SECURITY KRITIK

ENDI 2010

1Security K

Wave 1

Security kritik

3Security kritik 1nc

LINKS:

Security generic links:

Threat construction link7Realism/ psychological motives link9Threat construction link positivism10Threats to homeland link11Crisis management link12Securitization of non-military link13Agent links:

Sovereignty link14Hegemony link15Soft power link18Governmentality link19International norms/Rulemaking link20Representation links

Terrorism discourse link21AT: Terrorists are irrational24Borders link25Borders link - realism26AT: Borders key to security27Area links:

South China Sea link29Middle East Link30North Korea Link33China link- threat35China link economy/competitiveness37China link hostile rise / power vacuum38Russia link39Epistemology links:

Peace link40Positivism/empiricism link41Positivism link - state42Root cause link43Neorealism link44Prolif specific:

proliferation link45proliferation link - state47proliferation link weapon label48proliferation link stability49proliferation link wildfire / cancer metaphor50proliferation link weapons spread51proliferation link peaceful/ military distinction52proliferation link rogue states/ loose nukes53proliferation link rogues/ monitoring54proliferation discourse turns case55Impact links:

economic competitiveness link56humanitarian assistance link57environmental security link58environ. security t/o solvency59critical inequality link60inequality link - discrimination63inequality link - discrimination64inequality link international / capitalism65Link helpers66IMPACTS: Securitization bad kills criticism67Securitization bad violence68Securitization bad - resentment69Heg bad-imperialism70Myths impact71Kritik turns case-war72ALTERNATIVE(S):

2NC Alt solves73Alt solves - violence74Alt solves - sovereignty75Alt solves - Epistemology76Alt solves metanarratives77Environ security alt - exclude securitization78FRAMEWORK:

Discourse shapes reality/policy79Discourse shapes reality metaphor81security = speech act82Discourse 1st84AT: Rational actor852NC:AT: No impact to representation86AT: Perm- positivism87AT: Case outweighs89AT: Predictions/Scenario planning good91AT: Realism inevitable92AT: Realism good93AT: Realism good: nuclear war96AT: Realism good- Hobbes97AT: realism good - critical reasons98AT: Securitization key to action100AT: Post-structuralism bad101AT: Criticisms that make fun of post-structuralism103AT: Environmental securitization good105AT: Link turns aff stops seeing x as enemy106AT: Link turn we establish alliances107AT: Kritik is ideological108

******AFF******109Framework AT: Discourse first110AT: Reps first112Positivism good113AT: Scenario planning bad115AT: Predictions Fail1162AC Cede The Political117AT: State links118AT: Threat construction119AT: psychology links120AT: Middle East Link121AT: Terror Link1222AC impact calc - Consequences First1232AC impact calc AT: Value to life124AT: Value to life125AT: Structural Violence Impact1262AC-Permutation127Critical realism perm1292AC- Alt fails130Realism good131

Security kritik 1nc

Security is a speech act that manufactures low probability threats and worst case scenarios in order to build up the states defenses and defend its territory

Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, prof of politics at UC Santa Cruz, Negotiating the Boundaries of Difference and Security at Millennium's End, On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]

What then, is the form and content of this speech act? The logic of security implies that one political actor must be protected from the depredations of another political actor. In international relations, these actors are territorially defined, mutually exclusive and nominally sovereign states. A state is assumed to be politically cohesive, to monopolize the use of violence within the defined jurisdiction, to be able to protect itself from other states, and to be potentially hostile to other states. Self-protection may, under certain circumstances, extend to the suppression of domestic actors, if it can be proved that such actors are acting in a manner hostile to the state on behalf of another state (or political entity). Overall, however, the logic of security is exclusionist: It proposes to exclude developments deemed threatening to the continued existence of that state and, in doing so, draws boundaries to discipline the behavior of those within and to differentiate within from without. The right to define such developments and draw such boundaries is, generally speaking, the prerogative of certain state representatives, as Wver points out. 3 Of course, security, the speech act, does draw on material conditions "out there." In particular, the logic of security assumes that state actors possess "capabilities," and the purposes of such capabilities are interpreted as part of the speech act itself. These interpretations are based on indicators that can be observed and measured--for example, numbers of tanks in the field, missiles in silos, men under arms. It is a given within the logic--the speech act--of security that these capabilities exist to be used in a threatening fashion--either for deterrent or offensive purposes--and that such threats can be deduced, albeit incompletely, without reference to intentions or, for that matter, the domestic contexts within which such capabilities have been developed. Defense analysts within the state that is trying to interpret the meanings of the other state's capabilities consequently formulate a range of possible scenarios of employment, utilizing the most threatening or damaging one as the basis for devising a response. Most pointedly, they do not assume either that the capabilities will not be used or that they might have come into being for reasons other than projecting the imagined threats. Threats, in this context, thus become what might be done, not, given the "fog of war," what could or would be done, or the fog of bureaucracy, what might not be done. What we have here, in other words, is "worst case" interpretation. The "speech act" security thus usually generates a proportionate response , in which the imagined threat is used to manufacture real weapons and deploy real troops in arrays intended to convey certain imagined scenarios in the mind of the other state. Intersubjectivity, in this case, causes states to read in others, and to respond to, their worst fears. It is important to recognize that, to the extent we make judgments about possibilities on the basis of capabilities, without reference to actual intentions, we are trying to imagine how those capabilities might be used. These imagined scenarios are not, however, based only on some idea of how the threatening actor might behave; they are also reflections of what our intentions might be, were we in the place of that actor, constructing imagined scenarios based on what s/he would imagine our intentions might be, were they in our place. . . . and so on, ad infinitum . Where we cut into this loop, and why we cut into the loop in one place and not another, has a great deal to do with where we start in our quest to understand the notion of security, the speech act.

Security kritik 1nc

The affirmatives securitizing representations reduce human freedom and agency to a calculation- this is uniquely dehumanizing and destroys the value to lifeDillon 1996 (Michael is a professor of politics at the University of Lancaster, Politics of Security, p. 26)Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the power of its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which amount to the same thing), but a mere species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of calculation does it seem capable of constructing that oplitical arithmetic by which it can secure the security globalised Western thought insists upon, and which a world made uncreasingly unpredictable by the very way human being acts into it now seem to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is precisely also what reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surender of what is human to the de-humanising calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security. I think, then, that Hannah Arendt was right when she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is possible and a willingness to surender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it was, in short, characterized by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone one stage further- the surrender to the necessity of realising everything that is possible- and that this found its paradigmatic expression for example in the deterrent security policies of the Cold War; where everything up to and inclduing self-immolation not only became possible but actually necessary in the interests of (inter)national security. The logic persists in the metaphysical core of modern politics- the axiom of Inter-state security relations, popularized for example, through strategic discourse- even if the details have changed.

And, treating security as an a priori legitimizes the WMD suicide pact and billions of deaths

Der Derian 1998 [James, prof of political science at Brown, The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]

No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted. We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." 1 From God to Rational Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People--and on occasion in the reverse direction as well, for history is never so linear, never so neat as we would write it--the security of the center has been the shifting site from which the forces of authority, order, and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference. Yet the center, as modern poets and postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a bipolar system, the diffusion of power into new political, national, and economic constellations, the decline of civil society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything --transportation, capital and information flows, change itself--have induced a new anxiety. As George Bush repeatedly said--that is, until the 1992 Presidential election went into full swing--"The enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is instability." 2 One immediate response, the unthinking reaction, is to master this anxiety and to resecure the center by remapping the peripheral threats. In this vein, the Pentagon prepares seven military scenarios for future conflict, ranging from latino small-fry to an IdentiKit super-enemy that goes by the generic acronym of REGT ("Reemergent Global Threat"). In the heartlands of America, Toyota sledge-hammering returns as a popular know-nothing distraction. And within the Washington beltway, rogue powers such as North Korea, Iraq, and Libya take on the status of pariah-state and potential video bomb-site for a permanently electioneering elite.

security kritik 1nc

The alternative is to reject the affirmatives appeals to securitization. Questioning the conditions of possibility for power relations created through the affirmatives representations refuses to participate in calculative and depoliticizing worst case scenario predictions.

Edkins 1999 [Jenny, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, Postructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In, p. 1-3]

Ironically, what we call "politics" is an area of activity that in modern Western society is "depoliticized" or "technologized." These two terms are more or less synonymous (as far as my usage here goes), but the latter is perhaps more useful as a term because of the sense it conveys that what is going on is something positive. We are not talking about an absence of the political through some sort of lapse or mistake but an express operation of depoliticization or technologization: a reduction to calculability. In this context ideology is the move that conceals the depoliticization of politics and hides the possibility-the risks-of "the political." Technologization has its dangers, too, and one of the fields where its perils can be seen is international politics. As examples, I examine briefly the technologization of famine relief and the notion of securitization as a form of extreme depoliticization. In the final section of this chapter, I outline how the authors whose work I discuss later in the book see processes of technologization and depoliticization. POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL The distinction I employ here between "politics" and "the political" is similar to that between what is sometimes called a "narrow" meaning of the political and a broader one. In the narrow sense, the political is taken to be that sphere of social life commonly called "politics": elections, political -parties, the doings of governments and parliaments, the state apparatus. and in the case of "international politics," treaties, international agreements, diplomacy, wars, institutions of which states are members (such as the United Nations), and the actions of statesmen and -women. As James Donald and Stuart Hall point out, what gets to be counted as politics in this narrow form is not in any sense given. It is the result of contestation. It is ideological, contingent on a particular organization of the social order, not natural.6 Donald and Hall refer to the struggle in the 1970s and 1980s by the women's movement to extend the range of politics to include, for example, relations of power within the home or between men and women more broadly. "The personal is political" was their slogan. A similar extension of international politics has been advocated by Cynthia Enloe, this time with the phrase "the personal is international. "7 In other words, the question of what gets to count as "politics" (in the narrow sense) is part of "the political" (in the broader sense): It is a political process. Or in Fred Dallmayr's words, "Whereas politics in the narrower sense revolves around daY7to-day decision making and ideological partisanship . . . "the political" refers to the frame of reference within which actions, events, and other phenomena acquire political status in the first place."8 In the broader sense, then, "the political" has to do with the establishment of that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics. For Claude Lefort, the political is concerned with the "constitution of the social space, of the form of society."9 It is central to this process that the act of constitution is immediately concealed or hidden: Hence, "the political is ... revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured."10 How does this relate to the link that is generally made between "power" and the political? Following Lefort again, "the phenomenon of power lies at the centre of political analysis," but this is not because relations of power should be seen as autonomous and automatically defining "politics." Rather, it is because "the existence of a power capable of obtaining generalised obedience and allegiance implies a certain type of social division and articulation, as well as a certain type of representation ... concerning the legitimacy of the social order."" In other words, what is important about power is that it establishes a social order and a corresponding form of legitimacy. Power, for Lefort, does not "exist" in any sort of naked form, before legitimation: Rather, the ideological processes of legitimation produce certain representations of power. For a political analysis, in the broadest sense, what needs to be called into question are the conditions of possibility that produced or made conceivable this particular representation of power. The question is, "What change in the principles of legitimacy, what reshaping of the system of beliefs, in the way of apprehending reality, enabled such a representation of power to emerge?"12

Security kritik 1NC

Language matters- debating the affirmatives representations is key to overcoming dominant descriptions of agents and objects in international relations

Der Derian 98 (James, a Watson Institute research professor of international studies and directs the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project and the Global Media Project, International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Lexington Books, p.13)Once we give adequate recognition to the texts within which the world emerges and provided an understanding of politics that focuses on such impositions of meaning and value, we can appreciate the intimate relationship between textual practices and politics. It is the dominant, surviving textual practices that give rise to the systems of meaning and value from which actions and policies are directed and legitimated. A critical political perspective is, accordingly, one that questions the privileged forms of representation whose dominance has led to the unproblematic acceptance of subjects, objects, acts, and themes through which the political world is constructed. In as much as dominant modes of understanding exist within representational or textual practices, criticism or resistant forms of interpretation are conveyed less through an explicitly argumentative form than through a writing practice that is resistant to familiar modes of representation, one that is self-reflective enough to show how meaning and writing practices are radically entangled in general or one that tends to denaturalize familiar reunites by employing impertinent grammars and figurations, by, in short, making use of an insurrectional textuality. To appreciate the effects of this textuality, it is necessary to pay special need to language, but this does not imply that an approach emphasizing textuality reduces social phenomena to specific instances of linguistic expression. To textualize a domain of analysis is to recognize, first of all, that any "reality" is mediated by a mode of representation and, second, that representations are not descriptions of a world of facility, but are ways of making facility. Their value is thus not to be discerned in their correspondence with something, but rather in the economies of possible representations within which they participate. Modes of reality making are therefore worthy of analysis in their own right. Such analysis can be a form of interpretation in which one scrutinizes the effects on behavior or policy that the dominance of some representational practices enjoy, or it can be a form of critique in which one opposes prevailing representational practices with alternatives. Therefore, a concern with textuality must necessary raise issues about the texuality (the meaning and value effects) of the language of inquiry itself. In order, then, to outline the textualist approach, we must develop further our understanding of the language analysis.

Threat construction link

Security threats are created through acts of interpretationrepresentations enable securitizing actions

Mutimer 2000 [David, associate professor of political science at York University and Deputy Director of the Center for International and Security Studies, The Weapons State, pg 16-17]

A further point is to be made concerning Campbell's work. The focus of Writing Security is not, in fact, on the way in which danger is interpreted- the manner by which the interpretation of risk and the consequent creation of threat occur. Rather, Campbell's argument shows the way in which the interpreting subject-in this instance the United States-is itself created by those acts of identifying danger. If we can accept that both the threats and the subjects of international security are created in acts of interpretation, it should be clear that the interests those subjects pursue are also consequences of these same acts. It would be difficult to argue that interests remain fixed when the bearer of those interests does not. Jutta Weldes has made the case with respect to interests: In contrast to the realist conception of "national interests" as objects that have merely to be observed or discovered, then, my argument is that national interests are social constructions created as meaningful objects out of the intersubjective and culturally established meanings with which the world, particularly the international system and the place of the state in it, is understood. More specifically, national interests emerge out of the representations . .. through which state officials and others make sense of the world around them. 13 These "representations through which state officials and others make sense of the world around them" are central to my argument in this book. Rather than take the objects of study as given, I ask questions about the construction of a particular object, a particular set of identities and interests, and the specific practices through which proliferation is confronted. The key to answering these questions is to identify the way in which the problem is represented or, to use the language I deploy later, the image that is used to frame the issue in question. This image serves to construct the object of analysis or policy, to identify the actors, and to define their interests. It is therefore the image that enables the practices through which these actors respond to the problem of proliferation.Constructing threats necessitates an other to fear and respond to

Lipschutz 95- Professor of Politics and Associate Director of the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies at the UCSC ( Ronnie D. Lipshutz: On Security Pg. 8-9 1995) Conceptualizations of security-from which follow policy and practice-are to be found in discourses of security. These are neither strictly objective assessments nor analytical constructs of threat, but rather the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power within the state, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them. Hence, there are not only struggles over security among nations, but also struggles over security among notions. Winning the right to define security provides not just access to resources but also the authority to articulate new definitions and discoursed of security, as well. As Karen Liftlin points out, As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses delimit the range of policy options, thereby functioning as precursors to policy outcomes The supreme power is the power to delineate the boundaries of thought an attribute not so much of specific agents as it is of discursive practices. These discourses of security, however clearly articulated, nonetheless remain fraught with contradictions, as the chapters in this volume make clear. How do such discourses begin? In his investigation of historical origins of the concept, James Der Derian (Chapter 2: The Value of Seurity: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard) points out that, in the past, security has been invoked not only to connote protection from threats, along the lines of the conventional definition, but also to describe hubristic overconfidence as well as a bond or pledge provided in a financial transaction. To secure oneself is, therefore, a sort of trap, for one can never leave a secure place without incurring risks. (Elsewhere, Barry Buzan has pointed out that There is a cruel irony in [one] meaning of secure which is unable to escape. Security, moreover, is meaningless without an other to help specify the conditions of insecurity. Der Derian, citing Nietsche, points out that this other is made manifest through differences that create terror and collective resentment of difference the state of fear rather than a preferable coming to terms with the positive potential of difference.

Threat construction link

The term security is used to allow states to use whatever means necessary to eliminate the threats they have created

Lipschutz 95 (Ronnie D, a Professor of Politics and Codirector of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz , On Security, p. 9-10)

Operationally, however, this means: In naming a certain development a security problem, the state can claim a special right, one that will, in the final instance, always be defined by the state and its elites. Trying to press the kind of unwanted fundamental political chance on a ruling elite is similar to playing a gam in which ones opponent can change the rules at any time s/he likes. Power holders can always try to use the instrument of securitization of an issue to gain control over it. By definition, something is a security problem when the elites declare it to be so: and because the End of this Institution [the Leviathan, the Sovereign], is the Peace and Defense of them all; and whosoever has the right to the End, has right to the Means; it belongeth of Right, to whatsoever Man, or Assembly that hath the Soveraignty, to be Judge both of the meanes of Peace and Defense; and also of the hindrances, and disturbances of the same; and to do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done, both before hand, for the preserving of Peace and Security, by prevention of Discord at home and thus, that those who administer this order can easily use it for specific, self-serving purposes is something that cannot be easily avoided. What then is security? With the help of language theory, we can regard security as a speech act. In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to somethingmore rea; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promis, naming a ship). By uttering security, a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it. The clearest illustration of this phenomenon- on which I will elaborate below- occurred in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, where order was clearly, systematically, and institutionally linked to the survival of the system and its elites. Thinking about chainge in the East-West relations and/or in Eastern Europe throughout this period meant, therefore, rying to bring about change without generating a securitization response by elites, which would have provided the pretext for acting against those who had overstepped the boundaries of the permitted. Consequentally, to ensure that this mechanism would not be triggered, actors had to keep their challenges below a certain thershold and/or through the political process-wheter national or international- have the threshold negotiated upward. As Egbert Jahn put it, the task was to turn threats into challenges; to move developments from the sphere of existential fear to one where they could be handled by ordinary means, as politics, economy, culture, and so on. As part of this exercise, a crucial political and theoretical issue became the definition of intervention or interference in domestic affairs, whereby change-oriented agents tried, through international law, diplomacy, and various kinds of politics, to raise the threshold and make more interaction possible.

The will to security is an incitement to violence- only a break from the politics of security gives meaning to international relations

Dillon 1996 (Michael is a professor of politics at the University of Lancaster, Politics of Security, p. 19)We now know that neither metaphysics nor our politics of security can secure the security of truth and of life which was their reciprocating raison d etre (and, rason d etat). More importantly, we now know that the very will to security-the will to power of sovereign presence in both metaphysics and modern politics- is not a prime incitement to violence in the Western tradition of thought, and to the globalization of its (inter)national politics, but also self defeating; in that it does not in its turn merely endanger, but actually engenders danger in response to its own discursive dynamic. One does not have to be persuaded of the destinal sending of Being, therefore, to be persuaded of the profundity- and of the profound danger- of this modern human condition. That, then, is why the crisis of Western though is as much a fundamental crisis of (inter)national politics, as the criss of (inter)national politics is a crisis of thought. Moreover, that is why in doubting the value of security, and doubting in a Nietzschean mode better than Descartes, we are also enjoined by the circumstances of this critical conjunction of the philosophical and the political to doubt metaphysical truth. For the political truth of security is the metaphysical truth of correspondence and adequation in declension to mathesis; the mere, but rigorously insistent, measuration of calculabilty. To bring the value of security into question in the radical way required by the way it now, ironically, radically endangers us, correspondingly requires that we attend to metaphysics own continous process of deconstruction. In doing this, however, we go beyond mere doubting- which, after all, is the mere counterpart of the desire for certainty- and find non-apocalyptic ays of affirming and so continuing to enjoy and celebrate (in)security; that is to say human beings own obligatory freedom. Ultimately, now, our (inter)national politics of security is no longer even distinguished or driven by humanistic considerations. It is a security simply ordering to order. But it is only by virtue of the fact that our (inter)national politics of security has come to this end that we can in fact begin to consider the relationship between its end and its beginnning. Through this we do not, in a sense, go back to anything at all. Neither does this turn disguise some covert nostalgia for a phantom past. Rather, attention is turned towards consideration of what is entailed in the preparation and inception of continuous new political growth. This is also why, at the limit, it is useful to think about these origins and limits again. Not because they hold an answer that is now lost but because, antecedent to metaphysics, they make us think about the very liminal character of origins and limits, of the relationship which obtains between them, and of what proceeds from them, in ways that are not utterly determined by metaphysics. That way we may get some clues to some ways of thinking that are not metaphysical; nor, indeed, pre-metaphysical, because we cannot be pre-metaphysical at the end of metaphysics. What happens, instead, is that the whole question of emergence and origination, of the very possibility of repeating ourselves, opens-up again; specifically in the sense of the historical possibilities of the obligatory freedom of human being now terminally endangered globally by its very own (inter)national civilising practices.

realism/ psychological motives link

We should critically analyze the very idea of beliefs and psychological motivations in order to de-stabilize the modern subject

Der Derian 98 (James, a Watson Institute research professor of international studies and directs the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project and the Global Media Project, International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Lexington Books, p.18)What poststructuralist approaches have shown so far is that the orthodoxies of our social and political worlds are recreated in the process of writing, in the style of the texts through which our dominant understandings of the world have been constructed. And no form of writing is exempt; analysis itself is a textual practice that is intimately related to the political practices it aims to disclose. In order to exemplify analysis as a form of textual practice, it is useful once again to turn to a contrast between a textually oriented mode of reading and the more familiar, political psychology. The psychological approach to international relations, has focused, among other things, on the cognitive components through which individuals "perceive" aspects of policy. In order to textualize political psychology and, at the same time, demonstrate the difference in problematization between a psychological and textual approach, we offer a brief reading of what could best be termed the politics of fear. We begin this reading with the recognition that individuals, in their contributions to the meanings shaping public life, cannot be understood simply as mentalistic information processors, but rather as socially and temporally situated beings, connected to each other in a network of practices. This means, among other things, that we must resist many of modernity's professional and academic discourses that have produced modern "man" as psychological being (as Pltilip Rieff pointed out a few decades ago). Were we to treat this psychological identity as a fact rather than as a historically produced text, our analysis would be paralyzed in the same way as are these psychologizing practices. Rather than focusing on individual beliefs or other cognitive components, then, we argue that it is more enabling to understand how understandings are situated in domains of practice. Instead of exploring people's beliefs, for example, we can do a genealogy of belief itself, locating beliefs in the context of the history of practices related to the management of danger. Beliefs, as an identity for persons, are a kind of data, providing a way of reading the script of modernity, rather than an analytic device aiding interpretation. To note that modern individuals have "beliefs" is not to take cognizance of a fact about persons, but to notice the contemporary way of constructing them. By analyzing this practice for constituting the modern self, we can also move in the direction of disclosing the more cryptic modes of legitimating for public (and "foreign") policy.

Threat construction positivism link

Threats are imagined and constructed in order to legitimate existing political dispositions and responses Lipschutz 2000, (Ronnie D, a Professor of Politics and Codirector of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz, After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century, ch. 3, p. 56)

To return to an earlier question, who constructs and articuates contesting discourses of national security? Among such people are mainstream defense intellectuals and strategic analysts, those individuals who, in sharing a particular political culture, can agree on a common framework for defining security threats and policy responses (what might be called a security episteme). While their discourse is constructed around the interpretation of real incoming data, their analysis is framed in such a way as to, first, define the threat as they see it and, second, legitimate those responses that validate their construction of the threat (see, e.g., Schlesinger, 1991). To repeat: this does not mean that threats are imaginary. Rather they are imagined and constructed in such a way as to reinforce existing predispositions and thereby legitimate them. This legitimation, in turn, helps to reproduce existing policy or some variant of it as well as the material basis for that policy. Finally, we might ask why redifine security? Who advocates such an idea? During the 1980s at the time this argument was first made (Ullman, 1983; Matthews, 1989), the individuals compromising this group were an amorphous lot, lacking an integrated institutional base or intellectual framework (a situation that has slowly changed during the 1990s). Most tended to see consensual definitions and dominant discourses of security as failing to properly percieve or understand the objective threat environment, but they did not question the logic whereby threats and security were defined. In other words, the redefiners proposed that the real threats to security were different from those that policymakers and defense authorities were generally concerned about, but the threats were really out there.

Threats to homeland link

Constructing threats to the homeland as coming from the outside is the basis of statist identity construction and the legitimation of steps toward security Tickner 95 - Professor of Policy at Holy Cross University (J. Ann Ticknery: International Relations Theory Today, p. 189)

When national security is defined negatively, as protection against outside military threats, the sense of threat is reinforced by the doctrine of state sovereignty, which strengthens the boundary between a secure community and a dangerous external environment. For this reason, many critics of realism claim that, if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state sovereignty must be severed. While E. H. Carr argued for he retention of the nation-state to satisfy people's need for identity, those who are critical of state-centric analysis point to the dangers of a political identity constructed out of exclusionary practices. In the present international system, security is tied to a nationalist political identity which depends on the construction of those outsides as 'other' and therefore dangerous. (Walker 1990) David Campbell suggests that security the boundaries of this statist identity demands the construction of 'danger' on the outside: Thus, threats to security in conventional thinking are all in the external realm. Campbell claims that the state requires this discourse of danger to secure its identity and legitimation which depend on the promise of security for its citizens. Citizenship becomes synonymous with loyalty and the elimination of all that is foreign. Underscoring this distinction between citizens and people reinforced by these boundary distinctions, Walker argues that not until people, rather than any citizens, are the primary subjects of security can a truly comprehensive security be achieved.

crisis management link

Realist decisionmaking to protect the homeland shifts into crisis management, drawing the boundaries between self and other and quelling political opposition

Der Derian 98 (James, a Watson Institute research professor of international studies and directs the Information Technology, War, and Peace Project and the Global Media Project, Textual Strategies of the Military, International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Lexington Books, p.101)Strategic discourse is the mode of coordinating and disciplining that peacelessness that reigns without, beyond the borders of the sovereign state: "over there" in bordering or far distant regions where strange forces of otherness well u p to challenge domestic order. Like the popular television show of the mid-1960s, "Get Smart," the realist bifurcates domestic "control" and foreign "chaos." This arises from more general dichotomies such as "the self ' and "the other," of the one and the many, 9 of domestic order and international anarchy, all of which require that politics stop at the water's edge and that loyalty reign supreme at home lest the forces of disorder be emboldened. Traditionally, realism has negotiated this political terrain in terms of two strategies. The first is a kind of statist monism. Here we find a thoroughly articulated political apparatus that presides over civil society, 10 an architecture of bureaucratic Leviathanism that in its absolutist form was celebrated as the embodiment o f domestic reason and interests writ large. Out of this arose a set of practices that have continued to exercise a decisive hold upon the theoretical imaginations of contemporary realists. I speak here of the various means by which the state is supposed to maximize the well being of an undifferentiated populace. Mercantilism; pursuing the national interest; defending national security: these are the economic, political, and military spheres attended to by the state. Of course, there are people who populate the state: real-life kings and queens, cabinet members, diplomats, and statesmen. Situated atop, presiding over their sovereign realm, they alone are accorded a freedom of action that is quite literally heroic in its scope. Witness the gallant, globetrotting Kissingerian figure who has transcended the limits of bureaucratic structure and circumvented all manner of domestic accountability. II And this is the second strategy of realism: the military genius, the visionary statesman. The IR struggles to secure the well being of their polity occupy the stage upon which is played out the drama of the realist tradition. Contemporary neorealist has modified this somewhat, rendering more austere and technocratic the exercise of state power. Domestically, we have witnessed the advent of decision-making inquiries in a conceptual at tempt to understand the formerly posited unity o f a monolithic realist state. Internationally, one finds a proliferation of techno strategies and techno diplomacies that have displaced the drama of the heroic, visionary statesman, replacing him with the avatars of a disciplinary politics in the form of crisis management, command and control, intelligence gathering, and centrally coordinated war-fighting from computer-laden bunkers, dutifully carried out by attached-case carrying military staff. ll This is where strategic discourse achieves its hegemony, as the intellectual sphere within which these practices of "organized peacelessness"13 became standard operating procedure.

securitization of non-military link

Securitizing things outside of the military defense of the state gives the state free reign to endlessly expand its military agenda until it has swallowed politics and social relations

Waever 1998 [Ole, professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Securitization and Desecuritization, On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/index.html]

Widening along the referent object axis--that is, saying that "security is not only military defense of the state, it is also x and y and z"--has the unfortunate effect of expanding the security realm endlessly, until it encompasses the whole social and political agenda. This is not, however, just an unhappy coincidence or a temporary lack of clear thinking. The problem is that, as concepts, neither individual security nor international security exist . National security, that is, the security of the state, is the name of an ongoing debate, a tradition, an established set of practices and, as such, the concept has a rather formalized referent; conversely, the "security" of whomever/whatever is a very unclear idea. There is no literature, no philosophy, no tradition of "security" in non-state terms; it is only as a critical idea, played out against the concept and practices of state security, that other threats and referents have any meaning. An abstract idea of "security" is a nonanalytical term bearing little relation to the concept of security implied by national or state security. To the extent that we have an idea of a specific modality labelled "security" it is because we think of national security and its modifications and limitations, and not because we think of the everyday word "security." The discourse on "alternative security" makes meaningful statements not by drawing primarily on the register of everyday security but through its contrast with national security. Books and articles such as Jan berg's At Sikre Udvikling og Udvikle Sikkerhed , Richard H. Ullman's "Redefining Security," and Jessica Tuchman Mathews's "Redefining Security" are, consequently, abundant with "not only," "also" and "more than" arguments. 6 This reveals that they have no generic concept of the meaning of security--only the one uncritically borrowed from the traditional view, and multiplied and extended to new fields. Thus, it seems reasonable to be conservative along this axis, accepting that "security" is influenced in important ways by dynamics at the level of individuals and the global system, but not by propagating unclear terms such as individual security and global security. The concept of security refers to the state.

sovereignty link

The invocation of sovereignty is an aesthetic and political practice that should be questioned for its constructed content

Ashley and Walker 1990 [Richard, Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political. Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, RBJ, professor of political science at the University of Victoria, Conclusion: Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Sep., 1990), pp. 367-416, jstor]

Developing this third line of reply at some length, we shall show that the question of sovereignty, viewed as a practical political problem, is an intrinsically paradoxical problem that can never be named, rationally deliberated, and solved. Whether one speaks of the sovereignty of a disci- pline or the sovereignty of a modern state, the question is one whose naming and explicit deliberation would preclude its practical resolution. It is a question whose tentative resolution, if resolution there be, can depend upon aesthetic practices alone. As we shall suggest, the aesthetic practices of these and similar critical readings, including their construction of a double bind, labor to produce the effect of a sovereign center of judgment-in this case, the sovereignty of a "discipline" -in response to events that put an institutional order in crisis and in doubt. As we shall also want to suggest, the aesthetic practices at work in these critical readings are instructive in far wider scope. They offer helpful examples of a widely practiced strategic art by which the effect of sovereignty-be it the sovereignty of a territorial state or the sovereignty of a "state of the discipline"-is produced under conditions of crisis wherein notions of space, time, and political identity are shaken to the core. What occasions this strategic labor of art? What does it labor to do? How does it do it? What are the conditions of this art's effective performance? Can this strategic art any longer be effectively performed in a discipline or culture in which territorial bound- aries are everywhere in question and a sense of crisis is acute? What are the implica- tions for works of thought that would speak in reply to the opportunities and dan- gers of political life today? Developing this third line of reply, we shall explore these questions.

Hegemony link

Hegemony is an organizing myth in our culture- belief in inevitable US dominance as necessary to protect the globe is based on inaccurate IR assumptions and sanitizes violence to protect our regime

Preston, 2005 [Scott B.A. Honours, Communications, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dark Age Blog 2-22, http://www.darkage.ca/blog/_archives/2005/2/22/363696.html]

The recent history of American interventions around the globe doesn't suggest that Mr. Ferguson's thesis has much merit. Central America, America's erstwhile neglected "backyard" and the site of much US military and political meddling, still lies outside the umbrella of American benevolence, languishing in the Hobbesian gloom of that dark age that Mr. Ferguson's thesis suggests should not exist under the hegemony of the tutelary power. Nor does the history of US military intervention in Southeast Asia inspire much confidence in the thesis, designed as it was to bomb North Vietnam "back into the stone age", as one ferocious military planner put it -- an objective almost realised. American government efforts to roll back or preclude social revolution and the struggle against history in some of the darkest areas of the world seems to fly directly counter to Ferguson's (mis)representation of affairs.What bothers me about Ferguson's damn fool either/or treatment of the situation is that all-too-typical tendency of the modern mentality to aspire to grand abstractions of history in the famous "25 words or less". "We tend to assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum" and therefore "the struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal". That human beings might be something more than Newtonian forces of nature living on the brink of a Hobbesian condition of "the war of all against all" just never seems to cross their minds. They call this their "realism" and they are proud of their little realities. Mr. Ferguson relies on the precedents of history to support his contention that "a world with no hegemon at all.... could turn out to mean a new Dark Age of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic rapine in the world's no-go zones; of economic stagnation and a retreat by civilisation into a few fortified enclaves" (presumably something like "Fortress America" and the gated communities of entrenched mentality in North American suburbia, paranoiac survivalist refuges from the largely fantasised gathering Hobbesian gloom of the surrounding world and society). However, the precedents of history offer no guide to the unprecedented condition in which we find ourselves today, and therefore the past is no certain guide to the present or the future (thank God). We now live in an interconnected world. This is unprecedented. Our perceptions of reality are (at least in part) no longer guided by official gatekeepers and authorised guardians of conscience keeping watch at the portals of the mind, despite the considerable barrage of propaganda we are daily subjected to designed to counteract this emergent globalism of one world and one humanity (like the whole "clash of civilisations" creed). In some ways, it truly is a Global Village, even if from inside the walls of Fortress America it might look like the proverbial "jungle out there" (while to those of us on the outside of Fortress America peering in, it's beginning to look virtually medieval inside those walls). Human beings are not, after all, forces of nature -- or at least, not entirely so. They speak, and speech is super-natural. Speech is already effective power and the organisation of power, amongst other things. Into the "vacuum of power" may global dialogue flow! Human beings may have different interests, but they are also creatures with identical interests too, and those identical interests are what makes dialogue possible at all. It always strikes me as suspicious how the modern "mentality" simply overlooks human speech as if it just wasn't there. It seems to offend their "realism". Yet it is speech, and not power relations, that defines us as human beings. Where speech does not exist, in fact, only violence can restore order amongst human beings, and a truly Hobbesian state of nature would indeed prevail. Violence is a disease of speech. Mr. Ferguson's "power vacuum" is actually a "speech vacuum".But the real mendacity of Ferguson's either/or proposition is the way he overlooks the situation in the US itself. The notion that American imperialism might itself precipitate the Dark Age, which he presupposes is already lurking beyond the walls of Fortress America, never intrudes to stain the spotlessness of his cogitations. What he has described as the Hobbesian condition in the absence of a hegemon is really a condition of speechlessness -- the absence of dialogue. Yet, in the US today, the Bush Administration's emphasis on unilateralism, pre-emption, rejection of dialogue, contempt for dissenting views, the cooking of intelligence, resort to propaganda, dismissal of scientific evidence not in conformity with policy, subordination of the universities to political objectives, the Inquisitions of the Patriot Act, and intimidation of the press all conspire to produce the very conditions of darkness and speechlessness and atrophy of dialogue that Ferguson claims belong only to the Hobbesian darkness "outside"! Like Robert Kaplan, who warns of The Coming Anarchy and prescribes US imperialism, "warrior politics" and a return to the good old "pagan ethos" of the Roman emperor Tiberius, the proposed solution conspires to produce the very barbarism and Dark Age it is alleged to ameliorate. It's a self-devouring logic and a tautology. What lunacy! It's like the Dance of St. Vitus (and in that sense Ferguson is right. History can indeed be a guide to the present, at least in terms of the universal madness of groupthink).The cookie-cutter minds of the modern mentality seem to have no inkling and no self-consciousness at all of their self-devouring tautological mentations and ruminations. They all possess in common what I call a "mentality" -- the gated community of the contemporary mind. They have become an obsolete type. Neoliberal, neoconservative, and neosocialist are virtually indistinguishable. They look alike. They sound alike. Ferguson and Fukuyama, Messrs. Roberts Cooper, Kaplan, Kagan, and Michael Ignatieff, or Blair and Bush themselves, CONTINUES

hegemony link

CONTINUED

seem to have been cast from a single mould, oblivious to their own petty tyrannies and hypocrisies and duplicities and the deep nihilism they seem determined to pin and blame on others. I once thought this

duplicity, hypocrisy, and nihilism was the result of a deliberate propaganda of obfuscation. I have since come to see it as the pathological condition of the late modern "mentality" itself. The modern mentality has become self-devouring, and these men don't have the slightest consciousness of their condition.

Violent US leadership is wrong methodologically- making hegemony work better simply greases the wheels of future interventions. Its essential to challenge the neoconservative logic of their advantage to demilitarize American politics

James B Rule, PhD Harvard, MA Oxford, BA Brandeis, The Military State of America and the Democratic Left, Dissent Vol. 57 No 1, Winter 2010

The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country's repertoire - an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some wider conflict or to prevent ethnic cleansing or mass killings; indeed, its predictable effect was to promote these things. The purpose was to extirpate a regime that the United States had built up but that had morphed into an obstacle to this country - and to replace it with one that would represent a more compliant instrument of American purpose. In short, the war was a demonstration of American ability and willingness to remove and replace regimes anywhere in the world. Even in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, no one in high places has declared repetitions of such exploits "off the table" - to use the expression favored by this country's foreign policy elites. For those of us who opposed the war, there is obvious relief at the conclusion - we hope - of a conflict that has consistently brought out the worst in this country. But at the same time, those on the democratic Left look to the future with unease. Even under a reputedly liberal president, we have reason to worry about new versions of Iraq - in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or venues yet undisclosed. To its credit, Dissent has not joined the rush to avert attention from the endgames of the Iraq conflict. The Spring 2009 edition features a section of articles under the rubric "Leaving Iraq." The essays focus on the moral and political quandaries of America's departure from a country that it did a great deal to break, but where its ability to repair things is rapidly diminishing. But, a look at the proposals put forward there makes it clear that the thinking that gave us the American invasion of Iraq in the first place has not gone away. George Packer, for example, inveighs against those seeking a quick exit for American forces. The balance of power among Iraq's domestic forces could easily be upset, he holds, and valuable progress undone, without a longlingering presence of Americans as enforcers. Obviously playing to the sensitivities of Dissent readers, he concludes that "much as we might wish [the war] had never happened at all, America will have obligations as well as interests in Iraq for a long time to come." The sense of all this, from Packer's standpoint, becomes clear when you recall his efforts to discredit Americans' resistance to the war in the months before it began. The antiwar movement, he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in December, 2002, "has a serious liability . . . it's controlled by the furthest reaches of the American Left." He goes on, in this same article, to envisage a quite different role for those on the Left, like himself, who took what he considered a more enlightened view: The "liberal hawks could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans," he wrote; "they might even be able to explain the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism ..." Brendan O'Leary, another contributor to Dissent's Spring 2009 "Leaving Iraq" section, also stresses responsibility. He, too, means by this continued readiness to apply U.S. coercion to manage Iraqi domestic politics. To judge from his words, he has no difficulty in principle with the notion of remaking Iraq by outside military force: "Reasonable historians should judge ... that removing the genocidal Baathists was overdue," he avers. "The younger Bush made up for his father's mistake, though he did so for the wrong reasons." Still, O'Leary allows that the invasion hasn't quite unfolded as he might have wished: "... grotesque mismanagement of regime-replacement ... unnecessary and arrogant occupation ... incompetence of American direct rule... numerous errors of policy and imagination ... in the horrors and brutalities that have followed." The America occupiers have sometimes proved "blindly repressive," he allows - but sometimes, apparently, not repressive enough. Still, leaving before America sets things straight would be irresponsible. If the United States just keeps trying, it may yet get it all right. This country must now manage the political forces set in motion by its invasion according to O'Leary's exacting formula: defend the federalist constitution, keep resurgent Sunni and Shiite forces from each other's throats, and preserve the autonomy of the Kurds. Just the same, he notes, "After the United States exits, an Arab civil war may re-ignite, as well as Kurdish-Arab conflict." To some of us, an invasion that leaves such possibilities simmering after six years of American-sponsored death and destruction itself seems more than a little irresponsible. Some of the aims invoked by Packer and O'Leary are beyond reproach. Certainly the United States bears profound responsibilities to protect Iraqis at risk from their collaboration with or employment by American forces - and for that matter, to help repair damage to the country's infrastructure resulting from the invasion. And certainly this country should do everything possible to prevent regional, communal, and ethnic groupings from exploiting a U.S. pullout to oppress others. But making good on any of these estimable goals, as the authors seem to realize, will be a very big order - especially given America's record thus far. Yet the deeper, mostly unstated assumptions underlying these authors' proposals ought to strike a chill throughout the democratic Left. Their problems with the Iraq invasion - and implicitly, future American military exploits of the same kind - have to do with execution, not the larger vision of American power that inspired the enterprise. Their words strike an eerie resonance with those of Thomas L. Friedman, before the invasion occurred: he favored George W. Bush's "audacious" war plan as "a job worth doing," but only "if we can do it right." America's violent remaking of Iraq would have been entirely acceptable, it seems, if only Friedman's sensibilities could have guided it. More important: the continuing mission of the United States as maker and breaker of regimes around the world remained unquestioned. When any country gets seriously in the way of American power, the global responsibilities of this country are apt to require action like that taken in Iraq. We hear this kind of thinking in its most outof-the-closet form from neoconservatives - who gave us the Iraq invasion in the first place. But its roots in American history lie at least as far back as notions of Manifest Destiny. Its key inspiration is a particularly aggressive form of American exceptionalism. Some higher power - fate, Divine Providence, or special "moral clarity" - has created opportunities, indeed obligations, for America to set things straight on a global scale. Versions of this idea are pervasive among thinkers - American foreign policy elites, and those who would guide them - who would disclaim identification with the neocons. Often conveying the doctrine are code words referring to special "responsibilities" of the United States to guarantee world "stability." Or, as Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, stated, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. . ." To her credit, Albright's effusions in this direction stopped short of support for invading Iraq - something that cannot be said for the so-called liberal hawks. Accepting this view of America as the ultimate and rightful arbiter of global affairs - as master hegemon or world superpower, to use less upbeat terms - triggers the weightiest implications and consequences. Nearly all of them, I hold, run in collision course to the best aims and directions of the democratic Left. Yet even for thinkers who identify themselves as being on the Left, acceptance of a hyper-militarized America, and its concomitant role of global enforcer, often passes without question. For those of us who challenge this view, the invasion of Iraq was wrong for fundamental political and - indeed - moral reasons. Not because it was mismanaged. Not because too few troops were dispatched; not because the Iraqi Army was disbanded; not because the occupation was incompetent, corrupt, and often criminally negligent. It was wrong because wars of this kind are always wrong - aggressive, opportunistic wars of choice, aimed at revamping entire countries to fit the dictates of the invaders. These wars are wrong because of the destruction and distortions that they spread both abroad and at home. Among nations, they countervail against one of the subtle but hopeful tendencies in the world today - the movement away from sole reliance on brute state power to resolve international conflict and toward supranational authorities, multilateral decisi on -making, and establishment of powers above the level of states. At home, the effects are even more insidious. For in order to make itself the kind of country capable of "projecting power" anywhere in the world, as America has done so unsuccessfully in Iraq, it has had to impose vast demands and distortions upon its own domestic life.

hegemony link

Unilateral hegemony is a unique form of state sovereignty that perpetuates the myth of stability in the international system

Walker 2002 [RBJ, professor of political science at the University of Victoria, International/Inequality, International Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, International Relations and the New Inequality (Summer, 2002), pp. 7-24, jstor]

Sovereigns make the final discrimination. Yet while sovereigns may be supreme in this respect, they are neither alone nor universal. Sovereigns depend on the system of sovereigns that enable their particular sovereignty. Sovereignty may be the highest authority within a particular territory, but any particular authority depends on the even higher authority of the principle that the states system itself must survive in order to enable sovereigns to claim the highest authority. In this sense, the states system affirms a unity, even a univer- sality, first and a plurality, or anarchy, only second. The difficulty with this instantiation of modern discriminations between unity and diversity is that the pluralities that are enabled are inherently unstable. The modern states system is always susceptible to war, to the necessity of sovereigns declaring a state of emergency and an exception to all norms. It is also susceptible to processes through which the states system itself dissolves into something else: into empire, and the substitution of a vertical hierarchy for a horizontal field of spatially differentiated political communities. Most accounts of international relations have been preoccupied with the problem of war, and quite properly so. The other problem has remained largely in the background, largely because it has seemed reasonable to hope that the absence of empirical equality in a system of formally equal states would be a primary pillar of an interstate order rather than a fundamental threat to the balance between unity and diversity that sustains that order. In this context, the primary difficulty is to know how to judge between hegemony in a system of states, an inequality that implies unequal responsibil- ities, and a hegemony, or a unilateralism, or an empire of some kind that finally turns the constitutive principle of sovereign equality into little more than a token gesture. All of which is to say that the problem of inequality is already deeply inscribed in our modern accounts of the international, and thus of modern politics, even before any consideration of the dynamics associated with modern capitalism as a specific form of economic life that thrives on the production of inequality as a condition of its own dynamism.

Soft power link

Soft power is the velvet glove of hegemonys iron fist- masks implicit racism and violence

Kaplan, 2003 [Amy, Prof. of English @ Univ. of Pennslyvania, American Quarterly 56.1, Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today, p. muse]

Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the "reluctant imperialist." 10 In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be constitutionally unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the moral authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-interest merge in this narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the United States can save the people of the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an [End Page 4] uncivilized state. As Robert Kaplan writesnot reluctantly at allin "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "The purpose of power is not power itself; it is a fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society." 11 This narrative does imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the end of empire only when the world is remade in our image. This is also a narrative about race. The images of an unruly world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed modernity, recycle stereotypes of racial inferiority from earlier colonial discourses about races who are incapable of governing themselves, Kipling's "lesser breeds without the law," or Roosevelt's "loosening ties of civilized society," in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his much-noted article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "The American Empire," Michael Ignatieff appended the subtitle "The Burden" but insisted that "America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden." 12 Denial and exceptionalism are apparently alive and well. In American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the racism of empire and examine the dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are becoming racialized through the interplay of templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial Orientalism. These narratives of the origins of the current empirethat is, the neoconservative and the liberal interventionisthave much in common. They take American exceptionalism to new heights: its paradoxical claim to uniqueness and universality at the same time. They share a teleological narrative of inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the embodiment of universal values of human rights, liberalism, and democracy, the "indispensable nation," in Madeleine Albright's words. In this logic, the United States claims the authority to "make sovereign judgments on what is right and what is wrong" for everyone [End Page 5] else and "to exempt itself with an absolutely clear conscience from all the rules that it proclaims and applies to others." 13 Absolutely protective of its own sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the entire world a potential site of intervention. Universalism thus can be made manifest only through the threat and use of violence. If in these narratives imperial power is deemed the solution to a broken world, then they preempt any counternarratives that claim U.S. imperial actions, past and present, may have something to do with the world's problems. According to this logic, resistance to empire can never be opposition to the imposition of foreign rule; rather, resistance means irrational opposition to modernity and universal human values. Although these narratives of empire seem ahistorical at best, they are buttressed not only by nostalgia for the British Empire but also by an effort to rewrite the history of U.S. imperialism by appropriating a progressive historiography that has exposed empire as a dynamic engine of American history. As part of the "coming-out" narrative, the message is: "Hey what's the big deal. We've always been interventionist and imperialist since the Barbary Coast and Jefferson's 'empire for liberty.' Let's just be ourselves." A shocking example can be found in the reevaluation of the brutal U.S. war against the Philippines in its struggle for independence a century ago. This is a chapter of history long ignored or at best seen as a shameful aberration, one that American studies scholars here and in the Philippines have worked hard to expose, which gained special resonance during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Yet proponents of empire from different political perspectives are now pointing to the Philippine-American War as a model for the twenty-first century. As Max Boot concludes in Savage Wars of Peace, "The Philippine War stands as a monument to the U.S. armed forces' ability to fight and win a major counterinsurgency campaignone that was bigger and uglier than any that America is likely to confront in the future." 14 Historians of the United States have much work to do here, not only in disinterring the buried history of imperialism but also in debating its meaning and its lessons for the present, and in showing how U.S. interventions have worked from the perspective of comparative imperialisms, in relation to other historical changes and movements across the globe. The struggle over history also entails a struggle over language and culture. It is not enough to expose the lies when Bush hijacks words [End Page 6] such as freedom, democracy, and liberty. It's imperative that we draw on our knowledge of the powerful alternative meanings of these key words from both national and transnational sources. Today's reluctant imperialists are making arguments about "soft power," the global circulation of American culture to promote its universal values. As Ignatieff writes, "America fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires." 15 The work of scholars in popular culture is more important than ever to show that the Americanization of global culture is not a one-way street, but a process of transnational exchange, conflict, and transformation, which creates new cultural forms that express dreams and desires not dictated by empire. In this fantasy of global desire for all things American, those whose dreams are different are often labeled terrorists who must hate our way of life and thus hate humanity itself. As one of the authors of the Patriot Act wrote, "when you adopt a way of terror you've excused yourself from the community of human beings." 16 Although I would not minimize the violence caused by specific terrorist acts, I do want to point out the violence of these definitions of who belongs to humanity. Often in our juridical system under the Patriot Act, the accusation of terrorism alone, without due process and proof, is enough to exclude persons from the category of humanity. As scholars of American studies, we should bring to the present crisis our knowledge from juridical, literary, and visual representations about the way such exclusions from personhood and humanity have been made throughout history, from the treatment of Indians and slaves to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

governmentality link

The 1ac is an example of governmentality its the intersection between the desire to control populations and the desire to maintain a global order. This manifests itself in a never-ending cycle of responses to emergencies that are doomed to fail

Dillon and Reid 2000 [Michael, Professor of Political Science at Lancaster and internationally renowned author, and Julian, lecturer on international relations and professor of political Science at Kings College in London; from Alternatives, Volume 25, Issue 1: Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency]

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 becominga 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.

International norms/Rulemaking link

Setting international norms is a hegemonic practice seeks to order international spaceTuathail 96 Associate Professor of Geography at VT and Professor of Government and International Affairs (Gearoid O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics p.1-2)

Our final thesis placed the study of geopolitical reasoning within the context of the study of hegemony in a nonstatist, Gramscian-inspired sense. A hegemonic power like the United States is by definition a "rule writer" for the world community. Those occupying positions of power within the United States "become the deans of world politics, the administrators, regulators and geographers of international affairs. Their power is a power to constitute the terms of geopolitical world order, an ordering of international space which defines the central drama in international politics in particularistic ways" (195). What is important here is the activity of rule making and rule following rather than state dominance, for hegemony IS more than the primus inter pares power of a state. One can have a condition of hegemony without a hegemonic state, although, in the period from 1945 to 1985, the rules governing world order were overwhelmingly shaped by the institutional power and disciplinary power/knowledge apparatuses headquartered in the United States.

Terrorism discourse link

Using terrorist labels discursively shifts the perceived meaning of a particular actor and shapes other actors responses

Mutimer 2000 [David, associate professor of political science at York University and Deputy Director of the Center for International and Security Studies, The Weapons State, pg 21-22]

It is not difficult to imagine a similar set of descriptors of direct relevance to international relations: I have invited a Nobel 'prize winner to the discussion. I have invited a prime minister to the discussion. I have invited a noted freedom fighter to the discussion. I have invited a former terrorist to the discussion. Imagining Security 21 These four descriptors could all be applied to a single individual, and indeed they have been applied to at least one individual. Just as each of the epithets Lakoff and Johnson apply to their hypothetical dinner guest highlights and downplays or hides various parts of the person in question, so do those of my discussant. The description, given to another member of the group, forms a key part of the image of her fellow di~cussant. Indeed, having no other image on the basis of which to frame behavior toward this person, she will base her actions on the image created by that description. The first epithet downplays the high political office of the individual in question and hides her former terrorist activity. Similarly, the epithet terrorist downplays or hides the person's prime ministerial role, as well as her status as a Nobel laureate. Not only will the image of the other discussant be altered in relation to each descriptor, but so will that person's conversational strategies and interests. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine that someone who would happily sit at a table with a person described as a Nobel Prize winner might refuse the invitation to sit with a former terrorist. There is a fairly serious concern with Lakoff and Johnson's formulatiou of the role of metaphor in our understauding. They speak of "grounding" our conceptual system in terms of simple elements of our everyday lives that we can experience directly, without social mediation. Thus, for example, spatial metaphors of "up" and "down," "in" and "out" are based on our experiences of the world-we have an inside and an outside, we stand erect, we sleep lying down and rise when we awaken.2' Lakoff and Johnson have been criticized for betraying a biological bias, and although they clearly want to ground metaphors in part on our unmediated physiological experience of the world, they also allow for social rather than biological grounding: "In other words, these 'natural' kinds of experience are products of human nature. Some may be universal, while others will vary from culture to culture."29 Nevertheless, the very idea of grounding tends to assume a hierarchy of knowledge and the possibility of preconstituted experience that is not socially mediated. We do not need to accept this possibility of presocial knowledge, however, to make use of their iusights into metaphor.No risk of a turn: using the terrorist label constructs an image not based on the real but its redeployments are unstable and can still be used to demonize certain actors and populations- only refusing securitizing discourse avoids this

Mutimer 2000 [David, associate professor of political science at York University and Deputy Director of the Center for International and Security Studies, The Weapons State, pg 22-23]

Consider again the earlier example I derived from Lakoff and Johnson: the individual described as a Nobel Prize winner, a prime minister, a freedom fighter, or a terrorist. We might expect that this example means there is a person who is each of these things, that her characteristics are prediscursive. Even if we reject the possibility of the prediscursive, however, in other words, if we accept that nothing exists outside discourse, we can retain all that is important in this argument. Each epithet relates to a particular discourse or set of discourses and can be seen as an indicator of a discursively constituted identity. This is most obvious in the relation between terrorist and freedom fighter. These labels are identity markers constituted in particular discourses rather than in any particular features of the individual in question or her activities. In other words, we can think of the distinctions among highlighting, downplaying, and hiding in terms of the evocation of particular discursive representations. To use the epithet terrorist is to evoke one discourse with a certain set of entailments that go along with it, whereas using the epithet freedom fighter evokes a different discourse and a different set of entailments. Generally, the use of freedom fighter downplays the role of the individual in perpetrating acts of violence, a role highlighted by the entailments of terrorist. This is not always the case, however. The use of freedom fighter by the Reagan administration in the 1980s meant that in certain circles the term has come to be a pejorative and not only entails the role of the individual so named in perpetrating acts of violence but marks those acts as violence in the cause of a reactionary politics. This difference in the entailments of the same label in different circumstances is important, because it demonstrates that not only does metaphor link discourses but that the production of those links depends on the discursive context in which the metaphor is evoked. Metaphors are not grounded in a real or literal experience; further, even the "discursive connections they create are never entirely stable.

Terrorism discourse link

Rethinking the epistemological and ideological foundations of how we understand terrorism is necessary to understand the roots of violence. The affirmatives call for a hard approach merely obscures the conditions that cause retaliatory violence to begin with

Der Derian Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he completed a M.Phil. and D.Phil. in international relations (James Der Derian, Critical practices in international theory: selected essays p. 69-70 RC)It is more difficult - and certainly less popular - to assess the intellectual and structural obstacles blocking an inquiry into terrorism. The first obstacle is epistemological: even the most conscientious and independent student of terrorism faces a narrowly bounded discipline of thought. During the 1980s, terrorist studies became a fortress-haven at the edge of the social sciences, a positivist's armory of definitions, typologies, and databases to be wielded as much against the methodological critic as the actual terrorist who might call into question the sovereign reason and borders of the nation-state. The second obstacle is ideological: to gain official entry into the terrorist debate one must check critical weapons at the door, and join in the chorus of condemnation- or risk suspicion of having sympathy for the terrorist devil. What this means is that following a rash of terrorist incidents - at the moments of highest tension when sober thinking is most needed - responses other than instant excoriation and threats of retaliation are seen as "soft," or worse, collaborationist. As others have noted, this is very reminiscent of the regimentation of critical thinking by threat-mongering that marked Cold War I in the 1940s and 1950s and the mo