relevance in predicting that it may be easier to deter (that is, lower levels are necessary) an aggression than to undo that aggression. Thus, much higher levels of deterrence were probably required to compel Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait than to prevent him initially from invading that state. In fact, not even the presence of a powerful Desert Storm military force and a Security Council Resolution directing him to leave caused Hussein to voluntarily withdraw. As this real-world example illustrates, there is considerable experimental evidence in "prospect theory" of an almost instant renormalization of reference point after a gain; that is, relatively quickly after Saddam Hussein took Kuwait, a withdrawal was framed as a loss setting, which he would take high risk to avoid. Indeed, we tend to think of such settings as settings of compellance, requiring higher levels of incentive to achieve compulsion producing an action, rather than deterrence needed for prevention. One should also be careful not to overstate the effect of "prospect theory" or to fail to assess a threat in its complete context. We should remember that a belated pledge of Great Britain to defend Poland before the Nazi attack did not deter Hitler, who believed under the circumstances that the British pledge would not be honored. It is also possible that the greater relative wealth of democracies, which have less to gain in all out war, is yet another internal factor contributing to the "democratic peace."36 In turn, this also supports the extraordinary tenacity and general record of success of democracies fighting in defensive settings as they may also have more to lose. In assessing adequacy of deterrence to prevent war, we might also want to consider whether extreme ideology, strongly at odds with reality, may be a factor requiring higher levels of deterrence for effectiveness. One example may be the extreme ideology of Pol Pot leading him to falsely believe that his Khmer Rouge forces could defeat Vietnam.37 He apparently acted on that belief in a series of border incursions against Vietnam that ultimately produced a losing war for him. Similarly, Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attack against America, hopelessly at odds with the reality of his defeating the Western World and producing for him a strategic disaster, seems to have been prompted by his extreme ideology rooted in a distorted concept of Islam at war with the enlightenment. The continuing suicide bombings against Israel, encouraged by radical rejectionists and leading to less and less for the Palestinians, may be another example. If extreme ideology is a factor to be considered in assessing levels of deterrence, it does not mean that deterrence is doomed to fail in such settings but only that it must be at higher levels (and properly targeted on the relevant decision elites behind the specific attacks) to be effective, as is also true in perceived loss or compellance settings.38 Even if major war in the modern world is predominantly a result of aggression by nondemocratic regimes, it does not mean that all nondemocracies pose a risk of war all, or even some, of the time. Salazar's Portugal did not commit aggression. Nor today do Singapore or Bahrain or countless other nondemocracies pose a threat. That is, today nondemocracy comes close to a necessary condition in generating the high risk behavior leading to major interstate war. But it is, by itself, not a sufficient condition for war. The many reasons for this, of course, include a plethora of internal factors, such as differences in leadership perspectives and values, size of military, and relative degree of the rule of law, as well as levels of

external deterrence.39 But where an aggressive nondemocraticregime is present and poses a credible military threat, then it is the totality of external factors, that is, deterrence, that become crucial.

Impact D

Securitized framing doesn’t create violence or war – historical studies proveKaufman 9 Prof Poli Sci and IR – U Delaware (Stuart J, “Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case,” Security Studies 18:3, 400 – 434) Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly present , war occurs only if these factors are harnessed. Ethnic narratives and fears must combine to create significant ethnic hostility among mass publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to manipulate that hostility, evoking hostile narratives and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of chauvinist mobilization. Such mobilization is often spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes of violence) that increase feelings of hostility and make chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side's felt security needs threaten the security of the other side, the result is a security dilemma spiral of

rising fear, hostility, and mutual threat that results in violence. A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist logic explains why ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war. Even if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity exist, severe violence usually can still be avoided if ethnic

elites skillfully define group needs in moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is consociationalism.17 War is likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist mobilization, and a security dilemma.

Perm

We must confront threats – key to prevent ceding the political – does not preclude the transformative potential of securitizationFranke 9 (Associate Prof of Comparative lit at Vanderbilt William Poetry and Apocalypse Page 92-93)Apocalypse prima facie refuses and makes an end of dialogue: it thunders down invincibly from above. But for this very reason the greatest test of our dialogical capacity is whether we can dialogue with the corresponding attitude or must resort to exclusionary maneuvers and force. What is called for here is a capacity on the part of dialogue not to defend itself but to let itself happen in interaction with an attitude that is apparently intolerant of dialogue. Letting this possibility be, coming into contact with it, with the threat of dialogue itself, may seem to be courting disaster for dialogue. It is indeed a letting down of defenses. Can dialogue survive such a surrendering of itself in utter vulnerability to the enemy of dialogue? Or perhaps we should ask, can it rise up again, after this self-surrender, in new power for bringing together a scattered, defeated humanity to share in an open but commonly sought and unanimously beckoned Logos of mutual comprehension and communication? May this, after all, be the true and authentic “end” of dialogue provoked by apocalypse? For what it is worth, my

apocalyptic counsel is that we must attempt an openness to dialogue even in this absolute vulnerability and risk. The world is certainly not a safe place, and it will surely continue not to be such, short of something … apocalyptic. Needed, ever again, is something on the order of an apocalypse, not just a new attitude or a new anything that we can ourselves simply produce. Philosophy itself,

thought through to its own end, can hardly resist concluding that “only a god can save us” (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten). But can not our attitude make a difference- perhaps make possible the advent of apocalypse beyond all our powers, even those of our own imaginations? I will wager an answer to this question only in the operative mood.

May we bring a voice speaking up for mutual understanding onto the horizon of discourse in our time, a time marked by the terrifying sign of apocalyptic discourse. May we do this not by judging apocalyptic discourse, but by accepting that our condition as humans is as much to be judged as to judge and that all our relatively justified judgments are such to the extend that they offer themselves to be judged rather than standing on their own ground as absolute. In other words, may our discussions remain open to apocalypse,

open to what we cannot represent or prescribe but can nevertheless undergo in a process of transformation that can be shared with others – and that may be genuinely dialogue.

Alt Answers

Rejection of current IR paradigm magnifies hierarchy – emancipation rhetoric gives powerful states a basis for intervention and robs the Third World of agency – traditional security models solve their impacts betterMcCormack 10 – Lecturer in International PoliticsTara McCormack, is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester and has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster. 2010, Critique, Security and Power: The political limits to emancipatory approaches, pg. 127-129

The following section will briefly raise some questions about the rejection of the old security framework as it has been taken up by the most powerful institutions and states. Here we can begin to see the political limits to critical and emancipatory frameworks. In an international system which is marked by great power inequalities between states, the rejection of the old narrow national interest-based security framework by major international institutions, and the adoption of ostensibly emancipatory policies and policy rhetoric, has the consequence of problematising weak or unstable states and allowing international institutions or major states a more interventionary role, yet without establishing mechanisms by which the citizens of states being intervened in might have any control over the agents or agencies of their emancipation. Whatever the problems associated with the pluralist security framework there were at least formal and clear demarcations. This has the consequence of entrenching international power inequalities and allowing for a shift towards a hierarchical international order in which the citizens in weak or unstable states may arguably have even less freedom or power than before. Radical critics of contemporary security policies, such as human security and humanitarian intervention, argue that we see an assertion of Western power and the creation of liberal subjectivities in the developing world. For example, see Mark Duffield’s important and insightful contribution to the ongoing debates about contemporary international security and development. Duffield attempts to provide a coherent empirical engagement with, and theoretical explanation of, these shifts. Whilst these shifts, away from a focus on state security, and the so-called merging of security and development are often portrayed as positive and progressive shifts that have come about because of the end of the Cold War, Duffield argues convincingly that these shifts are highly problematic and unprogressive. For example, the rejection of sovereignty as formal international equality and a presumption of nonintervention has eroded the division between the international and domestic spheres and led to an international environment in which Western NGOs and powerful states have a major role in the governance of third world states. Whilst for supporters of humanitarian intervention this is a good development, Duffield points out the depoliticising implications, drawing on examples in Mozambique and Afghanistan. Duffield also draws out the problems of the retreat from modernisation that is represented by sustainable development. The Western world has moved away from the development policies of the Cold War, which aimed to develop third world states industrially. Duffield describes this in terms of a new division of human life into uninsured and insured life. Whilst we in the West are ‘insured’ – that is we no longer have to be entirely self-reliant, we have welfare systems, a modern division of labour and so on – sustainable development aims to teach populations in poor states how to survive in the absence of any of this. Third world populations must be taught to be self-reliant, they will remain uninsured. Self-reliance of

course means the condemnation of millions to a barbarous life of inhuman bare survival. Ironically, although sustainable development is celebrated by many on the left today, by leaving people to fend for themselves rather than developing a society wide system which can support people, sustainable development actually leads to a less human and humane system than that developed in modern capitalist states. Duffield also describes how many of these problematic shifts are embodied in the contemporary concept of human security. For Duffield, we can understand these shifts in terms of Foucauldian biopolitical framework, which can be understood as a regulatory power that seeks to support life through intervening in the biological, social and economic processes that constitute a human population (2007: 16). Sustainable development and human security are for Duffield technologies of security which aim to create self-managing and self-reliant subjectivities in the third world, which can then survive in a situation of serious underdevelopment (or being uninsured as Duffield terms it) without causing security problems for the developed world. For Duffield this is all driven by a neoliberal project which seeks to control and manage uninsured populations globally.

Radical critic Costas Douzinas (2007) also criticises new forms of cosmopolitanism such as human rights and interventions for human rights as a triumph of American hegemony. Whilst we are in agreement with critics such as Douzinas and Duffield that these new security frameworks cannot be empowering, and ultimately lead to more power for powerful states, we need to understand why these frameworks have the effect that they do. We can understand that these frameworks have political limitations without having to look for a specific plan on the part of current powerful states. In new security frameworks such as human security we can see the political limits of the framework proposed by critical and emancipatory theoretical approaches.

Total rejection of security discourse causes war.Charles F. Doran is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Washington DC, “Is Major War Obsolete? An Exchange” Survival, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 139—52The conclusion, then, is that the probability of major war declines for some states, but increases for others. And it is very difficult to argue that it has disappeared in any significant or reliable or hopeful sense. Moreover, a problem with arguing a position that might be described as utopian is that such arguments have policy implications. It is

worrying that as a thesis about the obsolescence of major war becomes more compelling to more people,

including presumably governments, the tendency will be to forget about the underlying problem, which is not war per Se, but security. And by neglecting the underlying problem of security, the probability of war perversely increases: as governments fail to provide the kind of defence and security necessary to maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility of new challenges. In this regard it is worth recalling one of Clauswitz’s most important insights: A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into our state unopposed. That is the underlying dilemma when one argues that a major war is not likely to occur and, as a consequence, one need not necessarily be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security itself. History shows that surprise threats emerge and rapid destabilising efforts are made to try to provide that missing defence, and all of this contributes to the spiral of uncertainty that leads in the end to war.

The alternatives fails and causes a spiral of insecurity that causes the most violent aspects of your impact claims – only taking strategic political action like the plan solvesP. H. Liotta (Professor of Humanities at Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, andExecutive Director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy) 2005 “Through the Looking Glass” Sage PublicationsAlthough it seems attractive to focus on exclusionary concepts that insist on desecuritization, privileged

referent objects, and the ‘belief’ that threats and vulnerabilities are little more than social constructions (Grayson, 2003), all these concepts work in theory but fail in practice. While it may be true that national security paradigms can, and likely will, continue to dominate issues that involve human security vulnerabilities – and even in some instances mistakenly confuse ‘vulnerabilities’ as ‘threats’ – there are distinct linkages between these security concepts and applications. With regard to environmental security, for example, Myers (1986: 251) recognized these linkages nearly two decades ago: National security is not just about fighting forces and weaponry. It relates to watersheds, croplands, forests, genetic resources, climate and other factors that rarely figure in the minds of military experts and political leaders, but increasingly deserve, in their collectivity, to rank alongside military approaches as crucial in a nation’s security. Ultimately, we are far from what O’Hanlon & Singer (2004) term a global intervention capability on behalf of ‘humanitarian transformation’. Granted, we now have the threat of mass casualty terrorism anytime, anywhere – and states and regions are responding differently to this challenge. Yet,

the global community today also faces many of the same problems of the 1990s: civil wars, faltering states, humanitarian crises. We are nowhere closer toaddressing how best to solve these challenges, even as they affect issues of environmental, human, national (and even ‘embedded’) security. Recently, there have been a number of voices that have spoken out on what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty has termed the ‘responsibility to protect’:10 the responsibility of some agency or state (whether it be a superpower such as the United States or an institution such as the United Nations) to enforce the principle of security that sovereign states owe to their citizens. Yet, the creation of a sense of urgency to act – even on some issues that may not have some impact

for years or even decades to come – is perhaps the only appropriate first response. The real cost of not investing in the right way and early enough in the places where trends and effects are accelerating in the wrong direction is likely to be decades and decades of economic and political frustration – and, potentially, military engagement. Rather than justifying intervention (especially military), we ought to be justifying investment. Simply addressing the immensities of these challenges is not enough. Radical improvements in public infrastructure and support for better governance, particularly in states and municipalities (especially along the Lagos–Cairo–Karachi–Jakarta arc), will both improve security and create the conditions for shrinking the gap between expectations and opportunity. A real debate ought to be taking place today. Rather than dismissing ‘alternative’ security foci outright, a larger examination of what forms of security are relevant and right among communities, states, and regions, and which even might apply to a global rule-set – as well as what types of security are not relevant – seems appropriate and necessary. If this occurs, a truly remarkable tectonic shift might take place in the conduct of international relations and human affairs. Perhaps, in the failure of states and the international community to respond to such approaches, what is needed is the equivalent of the 1972 Stockholm conference that launched the global environmental movement and established the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), designed to be the environmental conscience of the United Nations. Similarly, the UN Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996 focused on the themes of finding adequate shelter for all and sustaining human development in an increasingly urbanized world. Whether or not these programs have the ability to influence the future’s direction (or receive wide international support) is a matter of some debate. Yet, given that the most powerful states in the world are not currently focusing on these issues to a degree sufficient to produce viable implementation plans or development strategies, there may well need to be a ‘groundswell’ of bottom-up pressure, perhaps in the form of a global citizenry petition to push the elusive world community toward collective action.Recent history suggests that military intervention as the first line of response to human security conditions underscores a seriously flawed approach. Moreover, those who advocate that a state’s disconnectedness from globalization is inversely proportional to the likelihood of military (read: US) intervention fail to recognize unfolding realities (Barnett, 2003, 2004). Both middle-power and major-power states, as well as the international community, must increasingly focus on long-term creeping vulnerabilities in order to avoid crisis responses to conditions of extreme vulnerability. Admittedly, some human security proponents have recently soured on the viability of the concept in the face of

recent ‘either with us or against us’ power politics (Suhrke, 2004). At the same time, and in a bit more positive light, some have clearly recognized the sheer impossibility of international power politics continuing to feign indifference in the face of moral categories. As Burgess (2004: 278) notes, ‘for all its evils, one of the promises of globalization is

the unmasking of the intertwined nature of ethics and politics in the complex landscape of social, economic, political and environmental security’. While it is still not feasible to establish a threshold definition for human security that neatly fits all concerns and arguments (as suggested by Owen, 2004: 383), it would be a tragic mistake to assume that national, human, and environmental security are mutually harmonious constructs rather than more often locked in conflictual and contested opposition with each other. Moreover, aspects of security resident in each concept are indeed themselves embedded with extraordinary contradictions. Human security, in particular, is not now, nor should likely ever be, the mirror image of national security. Yet, these contradictions are not the crucial recognition here. On the contrary, rather than focusing on the security issues themselves, we should be focusing on the best multi-dimensional approaches to confronting and solving them.

One approach, which might avoid the massive tidal impact of creeping vulnerabilities, is to sharply make a rudder shift from constant crisis intervention toward strategic planning, strategic investment, and strategic attention. Clearly, the time is now to reorder our entire approach to how we address – or fail to address – security.

Transition Wars DATransition to the alternative guarantees war – radical changes in existing security architecture collapse threat perceptionYoon 03 – Professor of International Relations at Seoul National University; former Foreign Minister of South Korea (Young-Kwan, “Introduction: Power Cycle Theory and the Practice of International Relations”, International Political Science Review 2003; vol. 24; p. 7-8)In history, the effort to balance power quite often tended to start too late to protect the security of some of the individual states. If the balancing process begins too late, the resulting amount of force necessary to stop an aggressor is often much larger than if the process had been started much earlier. For example, the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland showed how non-intervention or waiting for the “automatic” working through of the process turned out to be problematic. Power cycle theory could also supplement the structure-oriented nature of the traditional balance of power theory by incorporating an agent-oriented explanation. This was possible through its focus on the relationship between power and the role of a state in the international system. It especially highlighted the fact that a discrepancy between the relative power of a state and its role in the system would result in a greater possibility for systemic instability. In order to prevent this instability from developing into a war, practitioners of international relations were to become aware of the dynamics of changing power and role, adjusting role to power. A statesperson here was not simply regarded as a prisoner of structure and therefore as an outsider to the process but as an agent capable of influencing the operation of equilibrium. Thus power cycle theory could overcome the weakness of theoretical determinism associated with the traditional balance of power. The question is often raised whether government decision-makers could possibly know or respond to such relative power shifts in the real world. According to Doran, when the “tides of history” shift against the state, the push and shove of world politics reveals these matters to the policy-maker, in that state and among its competitors, with abundant urgency. (2) The Issue of Systemic Stability Power cycle theory is built on the conception of changing relative capabilities of a state, and as such it shares the realist assumption emphasizing the importance of power in explaining international relations. But its main focus is on the longitudinal dimension of power relations, the rise and decline of relative state power and role, and not on the static power distribution at

a particular time. As a result, power cycle theory provides a significantly different explanation for stability and order within the international system. First of all, power cycle theory argues that what matters most in explaining the stability of the international system or war and peace is not the type of particular international system (Rosecrance, 1963) but the transformation from one system to another. For example, in the 1960s there was a debate on the stability of the international system between the defenders of bipolarity such as Waltz (1964) and the defenders of multi-polarity such as Rosecrance (1966), and Deutsch and Singer (1964). After analyzing five historical occasions since the origin of the modern state system, Doran concluded that what has been responsible for major war was not whether one type of system is more or less conducive to war but that instead systems transformation itself led to war (Doran, 1971). A non-linear type of structural change that is massive, unpredicted, devastating to foreign policy expectation, and destructive of security is the trigger for major war, not the nature of a particular type of international system.

Neg Security Supplement

Framing

ROB – Knowledge Production

The role of the ballot becomes a negotiation of knowledge, a deciding of axes and boundaries. Evaluate our critique by its ability to reorient political perception and action. Bleiker 2k (Roland, coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program @ U of Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, ) Describing, explaining and prescribing may be less unproblematic processes of evaluation, but only at first sight. If one abandons the notion of Truth, the idea that an event can be apprehended as part of a natural order, authentically and

scientifically, as something that exists independently of the meaning we have given it – if one abandons this separation of object and subject, then the process of judging a particular approach to describing and explaining an event becomes a very muddled affair. There is no longer an objective measuring device that can set the standard to evaluate whether or not a particular insight into an event, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is true or false. The very nature of a past event becomes indeterminate insofar as its identification is dependent upon ever-changing forms of linguistic expressions that imbue the event with meaning.56 The inability to determine objective meanings is also the reason why various critical international relations scholars stress that there can be no ultimate way of assessing human agency. Roxanne Doty, for instance, believes that the agent–structure debate ‘encounters an aporia, i.e., a self-engendered paradox beyond which it cannot press’. This is to say that the debate is fundamentally undecidable, and that theorists who engage in it ‘can claim no scientific, objective grounds for determining whether the force of agency or that of structure is operative at any single instant’.57 Hollis and Smith pursue a similar line of argument. They emphasise that there are always two stories to tell – neither of which is likely ever to have the last word – an inside story and an outside story, one about agents and another about structures, one epistemological and the other ontological, one about understanding and one about explaining international relations.58 The value of an insight cannot be evaluated in relation to a set of objectively existing criteria. But this does not mean that all insights have the same value. Not every perception is equally perceptive. Not every thought is equally thoughtful. Not every action is equally justifiable. How, then, can one judge? Determining the value of a particular insight or action is always a process of negotiating knowledge, of deciding where its rotating axes should be placed and how its outer boundaries should be drawn. The actual act of judging can thus be made in reference to the very process of negotiating knowledge. The contribution of the present approach to understanding transversal dissent could, for instance, be evaluated by its ability to demonstrate that a rethinking of the agency problematique has revealed different insights into global politics. The key question then revolves around whether or not a particular international event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, appears in a new light once it is being scrutinised by an approach that pays attention to factors that had hitherto been ignored. Expressed in other words, knowledge about agency can be evaluated by its ability to orient and reorient our perceptions of events and the political actions that issue from them. The lyrical world, once more, offers valuable insight. Rene´ Char: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.

Epistemology First

Epistemology comes first- The question of action must take a backseat to questions of policy formation and assumptions surrounding problem-solving techniques.Owen 02, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton (David, “Reorienting International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/653)The first dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR theory and postmodernist IR ‘theory’ (and the examples illustrate the claims concerning pluralism and factionalism made in the introduction to this section). It is exhibited when we read Walt warning of the danger of postmodernism as a kind of theoretical decadence since ‘issues of peace and war are too important for the field [of IR] to be diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world’,12 or find Keohane asserting sniffily that Neither neorealist nor neoliberal institutionalists are content with interpreting texts: both sets of theorists believe that there is an international political reality that can be partly understood, even if it will always remain to some extent veiled.13 We should be wary of such denunciations precisely because the issue at stake for the practitioners of this ‘prolix and self-indulgent discourse’ is the picturing of international politics and the implications of this picturing for the epistemic and ethical framing of the discipline, namely, the

constitution of what phenomena are appropriate objects of theoretical or other forms of enquiry. The kind of accounts provided by practitioners of this type are not competing theories (hence Keohane’s complaint) but conceptual reproblematisations of the background that informs theory construction, namely, the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, inferences and assertability warrants that are taken for granted in the course of the debate between, for example, neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists (hence the point-

missing character of Keohane’s complaint). Thus, for example, Michael Shapiro writes: The global system of sovereign states

has been familiar both structurally and symbolically in the daily acts of imagination through which space and human identity are construed. The persistence of this international imaginary has helped to support the political privilege of sovereignty affiliations and territorialities. In

recent years, however, a variety of disciplines have offered conceptualizations that challenge the familiar, bordered world of the discourse of international relations.14 The point of these remarks is to call critically into question the background picture (or, to use another term of art, the

horizon) against which the disciplinary discourse and practices of IR are conducted in order to make

this background itself an object of reflection and evaluation. In a similar vein, Rob Walker argues: Under the present circumstances the question ‘What is to be done?’ invites a degree of arrogance that is all too visible in the behaviour of the dominant political forces of our time. . . . The most pressing questions of the age call not only for concrete policy options to be offered to existing elites and institutions, but also, and more crucially, for a serious rethinking of the ways in which it is possible for human beings to live together.15 The aim of these comments is to draw to our attention the easily

forgotten fact that our existing ways of picturing international politics emerge from, and in relation to, the very practices of international politics with which they are engaged and it is entirely plausible (on standard Humean grounds) that, under changing conditions of political activity, these ways of guiding reflection and action may lose their epistemic and/or ethical value such that a deeper interrogation of the terms of international politics is required. Whether or not one agrees with Walker that this is currently required, it is a perfectly reasonable issue to raise. After all, as Quentin Skinner has recently reminded us, it is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. . . . As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them.16 In this respect, one effect of the kind of challenge posed by postmodernists like Michael Shapiro and Rob Walker is to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched.

The assumption that policymaking occurs in an objective vacuum is false--the preconditions for any communicative exchange include the establishment of some normative framework for evaluation. Their framework arguments only serve to whitewash the value-ladenness of their procedural standards.Owen 02, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton (David, “Reorienting International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/653)The third dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR theory and critical IR theory, where White’s distinction enables us to make sense of a related confusion, namely, the confusion between holding that forms of positivist IR theory (e.g., neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism) are necessarily either value-free or evaluative. It does so because we can now see that, although forms of positivist IR theory are not normative theories, they

presuppose a background picture which orients our thinking through the framing of not only what can be intelligibly up for grabs as true-or-false (the epistemic framing) but also what can be intelligibly up for grabs as good-or-bad (the ethical framing). As Charles Taylor has argued, a condition of our intelligibility as agents is that we inhabit a moral framework which orients us in ethical space and

our practices of epistemic theorising cannot be intelligibly conceived as existing independently of this orientation in thinking.21 The confusion in IR theory arises because, on the one hand, positivist IR theory typically suppresses acknowledgement of its own ethical presuppositions under the influence of the scientific model (e.g., Waltz’s neorealism and Keohane’s neoliberal institutionalism), while, on the other hand, its (radical) critics typically view its ethical characteristics as indicating that there is an evaluative or normative theory hidden, as it were,

within the folds of what presents itself as a value-free account. Consequently, both regard the other as, in some sense, producing ideological forms of knowledge; the positivist’s claim is that critical IR theory is ideological by virtue of its explicitly normative character, the critical theorist’s claim is that positivist IR theory is ideological by virtue of its failure to acknowledge and reflect on its own implicit normative commitments. But this mutual disdain is

also a product of the confusion of pictures and theories. Firstly, there is a confusion between pictures and theories combined with the scientistic suppression of the ethical presuppositions of IR theory. This finds expression in the thought that we need to get our epistemic account of the world sorted out before we can engage responsibly in ethical judgement about what to do, where such epistemic adequacy requires the construction of a positive theory that can explain the features of the world at issue. An example of this position is provided by Waltz’s neorealism.22 Against this first position, we may reasonably point out that epistemic adequacy cannot be intelligibly specified independently of background ethical commitments concerning what matters to us and how it matters to us. Secondly, there is the confusion of pictures and theories combined with the moralist

overestimation of the ethical (ideological) commitments of IR theory. This finds expression in the thought that we need to get our ethical account sorted out before we can engage responsibly in epistemic judgement about what to know, where such ethical adequacy requires the construction of a moral theory and, more particularly, a moral ideal that can direct the enterprise of epistemic theorising. An example of this position is provided by Linklater ’s version of critical IR theory.23 Against this position, we can reasonably point out that the kind of ethical adequacy required does not entail the construction of a moral ideal but only the existence of some shared ethical judgements concerning what matters to us that orient our epistemic enquiries. The dual confusion in question leads fairly straightforwardly to the thought that what is at stake here are incompatible epistemological commitments and hence that debate between positivist and critical forms of IR theory needs to be conducted at an epistemological level. However, as my remarks indicate, this thought is mistaken insofar as the apparent incompatibility from which it derives is an illusion.

A2: Policymaking Focus

Strict policymaking fails to change the status quo. However, our writings and teachings inform policy making, which makes exposing their frameworks dynamics of power a critical prerequisite for effective policymakingEdkins and Zehfuss 2005 [Jenny and Maja, Generalizing the International, Review of International Studies (32, 451-472) ] What we are attempting in this article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the

sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It seems to us that this has become important in the present circumstances. The focus on security and the dilemma of security versus freedom that is set out in debates immediately after September 11th

presents an apparent choice as the focus for dissent, while concealing the extent to which thinking is thereby confined to a specific agenda. Our argument will be that this approach relies on a particular picture of the political world that has been reflected within the discipline of international relations, a picture of a world of sovereign states. We have a responsibility as scholars; we are not insulated from the policy world. What we discuss may not, and indeed does not, have a direct impact on what happens in the policy world, this is clear, but our writings and our teaching do have an input in terms of the creation and reproduction of pictures of the world that inform policy and set the contours of policy debates.21 Moreover, the discipline within which we are situated is one which depends itself on a particular view of the world - a view that sees the international

as a realm of politics distinct from the domestic - the same view of the world as the one that underpins thinking on security and defence in the US administration.22 In this article then we develop an analysis of the ways in which thinking in terms of international relations and a system of states forecloses certain possibilities from the start, and how it might look to think about politics and the international differently. Our chosen point of intervention is to examine how IR thinking works; by showing how this thinking operates, and how it relies on certain analytical moves and particular categorisations and dichotomies,

we hope to demonstrate that it is not the only way that world politics could be thought through. Identifying the underpinnings of existing frameworks is an important preliminary before new thinking can be fully effective and is itself a first move in dislodging these underpinnings.

Impacts

! – Serial Policy Failure

Failure to account for the ontological roots of modern politics ensures serial policy failure – we will repeatedly reproduce the same problems that we seek to solveDillon & Reid 2000 [Michael & Julian, Prof of Politics & Prof of International Relations, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,” Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance 25.1]As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[ 34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35 ] Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of

power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which

life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the

local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to

exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[ 36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins

to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower" ways.

A2: Perm – DA Focus on policy relevant theory relegates all agenda setting to policymakers, censoring alternative views and leading to structural violence Bilgin 05 pinar (department of international relations, bilkent university, ankara, turkey) regional security in the middle east 2005 p 49-50The positions of Gray and Garnett regarding the theory/practice relationship are similar to that of their conception of theory. Both authors are in favour of and open about the role theories play in informing practice. However, their conception of practice is restricted in that they understand practice as policy-making and implementation at governmental level . In this sense, those who do not engage in issues directly relevant for policymaking are not considered to be engaging with practice. This position hints at a narrow view of politics where it is considered only to do with governance at the state level . This, in turn, flows from the objectivist position adopted by the authors where the study of strategy in particular and academic enterprise in general is viewed as a politics-free zone. This is a powerful move, for once an approach is regarded as ‘objective’, others that are critical of it are immediately labelled at best ‘ subjective’ or ‘political’ in a derogatory sense, and at worst ‘propaganda’. It is not only the

conception of practice adopted by Gray and Garnett but also that of theory that is restricted in that both conceive theory

as ‘problem-solving theory’, in Robert Cox’s (1981) terms; it is there to assist policy-makers in solving problems (Gray 1992: 626–31). Security Studies, in this sense, is supposed to deal with issues that are deemed problematic by policy-makers,21 leaving untouched other issues that do not make it to governmental agendas. This, in turn, creates a vicious circle where issues to be put on the security agenda are decided by policy-makers and analysed by those who

they consider as ‘ experts’ . Those who propound alternative views are dismissed as mere propagandists and the issues they identified, such as ‘structural violence’, are not allowed on security agendas. This position is still prevalent in certain strands of security thinking in the post-Cold War era (see, for example, Walt 1991).

A2: Cede the Political

Alt is a pre-requisite – the scholarship we produce in debate matters – exploration of root causes and strategies to approach those causes is critical to reflection and development of empowered citizens.Kenis and Mathijs 2011 “Beyond individual behaviour change: the role of power, knowledge and strategy in tackling climate change,” Environmental Education Research 18.1 February, 45-65Consequently, this finding suggests that closing the ‘gap’ between knowledge and action does not in the first

place – at least not in the case of environmentally aware citizens – require a further raising of people’s knowledge of the environmental problem as such. What seems to be needed, is the knowledge of root causes,

visions on alternatives and especially strategies to reach these. By leaping too directly from the

knowledge of the nature and effects of the environmental problem to the level of solutions, the individual behaviour change approach risks sidestepping not only the human-societal context within which the problem arose, but also the possibility for people to engage in strategic reflection themselves and to draw their own conclusions on the kind of actions required. In other words, it risks sidestepping the possibility for people to be really em’power’ed citizens and potential subjects of change. As a

conclusion, one can state that, whereas there is a quite clear distinction between ‘individual behaviour

change’ and ‘collective social action’ studies in a lot of policy and academic literature, the distinction is maybe not so clear-cut in the minds of ecologically concerned citizens. Whereas almost all respondents were (also) involved in individual behaviour change, most seemed to prefer collective social action as a strategy towards change, even if they did not put this strategy into practice. One of the most important barriers to undertaking the latter seems to be that the dominant discourse does not provide them with the conceptual tools needed for engaging in these kinds of action. More attention to the ‘action-oriented’ domains of knowledge (knowledge about

root causes, strategy and alternatives) might compensate for this. Concerning this, it is important to acknowledge that there exists a fundamental difference between strictly physical knowledge about climate change and actionoriented domains. The latter can never be as exact as the first. If one speaks about analysis, strategies and alternatives, one definitively enters onto ideological terrain. On the basis of Gramsci’s work, we have shown that ‘common sense’ is a fragmented and incoherent collection of all sorts of ideas and influences, and that ideological struggle has to do with making this common sense more coherent in one way or another. In a certain way, environmental researchers and/or educators are also involved in this ideological struggle, whether they want it or not. Their position is not easy. On the one hand, they cannot claim to make ‘objective’ judgments. On the other hand, they cannot neglect this terrain either, as they then risk allowing for it to be occupied by movements, governments or companies that also have other interests than the ‘common good’. Maybe the task of researchers and/or

educators can be to try to make the range of possible analyses, visions and strategic options visible and to make their assumptions, effects and implications explicit. Hereby, it is of central importance to get to the abstract level of the principles underlying these, and to be conscious of the fact that one thus enters an ideological battlefield. One of their contributions could even be to disclose the very ideological character of the debate as such.