Terror Neg

T

1NC T – Domestic Surviellence.A. Interpretation - DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE DEALS WITH COMMUNICATION INSIDE THE USHRC 14 Human Rights Council 2014 IMUNC2014 https://imunc.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/hrc-study-guide.pdf

Domestic surveillance: Involves the monitoring, interception, collection, analysis, use, preservation, retention of, interference with, or access to information that includes, reflects, or arises from or a person’s communications in the past, present or future with or without their consent or choice, existing or occurring inside a particular country.

2.Violation – the affirmative curtails foreign intelligence collection, which is distinct from domestic surveillance. McCarthy 6 Andrew C. McCarthy former assistant U.S. attorney, now contributing editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. May 15, 2006 National Review It’s Not “Domestic Spying”; It’s Foreign Intelligence Collection http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/122556/its-not-domestic-spying-its-foreign-intelligence-collection-andrew-c-mccarthy

Eggen also continues the mainstream media’s propagandistic use of the term “domestic surveillance [or 'spying'] program.” In actuality, the electronic surveillance that the NSA is doing — i.e., eavesdropping on content of conversations — is not “domestic.” A call is not considered “domestic” just because one part to it happens to be inside the U.S., just as an investigation is not “domestic” just because some of the subjects of interest happen to reside inside our country . Mohammed Atta was an agent of a foreign power, al Qaeda. Surveilling him — had we done it — would not have been “domestic spying.” The calls NSA eavesdrops on are “international,” not “domestic.” If that were not plain enough on its face, the Supreme Court made it explicit in the Keith case (1972). There, even though it held that judicial warrants were required for wiretapping purely domestic terror organizations, the Court excluded investigations of threats posed by foreign organizations and their agents operating both within and without the U.S. That is, the Court understood what most Americans understand but what the media, civil libertarians and many members of Congress refuse to acknowledge: if we are investigating the activities of agents of foreign powers inside the United States, that is not DOMESTIC surveillance. It is FOREIGN counter-intelligence.That, in part, is why the statute regulating wiretaps on foreign powers operating within the U.S. — the one the media has suddenly decided it loves after bad-mouthing it for years as a rubber-stamp — is called the FOREIGN Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The United States has never needed court permission to conduct wiretapping outside U.S. territory; the wiretapping it does inside U.S. territory for national security purposes is FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION, not “domestic surveillance.”

B. THE AFFIRMATIVE INTERPRETATION IS BAD FOR DEBATELimits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their interpretation makes the topic too big. They make the domestic limit meaningless. All surveillance becomes topical by their standards

C. T IS A VOTER because the opportunity to prepare promotes better debating

Model Minority K

Model Minority KThe US categorization of Muslims as either “good” or “bad” is a particular formation of the model minority stereotype. The Affirmatives redemption of “bad” Muslims into the category of “good” Muslims perpetuates the dichotomy, making hyper-visible those who do not conform to the ideal societal position ascribed to them Jackson and Kim 11(John L. Jackson is Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice. He also is the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Africana Studies, and Anthropology in the Standing Faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Standing Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences. David K. Kim is a Professor of Religious Studies , Chair of the Religious Studies Department , and Associate Professor in American Studies at Connecticut College. “Race, Religion, and Late Democracy” https://books.google.com/books?id=f0dcGarZj0AC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=model+minority+islam&source=bl&ots=pbOVG4ECMU&sig=9zhvyJBJAVBhK9WBJQnAdzJBr3U&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAmoVChMItd_zq6jixgIVgZeACh3IeABK#v=onepage&q=model%20minority%20islam&f=false)

Asian Americans as model minorities operated to discipline African Americans as an example of racial success, yet the emphasis on minority status reaffirmed the super position of whites. Unlike the use of the foreignness trope to serve foreign policy, the model minority trope is domestic and serves to discipline African Americans. The model minority is also a pan-Asian category: it is applied to most Asian Americans, not limited to a particular national origin.

Together, the two tropes offer a more complete racial landscape for Asian Americans. The “good Asian” performs racially as a model minority, assimilated and successful. But if there is resistance to racial subordination organized through ethnic or group identity, those ethnic excesses can be labeled as foreign. Labeling a racial performance as foreign is an invitation to discrimination and disciplinary actions against the “bad Asian.” Furthermore, in the case of conflict with an Asian nation, the raced bodies of Asian Americans are available through the trope of foreignness as a mobilization point for Americans . “Good Muslim” Corresponding to the Asian American model minority, we can see the emergence of the ”good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” stereotypes . While the “Muslim terrorist” is now well established, the scripting of the “good Muslim” is a work in progress. The new republican majority in Congress is holding congressional hearings on the threat of “Islamic radicalization.” The first noncongressional witness to testify was Zuhdi Jasser, A Republican and self-identified Muslim; founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, he is politically active and appears often in conservative media. He is reported as “calling on Muslim leaders to aggressively oppose a “culture of separatism” and urges Islamic clerics “to disavow scripture that belittles non-Muslims and women and to renounce a role for Islam in the government” (Boorstein 2011). Jasser’s appearances on controversial television commentator Glen Beck’s show suggest that this is not a doctrinal or sectarian dispute among Islamic faithful. This is an example of the crafting of the “model minority” for the racial category of Muslims. We should expect continued efforts to create a script for the proper racial performance of the “good Muslim.” The emergence of the possibility of the “good Muslim” suggests that the Muslim racial category will follow the dual

track of Asian American racialization with two different ascribed racial sterotypes: the Muslim terrorist and the good Muslim . The Muslim terrorist is an extreme example of the foreignness trope, providing a domestic body in the service of our foreign military operations in Iraw and Afghanistan . For those Americans who are collected in then Muslim category, the disciplinary function of the “good Muslim” corresponding to the “model minority” is available for use against Muslims or those with Asiatic brown bodies who protest or disagree with American domestic or foreign policy. The loose framework for the Muslim racial category and its racial trope, the “Muslim terrorist,” makes organizing difficult. Mosques offer important centers for faith and community. But it is unclear how a faith-based community can organize to include non-Muslims against a racial trope. One promising development was the support given by Asian Americans to the victims of hate crimes after 9/11. The racial category of Asian Americans as a panethnic group could, over time, encompass faith-based communities. The implications of the racialization of Islam for American foreign policy considerations are less ambiguous but more discouraging. The racialization of Islam through the Muslim racial category seems to be following the model of Asian American racialization. There is a simplistic duality . One side is the bad Muslim, the “Muslim terrorist,” useful to further American foreign policy goals. On the other side is the good Muslim, assimilating to conventional American secular ideals. While that awkward binary may be adequate for domestic racial politics, it is clearly inadequate to address Islam and democracy in the world today. The democratic upheavals in North Africa and the Arab world are far more complex and subtle than the gross categories offered by American racialization.

Hypervisible bodies are simultaneously marginalized and rendered invisible through specular abstraction by the privileged observerTraise Yamamoto, 2000, "In/Visible Difference: Asian American Women and the Politics of Spectacle on JSTOR," Race, Gender & Class Journal, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675310?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

You will find, this season, signs of yourself everywhere, but while Asian fashion accessories can be worn "as accents or top-to-toe" ( Marie Claire , 134) in order to achieve that eponymous "China Girl" look, not a single Asian American model is to be found in these pages. Inclusion of "Asianness" expands

style horizons, extends the fashion frontier, but Asian bodies remain firmly on the other side of the geo-sartorial border. Such magazines perfectly emblematize the function of difference in this age of spectacle and multi –cultural display, and the ways in which the appearance of inclusion (as well as the inclusion of appearance) substitutes specular, commodified representations for structural visibility as national subjects. The insidiousness of difference as spectacle is that it is just as often used to lay claim to a supposed ideology of inclusion, as it is to demarcate the boundaries beyond which colored bodies may not go. This was made all too clear by the now infamous cover of the March 24th, 1997, issue of National Review magazine, which depicts Al Gore and Bill and Hilary Clinton as a Chinese monk, peasant and Maoist, respectively. Outfitted with cues, slanted eyes, and the requisite buck teeth, the three Manchurian Candidates" (the lead article's title) are a stark figuration of what it means to be hyper

visible as a racialized object - the parsed, exaggerated and fetishized signs of which circulate in a discursive and representational arena in which the Asian American body, like all bodies of color in the United States, is primarily useful as ideological cultural capital. French political theorist Guy DeBord asserts that "The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image " (1 965/1 997), and these magazines collectively display that the ideological work of demarcating and delimiting national subjects is enacted through infinitely manipulable images of Asianness, which run the gamut from politically-charged yellowface to fashionable chinoiserie. In both cases, signs of Asianness, orientaba, mark the cutting edge of or transgression beyond the border of normative whiteness. Lauren Beriant, among

others, has argued that national identity is formulated through the ways in which historical or "everyday" persons are abstracted and "reconstituted as a collective subject, or citizen" (1991). That is, the individual person "acquires a new body by participation in the political public sphere. The

American subject is privileged to suppress the fact of his historical situation in the abstract 'person': but then, in return, the nation provides a kind of prophylaxis for the person, as it promises to protect his privileges," one effect of which "is to appear to be disembodied or abstract while retaining cultural authority" ( 1 99 1 a). Yet, this process of privileged abstraction implicitly assumes a subject whose particularities of race, gender, class and sexuality are coded as normative and therefore invisible. The male, white, heterosexual and propertied subject is structurally visible in direct proportion to that subject's invisibility as a site of marked embodiment. But what obtains for those whose marked particularity remains, in a sense, uncollectible, unabstractable, who are marked "as precisely not abstract, but as imprisoned in the surplus embodiment of a culture that values abstraction" (1991a). Women, people of color , the poor, the queer are subject to an enforced embodiment wherein the particularity of their hyper-visible bodies defines their status as the obverse of American ideality, or more accurately as the obverse upon which the idea of American national identity depends.

The myth of model minority demonizes and makes other POCs hyper visible by reinforcing existing racial prejudices—countering this stereotype is a prerequisite to any aff solvencyNoy Thrupkaew, 3-25-2002 "The Myth of the Model Minority," American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/myth-model-minority AC

The Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), an advocacy group in Washington, estimates that more than 2.2 million Southeast Asians now live in the United States. They are the largest group of refugees in the country and the fastest-growing minority. Yet for most policy makers, the plight of the many Mali Keos has been overshadowed by the well-known success of the Asian immigrants who came before and engendered the myth of the "model minority." Indeed, conservatives have exploited this racial stereotype -- arguing that Asians fare well in the United States because of their strong "family values" and work ethic. These values, they say, and not government assistance, are what all minorities need in order to get ahead. Paradoxically, Southeast Asians -- supposedly part of the model minority -- may be suffering most from the resulting public policies. They have been left in the hands of underfunded community-assistance programs and government agencies that, in one example of well-intentioned incompetence, churn out forms in Khmer and Lao for often illiterate populations. But fueled by outrage over bad services and a fraying social safety-net, Southeast Asian immigrants have started to embrace that most American of activities, political protest -- by pushing for research on their communities, advocating for their rights, and harnessing their political power. The model-minority myth has persisted in large part because political conservatives are so attached to it. "Asian Americans have become the darlings of the right," said Frank Wu, a law professor at Howard University and the author of Yellow: Race beyond Black and White. "The model-minority myth and its depiction of Asian-American success tells a reassuring story about our society working. " The flip side is also appealing to the right. Because Asian Americans' success stems from their strong families and their dedication to education and hard work, conservatives say, then the poverty of Latinos and African Americans must be explained by their own "values": They are poor because of their nonmarrying, school-skipping, and generally lazy and irresponsible behavior, which government handouts only encourage.

Specifically, model minority obscures the identity of Southeast Asians and increase their vulnerability to poverty and similar problems faced by black and Latino communitiesNoy Thrupkaew, 3-25-2002 "The Myth of the Model Minority," American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/myth-model-minority AC

What most dramatically skews the data, though, is the fact that about half the population of Asian (or, more precisely, Asian-Pacific

Islander) Americans is made up of the highly educated immigrants who began arriving with their families in the 1960s. The plight of refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, who make up less than 14 percent of Asian Americans, gets lost in the averaging. Yet these refugees, who started arriving in the United States after 1975, differ

markedly from the professional-class Chinese and Indian immigrants who started coming 10 years earlier. The Southeast Asians were fleeing wartime persecution and had few resources. And those disadvantages have had devastating effects on their lives in the United States. The most recent census data available show that 47 percent of Cambodians, 66 percent of Hmong (an ethnic group that lived in the mountains of Laos), 67 percent of Laotians, and 34 percent of Vietnamese were impoverished in 1990 -- compared with 10 percent of all Americans and 14 percent of all Asian

Americans. Significantly, poverty rates among Southeast Asian Americans were much higher than those of even the "non model" minorities: 21 percent of African Americans and 23 percent of Latinos were poor. Yet despite the clear inaccuracies created by lumping populations together, the federal government still groups Southeast Asian refugees under the overbroad category of "Asian" for research and funding purposes. "We've labored under the shadow of this model myth for so long," said KaYing Yang, SEARAC's executive director. "There's so little research on us, or we're lumped in with all other Asians, so people don't know the specific needs and contributions of our communities." To get a sense of those needs, one has to go back to the beginning of the Southeast Asian refugees' story and the circumstances that forced their migration. In 1975, the fall of Saigon sent shock waves throughout Southeast Asia, as communist insurgents toppled U.S.-supported governments in Vietnam and Cambodia. In Laos, where the CIA had trained and funded the Hmong to fight Laotian and Vietnamese communists as U.S. proxies, the communists who took over vowed to purge the country of ethnic Hmong and punish all others who had workedwith the U.S. government. The first refugees to leave Southeast Asia tended to be the most educated and urban, English-speakers with close connections to the U.S. government. One of them was a man who wishes to be identified by the pseudonym John Askulraskul. He spent two years in a Laotian re-education camp -- punishment for his ability to speak English, his having been educated, and, most of all, his status as a former employee of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). "They tried to brainwash you, to subdue you psychologically, to work you to death on two bowls of rice a day," Askulraskul told me recently. After being released, he decided to flee the country. He, his sister, and his eldest daughter, five and a half years old, slipped into the Mekong River with a few others. Clinging to an inflated garbage bag, Askulraskul swam alongside their boat out of fear that his weight would sink it. After they arrived on the shores of Thailand, Askulraskul and his daughter were placed in a refugee camp, where they waited to be reunited with his wife and his two other daughters. It was not to be. "My wife tried to escape with two small children. But my daughters couldn't make it" -- he paused, drawing a ragged breath -- "because the boat sank." Askulraskul's wife was swept back to Laos, where she was arrested and placed in jail for a month. She succeeded in her next escape attempt, rejoining her suddenly diminished family. Eventually, with the help of his former boss at USAID, they moved to Connecticut, where Askulraskul found work helping to resettle other refugees. His wife, who had been an elementary-school teacher, took up teaching English as a second language (ESL) to Laotian refugee children. His daughter adjusted quickly and went to school without incident. Askulraskul now manages a project that provides services for at-risk Southeast Asian children and their families. "The job I am doing now is not only a job," he said. "It is part of my life and my sacrifice. My daughter is 29 now, and I know raising kids in America is not easy. I cannot save everybody, but there is still something I can do." Like others among the first wave of refugees, Askulraskul considers himself one of the lucky ones. His education, U.S. ties, and English-language ability --everything that set off the tragic chain of events that culminated in his daughters' deaths -- proved enormously helpful once he was in the United States. But the majority of refugees from Southeast Asia had no such advantages. Subsequent waves frequently hailed from rural areas and lacked both financial resources and formal schooling. Their psychological scars were even deeper than the first group's, from their longer years in squalid refugee camps or the killing fields. The ethnic Chinese who began arriving from Vietnam had faced harsh discrimination as well, and the Amerasians -- the children of Vietnamese women and U.S. soldiers -- had lived for years as pariahs. Once here, these refugees often found themselves trapped in poverty, providing low-cost labor, and receiving no health or other benefits, while their lack of schooling made decent jobs almost impossible to come by. In 1990, two-thirds of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong adults in America had less than a high-school education -- compared with 14 percent of whites, 25 percent of African Americans, 45 percent of Latinos, and 15 percent of the general Asian-American population. Before the welfare-reform law cut many of them off, nearly 30 percent of Southeast Asian Americans were on welfare -- the highest participation rate of any ethnic group. And having such meager incomes, they usually lived in the worst neighborhoods, with the attendant crime, gang problems, and poor schools. But shouldn't the touted Asian dedication to schooling have overcome these disadvantages, lifting the refugees' children out of poverty and keeping them off the streets? Unfortunately, it didn't. "There is still a high number of dropouts for Southeast Asians," Yang said.

"And if they do graduate, there is a low number going on to higher education." Their parents' difficulty in navigating American school systems may contribute to the problem. "The parents' lack of education leads to a lack of role models and guidance. Without those things, youth can turn to delinquent behavior and in some very extreme cases, gangs, instead of devoting themselves to education," said Narin Sihavong, director of SEARAC's Successful New Americans Project, which interviewed Mali Keo. "This underscores the need for Southeast Asian school administrators or counselors who can be role models, ease the cultural barrier, and serve as a bridge to their parents." "Sometimes families have to choose between education and employment, especially when money is tight,"

said Porthira Chimm, a former SEARAC project director. "And unfortunately, immediate money concerns often win out." The picture that emerges -- of high welfare participation and dropout rates, low levels of education and income -- is startlingly similar to the situation of the poorest members of "nonmodel" minority groups . Southeast Asians, Latinos, and African Americans also have in common significant numbers of single-parent families. Largely as a result of the killing fields, nearly a quarter of Cambodian households are headed by single women. Other Southeast Asian families have similar stories. Sihavong's mother, for example, raised him and his five siblings on her own while his father was imprisoned in a Laotian re-education camp. No matter how "traditional"

Southeast Asians may be, they share the fate of other people of color when they are denied access to good education, safe neighborhoods, and jobs that provide a living wage and benefi ts. But for the sake of preserving the model-minority myth, conservative policy makers have largely ignored the needs of Southeast Asian communities. One such need is for psychological care. Wartime trauma and "lack of English proficiency, acculturative stress, prejudice, discrimination, and racial hate crimes" place Southeast Asians "at risk for emotional and behavioral problems," according to the U.S. surgeon general's 2001 report on race and mental health. One random sample of Cambodian adults found that 45 percent had post-traumatic stress disorder and 51 percent suffered from depression. John Askulraskul's past reflects trauma as well, but his education, English-language ability, and U.S. connections helped level the playing field. Less fortunate refugees need literacy training and language assistance. They also need social supports like welfare and strong community-assistance groups. But misled by the model-minority myth, many government agencies seem to be unaware that Southeast Asians require their services, and officials have done little to find these needy refugees or accommodate them. Considering that nearly two-thirds of Southeast Asians say they do not speak English very well and more than 50 percent live in linguistically isolated ethnic enclaves, the lack of outreach and translators effectively denies them many public services. The problem extends beyond antipoverty programs, as Mali Keo's story illustrates. After her husband left her, she formed a relationship with another man and had two more children. But he beat the family for years, until she asked an organization that served Cambodian refugees to help her file a restraining order. If she had known that a shelter was available, she told her interviewer, even one without Khmer-speaking counselors, she would have escaped much earlier. Where the government hasn't turned a blind eye, it has often wielded an iron fist. The welfare-reform law of 1996, which cut off welfare, SSI, and food-stamp benefits for most noncitizens -- even those who are legal permanent residents -- sent Southeast Asian communities into an uproar. Several elderly Hmong in

California committed suicide, fearing that they would become burdens to their families. Meanwhile, the lack of literacy programs prevented (and still does prevent) many refugees from passing the written test that would gain them citizenship and the right to public assistance.

Vote negative to reject the myth of the model minority and to open space to deconstruct discursive racisms in the context of Islamophobia

Caroline Hargreaves, 2010, "How Important is Discourse to Social Change? Case: Micro-blogging Community Tumblr," London School of Economics and Political Science https://www.academia.edu/1635691/How_Important_is_Discourse_to_Social_Change_Case_Micro-blogging_Community_Tumblr

Discourse can be described as a set of values and beliefs that informs our social responses and actions, More importantly, a thorough understanding of the discursive forces that shape our social fabric presents a valuable opportunity and instrument for resistance groups to challenge dominant discourses. Foucault's famous work on the relationship between power and knowledge brings the debate to another level, where discourses serve as the meeting place of these two forces. This conception opens up possibilities to bring about change, as power in a Foucauldian perspective is ubiquitous and operates without agency, beyond traditional notions of the state and through culturally embedded factors.

Foucault rejects the liberal notion that knowledge can flourish only in the absence of power (see Evans, 2005), which allows alternative discursive methods onto the scene. These can challenge the way in which relations and structures of power are embedded in everyday life by providing alternative values and norms as well as morally validating the identities and perspectives of those oppressed by the existing relations and structures of powe r (Stammers, 1999). This is why much attention should be paid (by actors seeking to challenge the status quo) towards discourse in particular in terms of locating both opportunities and constraints for social change . As argued by Hacking (1999:58) "Politics, ideology and power matter more than metaphysics to most advocates of construction. Talk of construction tends to undermine the authority of knowledge and categorization. It challenges complacent ways of doing things not by refuting or proposing better, but by ‘unmasking’." This will reveal how categories of knowledge are used in power relationships and towards moulding the global society in a particular way. With reference to the discourse of human rights, Hunt (1990) argues that the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony make it possible to advance a positive evaluation certain strategies within progressive politics. The 'discursive war of position' is here seen as taking practical measurements to bring about shifts and modifications in popular consciousness. In discourse

specifically, Mouffe (2005:18) explains that "[e]very hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices, i.e. practices which will attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install other forms of hegemony." Hegemony then becomes a process that generates a question of culturally altering social consciousness, reworking what already exists and introducing elements that transcend dominant narratives of issues and movements. Without going too far into the reasons behind resisting the mainstream media logic, the main concerns are to what extent this logic can be seen as representative of the larger voice of society, locally and globally. Mass culture has been perceived to be an instrument of ideological dominance over ‘social consciousness’ (see Gramsci, 1971), or what Hirst (1976:386) later labeled the ‘imaginary’, shaping social subjects. Discourses are therefore not deliberately created narratives, but rather ideological extensions of the hegemonic forces in play on both macro- and micro levels of society. The democratic deficits inherent in a media system dominated by corporate and commercial structures are apparent alongside inequalities of access, representation and ideological power (Carroll and Hackett, 2006). At every point in history when a larger minority has felt oppressed by a smaller majority, revolutions have taken place, often manifested in large social movements. Melucci (1996:84) also takes the constructivist approach and writes that at the core of social movements is the construction of

collective identity, an interactive process that addresses the question of how a collective becomes a collective. Since our identities and cultures are ultimately shaped through cognitive perceptions and flows of information, its democratization is integral to the collective welfare and progression. Collective action therefore becomes

a way of communicating a message to the rest of society. As argued by Faiclough and Wodak (1997: 258), discourse is “constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transformin g it.” From the mere conception of ideas to the distribution of

messages through e.g. self-mediation, policy-makers, marketing-companies, social movements and NGOs, the significance of discourse to progressive social change is clear.

CaseWhat has the government done in response to this rise in terrorism? Nothing. Now, the aff calls to not target terrorist orginizations, making any chance of involving federal authorities to investigate who these terrorists are impossible. The burning of Black churches in the south necessitates an increase of domestic surveillance in order to prevent future horrific attacks.

Deirdre Griswold, 7-14-2015, "As Black churches burn, where are the feds?," Workers World, http://www.workers.org/articles/2015/06/29/as-black-churches-burn-where-are-the-feds/

As of June 29, six Black churches in the South have either been destroyed or suffered severe damage from fires since Charleston. At least three are confirmed to have been caused by arson, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The loss to the people of these communities comes to hundreds of

thousands of dollars. Worse, the torchings are a threat of further violence to a people whose painful history at the hands of white exploiters still resonates so strongly . The first burning deemed by fire marshals to be arson destroyed the College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tenn., on June 22. The Knoxville fire department said the arsonist set multiple fires on the church’s property. The church’s van was also burned. The very next day, a fire in the sanctuary of God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, Ga., was also blamed on arson. And the day after that, a fire was deliberately set at the Briar Creek Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., that destroyed an education wing meant to house a summer program for children. The gymnasium and sanctuary burned, causing an estimated $250,000 in damage. That same week, three other Southern Black churches — in Tennessee, Florida and South Carolina — also suffered fires, although two may have had natural

causes. Investigations are continuing. After what happened in Charleston, S.C., there can be little doubt that the arson fires were set by white supremacists , whose outpourings of hate in print and on the Internet call again and again for violence against people of color, using at best flimsily disguised language and at worst the vilest and most degrading terms. One might think that mass murder of the type that happened in Charleston would immediately lead to arrests of those advocating race war against Black people. We have seen many examples in recent years of elaborate sting operations set up by the FBI and local police authorities to ensnare Black militants on charges of plotting terrorist acts — which government agents had encouraged and facilitated. B ut just as with the murders of the three civil rights workers in 1964 — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — by members of the K u K lux K lan, the authorities have not intervened to stop such attacks , even though it is logical to assume that, in this day and age of wide surveillance, they have knowledge of them.

As the aff calls for a decrease in surveillance of white terrorists, justifying the murder of black people and destruction of black religious sites, they ignore the unwarranted, unjust surveillance of Black and Brown people used by local police departments to further structural racism and criminalize people of color.

Malkia Amala Cyril, 4-1-2015, "Black America's State of Surveillance," The Progressive Inc., http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our

door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans , J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA . Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy . It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance . We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer—it may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: “2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that would’ve been unheard of even a few years ago.” Predictive policing, also known as “Total Information Awareness,” is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to “preempt” crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice . Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken Windows.” This approach to

policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling—it relies on it . Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, s uspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that

must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism . Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, it’s a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century. We can help black lives matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that ain’t been heard yet . Let’s birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty- first century create equity and justice for all—so all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more.

Anti-black terror at the hand of white supremacist groups is THE biggest threat to U.S. national security. It did not end with the Jim Crow South, but as we have seen in Charleston, is an ongoing concern.

Julia Craven, 6-24-2015, "White Supremacists More Dangerous Than Foreign Terrorists: Study," Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-charleston_n_7654720.html

Nine people were added to a long list of lives taken by domestic terrorism when Dylann Roof allegedly began shooting inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. At least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-wing extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11 attacks -- almost twice as many as were killed by self-identified jihadists in that time, according to a study released Wednesday by the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., research center. The study found that radical anti-government groups or white supremacists were responsible for most of the terror attacks. The data counters many conventional thoughts on what terrorism is and isn’t. Since Sept. 11, many Americans attribute terror attacks to Islamic extremists instead of those in the right wing. But the numbers don't back up this popular conception , said Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kurzman is co-authoring a study with David Schanzer of Duke University, set to be published Thursday, that asks police departments to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. Law enforcement agencies reported they were more concerned about the activities of right-wing extremist groups than Islamic extremists in their jurisdictions (about 74 percent versus 39 percent) due to the "menacing" rhetoric used by some of these groups -- and that they were training officers to take caution when they saw signs of potentially violent individuals, Kurzman and Schanzer found. "Muslim extremism was taken seriously in many of these jurisdictions that we surveyed… but overall, they did not see as much of an issue with Muslim extremism as with right-wing extremism in their locations ," Kurzman told The Huffington Post. He added that it's hard to get a definitive statistical picture of plots and acts of violent extremism since that definition tends to vary and data for incidents nationwide is hard to come by. The accused Charleston shooter is currently being investigated under domestic terrorism charges by the Department of Justice -- a move that acknowledges the long history of anti-black terrorist attacks. America’s first federal anti-terrorism law, known as the Third Force Act or the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was passed by Congress in 1871, caused nine counties in South Carolina to be placed under martial law and led to thousands of arrests. The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1882. David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, told HuffPost in February that the actions of foreign extremist groups are no better or worse than the historic violence against African-Americans by domestic actors. "There's nothing you're going to see today that's not going to have already occurred in the U.S.," he said. "If you think of these groups that behead now -- first of all, beheading is barbaric but it's no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the U.S." Pilgrim said he found it offensive that, after Sept. 11, some Americans bemoaned that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders. "That is ignoring and trivializing -- if not just summarily dismissing -- all the people, especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots," he said evoking

lynching victims who were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed -- and in some cases beheaded. And while most officially acknowledged anti-black terrorism cases occurred during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as recent news demonstrate, this type of terrorism is still an ongoing concern.

Case

Homegrown terrorism on the rise—74 plot s discoveredCarrie Blackmore, 1-17-2015, "Number of homegrown terrorists is rising," USA TODAY, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/17/number-of-homegrown-terrorists-is-rising/21940159/

CINCINNATI — We are far from knowing the outcome of the case against Christopher Cornell, the young local man accused of plotting an attack on the U.S. Capitol, but if he is convicted, he would be added to a growing list of homegrown jihadist terrorists. From Sept. 11, 2001, to January 2014, there were 74 known terrorist plots perpetrated by Americans, lawful U.S. residents or visitors largely radicalized here in the United States, according to the most recent data reported by the Congressional Research Service. Five of those plots were carried out before law enforcement was able to intervene. Fifty-three of the cases – almost 72 percent – happened after April 2009. That's a 152 percent increase over that time period – and constitutes a spike, according to the report by the service, an agency that works exclusively for the U.S. Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and members of the House and Senate. "It may be too early to tell how sustained this uptick is," the report reads. "Regardless, the apparent spike in such activity after April 2009 suggests that ideologies supporting violent jihad continue to influence some Americans – even if a tiny minority." A review of the 74 cases shows that just seven were initiated by someone working independently, a lone wolf. Forty-five of the 74 planned to attack a domestic target.

The likelihood of a lone wolf attack is growingZenko 5/19/15 (Micah, Council on Foreign Relations, "Is US Foreign Policy Ignorning Homegrown Terrorists?")

On February 12, National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:¶ “We face a much greater, more frequent, recurring threat from lone offenders and probably loose networks of individuals. Measured in terms of frequency and numbers, it is attacks from those sources that are increasingly the most noteworthy…”¶ On February 26, during the annual worldwide threats hearing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned:¶ “Home-grown violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to the homeland.”¶ Last Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson stated on MSNBC:¶ “We’re in a new phase…in the global terrorist threat where, because of effective use of social media, the Internet, by ISIL, al-Qaeda, we have to be concerned about the independent actor who is here in the homeland who may strike with little or no warning…”¶ Finally, yesterday, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell described the messaging efforts of jihadist groups generally and the self-declared Islamic State (IS) more specifically:¶ “Their narrative is pretty powerful: The West, the United States, the modern world, is a significant threat to their religion. Their answer to that is to establish a caliphate. And they are being attacked by the U.S. and other Western nations, and by these apostate regimes in

the region. Because they are being attacked they need support in two ways; people coming to fight for them, and people coming to stand up and attack coalition nations in their home.”¶ In summary, the most likely—though not most lethal—terror threats to Americans come from individuals living within the United States who are partially motivated to undertake self-directed attacks based upon their perception that the United States and the West are at war with the Muslim world.

Local police will continue to profile Islam people despite federal lawsKane 13 (Alex Kane is an assistant editor for the news website Mondoweiss, which covers the Israel–Palestine conflict, and the World section editor at AlterNet. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Daily Beast’s “Open Zion” blog, Vice, BBC Persian, +972 magazine, the Electronic Intifada, Extra!, and Common Dreams, Kane is citing the book “Enemies Within” by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, “Alex Kane on Enemies Within : Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America”, October 24th, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/raking-the-coals-islamophobia-surveillance-targeting-and-the-nypds-secret-spying-unit)

Like the NYPD, the FBI has used its own power to pressure Muslims into becoming informants in exchange for help. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI has told Muslim-Americans trapped abroad because of their inclusion on a no-fly list that they could get off easily — by spying on their own communities back home in the US. For all the oversight of the FBI — something the NYPD doesn’t have to contend with — parts of the federal agency still view Muslims as targets for spying rather than partners in the fight against terrorism. Far from an aberration in America's post-9/11 landscape, the NYPD is merely the most extreme example of a law enforcement apparatus running roughshod over the rights of Muslim Americans.¶ What's also missing from Apuzzo and Goldman’s otherwise excellent exposé of the NYPD is the larger political context in which the spying took place. The NYPD's logic is Islamophobic at its core: all Muslims are deemed potential terrorists until they're proven not to be, an inversion of how law enforcement is supposed to work. Yet there's little exploration of how Islamophobic discourse from the media and elected officials contribute to the implementation and acceptance of spying targeting Muslims.¶ In the same year that Apuzzo and Goldman began reporting on the NYPD's Intelligence Division, New York Republican Peter King set up House hearings to probe “radicalization” among Muslim-Americans — a transparent attempt to cast aspersions on one particular community. In 2010, anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller worked the national media into a frenzy over what was inaccurately labeled the “Ground Zero mosque.” King, Geller and other prominent figures who demonized Muslims directly after 9/11 opened up space for institutions with even more power, like the police, to move a discourse of bigotry into policies of bigotry. In an atmosphere where anti-Muslim sentiment largely went unchallenged, it's no surprise that hardly an eye was batted when the NYPD hired CIA officials to implement an intelligence collection program aimed at law-abiding citizens. ¶ The book presents an undeniably damning portrait of the NYPD’s surveillance operation. Now, it’s up to the courts and lawmakers to decide whether these operations are legal or prudent. Three federal lawsuits are being pursued in reaction to Apuzzo's and Goldman's groundbreaking investigations. The next New York City mayor will have to grapple with the question of continuing or halting the spy operations. Judges and elected officials will have a documented record on which to look back to decide these weighty questions in the coming months: Enemies Within.¶

Surveillance is heavily biased– It is assumed that Muslims are terroristsKhalek 14 (Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized communities, “How NSA Spying Impacts Muslim Communities and Cultivates Islamophobia”, January

26, 2014, http://raniakhalek.com/2014/01/26/how-nsa-spying-impacts-muslim-communities-and-cultivates-islamophobia/ -JD)

RANIA KHALEK: That’s a really good point that you make and I actually want you to touch on that a little bit more about how the vilification and demonization of Muslims inside the United States and foreign has really been used to justify this type of mass surveillance and in some cases it seems to have worked. All you have to do is say terrorist, Islamic terrorism and people are like, oh okay. Could you talk a little

bit about that?¶ ABBAS: I agree wholeheartedly that the fear of Islam, the fear of Muslims, is a notion I think has been cultivated by policy choices at the federal level. The use of airport screenings, that inevitably cultivates and reflects the bias that people have against Muslims, has I think created space for an anti-Muslim movement to take root. Right after September 11, you didn’t have your Act for

America’s, your David Yerushalmi’s, your Center for Security Policy’s—this well-organized, well-financed movement dedicated towards marginalizing Muslims and that gave rise to essentially an engine of generating ant-Muslim sentiment that creates this terrible and despicable cycle where now you have the overt argument being made that Muslims are here in the United States to abrogate the US constitution, to overthrow the US government and replace it with Sharia law, which couldn’t be further from the truth.¶ As the facts would have it, the American Muslim community is a well-educated, well-integrated and looking to continue to do so in the world. You can’t identify an American Muslim radical voice in the United States, whereas if you go to Europe, you can find people that have a platform that say despicable objectionable things. In the US, that’s just not the case.¶ But we still have in the US, which is really exporting anti-Muslim sentiment to other parts of the world especially Europe, we still have this fear of Islam that absolutely does give rise to justify these surveillance policies.¶ GOSZTOLA: So for people who are hearing this debate and they maybe think it’s kind of abstract, we’ve been hearing people talk about collection of the information and then we’ve been hearing about how the information is stored. And right now when we’re talking about the program under the Patriot Act, the Section 215 program, which is the bulk records collection of the phone records, it’s all about who’s going to hold it, who’s going to store it, and it’s kind of like we’re not talking about the collection. I’d like you to talk about why the collection would be really bad and I think a thing you could address is how the collection of people’s information in Muslim communities in New York is a huge deal for them and collecting that information is the beginning of the injustice.¶ ABBAS: Absolutely. What we know a lot about now regarding the NSA’s surveillance programs is what is collected,

some of the searching mechanisms that can be utilized to sift through the collected information. But what we really get to see in more granular detail with the NYPD’s specifically designed Muslim surveillance program is how indiscriminately collected information gets utilized and what people in positions of authority that can collect such information think is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars. And

what we find is that the NYPD thought it was absolutely worth taxpayer money to send their agents on camping trips of 19 and 20-year-old college students. They thought it was absolutely critical for them to map the Muslim community in Newark, New Jersey, and beyond, identifying every halal grocery store, every halal restaurant. These things are laughable when we see them up close and in granular detail and just like the PCLOB board has determined itself, a board that was authorized by Congress years ago, that the sifting through everybody’s information on an ongoing basis actually is not only objectionable in itself but it’s not productive by any criteria.¶ So you have for instance James Clapper arguing that there’s the ‘piece of mind’ quotients that is part of the benefit of their surveillance program because we’re monitoring everything. At the very least we know that nothing is happening. But this mentality that gave rise to the NSA program is really the objectionable thing that needs to end because it gives rise to not only indiscriminate collection of information automatically through these telecommunications companies, but it’s also given rise to a network of 15,000 FBI informants that have saturated the Muslim community across the country, that are sent to mosques without any type of criminal predicate just to collect information because there’s a sense that that’s where the problem. And that’s the inevitable result of indiscriminate collection. It’s always going to be the case that indiscriminate collection—in addition to not being productiv—will lead to despicable consequences.¶ And I’ll end my answer here.¶ The saddest thing I’ve ever heard as a CAIR staff

attorney, and I hear lots of sad things, was when a young guy told me that when he goes to the mosque to pray, his mom warns him to be careful. And the mom warns him to be careful because there’s an understanding based on experience that the mosque is likely filled with informants and infiltrators that are not there to make us any safer but there to extract information from innocent Americans by any means necessary. ¶

Their plan fails-government involvement result in cooption and serial policy failureDr. Brincat et al, co-editor of Global Discourse, 2012

(Shannon, “Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies: Interviews and Reflections”, interviewing Andrew Linklater, an international relations academic, and current Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics @ Aberystwyth University)

The closer one gets to political power in our field the less one becomes an academic in the true sense, because one has to move onto the agenda of those in power. Various experiences in the 1970s led

me to think there is limited value in spending much time with politicians and policy makers, because they only want to use academics as a bureaucratic resource. They are only interested in one's work if one has something to say about their agenda. Occasionally, it is possible to have a useful

interchange between governments and academics, but our skills are not best employed to serve the interests of particular governments and their agencies or 'nations'. However, one should not define 'political impact' narrowly, in terms of the agenda of the political elite. If impact is defined more broadly, then I think

academics can have an important influence — though that impact is likely to be broad, diffuse, probably long term, and certainly beyond the horizons of the so-called 'metrics' beloved by the managers of higher education (especially in the United Kingdom). We should always be very modest about what we can achieve as academics, especially

in the short run (except for teaching as well as we can). This is always perhaps particularly the case for the critical theorist working in the inhospitable field of IR. As 'outsider' theorists, our role is to hold up a mirror to present realities , and to provide alternative ways of thinking and behaving. As such, we must appreciate the privilege of being among the relatively small number of people on Earth with the time and opportunity

to think about world politics in this way. Our aim must be to make some contribution, however little, to changing human consciousness about living globally — for common humanity and towards emancipation