Neg Biopower K

1

1NC ShellThe aff’s attempt to restrain a small element of the surveillance state normalizes its existence as a whole and causes the corporate surveillance to fill in --- that results in a depoliticized populace that embraces the panoptic gaze of authoritarianism Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

In his videotaped Christmas message, Snowden references Orwell's warning of "the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us,"2 allowing the state to regulate subjects within the most intimate spaces of private life. But these older modes of surveillance, Snowden elaborates, however, are nothing compared to

what is used to infringe on our personal privacy today. For Snowden, the threat posed by the new surveillance state can be measured by its reach and

use of technologies that far outdate anything Orwell envisioned and pose a much greater threat to the privacy rights of citizens and the reach of sovereign powers. He reiterates this point by reminding his viewers that "a child born today will grow up with no conception of

privacy at all - they will never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."3 Snowden is right about the danger to privacy rights but his analysis fails to go far enough in linking together the question of surveillance with the rise of "networked societies," global flows of power and the emergence of the totalitarian state.4 The democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition. Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically in an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange and circulation. So, too, and in the current period of historical amnesia, privacy has been redefined through the material and ideological registers of a neoliberal order in which the right to privacy has succumbed to the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism's unending necessity to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5 In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of

the recognition of the frailty of human life. In a world in which the worst excesses of capitalism are unchecked, privacy is nurtured in a zone of historical

amnesia, indifferent to its transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices."6 Consequently, culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven ethic "makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals" and furthers the collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state.7 Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life. In fact, it is more appropriate to analyze

the culture of surveillance, rather than address exclusively the violations committed by the corporate-surveillance state. In this instance, the surveillance and security state is one that not only listens, watches and gathers massive amounts of information through data

mining necessary for identifying consumer populations but also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of

surveillance technologies and privatized commodified values into all aspects of their lives. Personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based websites and gathered daily as people move from one targeted web site to the next across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,” all the while endlessly

shopping online and texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets, commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like. Yet the most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of

information but also in a culture that normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and enticements for consumers who use the new digital technologies and social networks to simulate false notions of community and to socialize young people into a culture of security and commodification in which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private

addictions, self-help and commodification. Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion . Authoritarianism in its contemporary manifestations, as evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead has become omniscient in a culture of control in which the most cherished notions of agency collapse into unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for the spying state. The self has become not simply the subject of surveillance but a willing participant and object. Operating off the assumption that some individuals

will not willingly turn their private lives over to the spying state and corporations, the NSA and other intelligence agencies work hard to create a turnkey authoritarian state in which the "electronic self" becomes public property. Every space is now enclosed within the purview of an authoritarian society that attempts to govern the entirety of social life. As Jonathan Schell points out: Thanks to

Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer

companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these data is that a mere

generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it

2

for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.8 Social cynicism and societal indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed hallucinatory hopes.9

Surveillance and its accompanying culture of fear now produce subjects that revel in being watched, turning the practice if not the threat posed by surveillance into just another condition for performing the self. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube,

Facebook or some other social network. Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless public display of the self. Zygmunt

Bauman echoes this sentiment in arguing that: These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to share.10

That biopolitical thought the aff uses leads to mass destruction and inevitable extinction.Kouros 97 (George, Yale Law Graduate, Holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory. “Become What You Are”/)

Although the consequences are grave, the administrative practices of biopower go largely unchallenged precisely because they

promise the opportunity of vastly improving the quality of life. But a system primarily concerned with technological exigencies of

ensuring survival paradoxically is no longer able to assign meaning to the value of life. Life is something to be secured at all costs, and by any means, as the American military motto of "you have to kill to save" during the Vietnam War demonstrates. For Foucault,

this technological imperative to secure survival is what brings us closest to the possibility of our own extinction: [T]his formidable power of death ... now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it

to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars ... are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life

and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And

through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's existence . . . If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it

is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race. (HS 137) In the interest of optimizing life we find ourselves possessing the capabilities to wipe out all of humanity as we know it. Heidegger, much like Foucault, understands "the atomic situation" as the product of a technological process that seeks to create "a happier human life."8 But he also emphasizes that "precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved" that we face the greatest danger (DT 52). Responding to a chemist's proclamation that "The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will," Heidegger writes: "We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little" (DT 52). In other words, in the absence of a nuclear holocaust we assume that we have managed to keep technology in hand. Without the sound of an explosion to alert us, we become complacent to the deadliness of our own technological achievements. For example, the chemist's ability to manipulate DNA and genetically screen out undesirable traits, while promising the possibility of a "happier human being," maintains the conditions for a eugenic nightmare.

3

The alt is a complete rejection of the plan. Without actively acknowledging biopolitical control, the aff’s plan is meaningless. Only through a clear rejection of biopower while crafting policy can we avoid re-entrenching the systems of control the affirmative team creates.Richardson, 01 – professor of urban theory at Aalborg University in Denmark (Tim, “The Pendulum Swings Again: In Search of New Transport Rationalities,” The Town Planning Review, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 299-319, July 2001, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40112456)//

Foucauldian discourse: interrogating rationality; embracing power and knowledge To review Foucault's work and to discuss its broader relevance to policy studies is beyond the scope of this paper.2 Here I will simply outline how Foucault's critical inquiries into discourse, power, rationality and space provide a potentially powerful conceptual approach to the analysis of transport policy. Traditionally, the theoretical domain of transportation so far as it can be said to exist has been largely dominated by the use of economic, technical and behavioural analysis, with relatively sparse attention to the broader canvas of politics and power relations upon which decisions and policies are made. There have been few attempts, in transport thought, to close the gap between the technocentrism of operational theory and the socio-political realities of everyday life. Yet this tension between the calm spaces of rational, scientific policy making, and the messy, turbulent world of politics and

power has pervaded broader debates in public policy. Since Lindblom, in the 1950s, defined political rationality (Lindblom, 1959), theorists have sought alternatively to avoid, mitigate, or accept the problematisation of policy with power. The modernist tendency, seen in the domain of transport, has been to sidestep the problem, maintaining a claim to value-free objectivity, and constantly refining scientific and economic instruments to shape and deliver policy. The neo-liberal assertion of the critical role of market forces in shaping policy (Healey, 1997), and the resurgence of technical and scientific analysis typified by the development of new approaches to environmental planning (Wong, 1998) represent the two prongs of this instrumental rationality. An emerging body of theory which attempts to break free from instrumentalism instead posits policy making as argumentation, and focuses on communicative rationality (Fischer and Forester, 1993; Innes, 1995; Healey, 1997). In the communicative approach knowledge is negotiated in policy making, and

ways of thinking, valuing and acting are 'actively constructed by participants' (Healey, 1997, 29). Power is acknowledged, but regarded as a negative, distorting influence whose effects can be removed by constructing an idealised debate, where all participants

have equal status, and where it is the rationality of argumentation that prevails.3 Instead of sidestepping or seeking to remove the traces of power from

policy making, the Foucauldian approach recognises the all-pervasive nature of power, emphasising its productive as well as

destructive potential.4 Here, theory engages squarely with policy constructed in a field of power struggles between different interests, where knowledge and truth are contested, and the rationality of policy making itself is exposed as a focus of conflict. This is what Flyvbjerg has called 'realrationalitat', or 'real-life'

rationality (Flyvbjerg, 1996), where the focus shifts from what should be done to what is actually done. This analysis

embraces the idea that 'rationality is penetrated by power', and the dynamic between the two is critical in understanding what policy is about. It therefore 'becomes meaningless, or misleading - for politicians, administrators and researchers alike - to operate with a concept of rationality in which power is absent' (Flyvbjerg, 1998, 164-65).

4

Links

5

GeneralNSA’s perpetuated domestic surveillance bolsters biopowerBeauchamp 13, Editor of TP Ideas and a reporter for ThinkProgress.org, Zack holds B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from

Brown University and an M.Sc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, “Why The NSA’s Secret Online Surveillance Should Scare You,” http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/07/2120141/why-the-nsas-secret-online-surveillance-should-scare-you/

The reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA)’s secret online spying program, PRISM, has been polarized between seething outrage and some variant on “what did you expect?” Some have gone

so far as to say this program helps open the door to fascism, while others have downplayed it as in line with the way that we already let corporations get ahold of our personal data. That second reaction illustrates precisely why this program is so troubling. The more we accept perpetual government and corporate surveillance as the norm, the more we change our actions and behavior to fit that expectation — subtly but inexorably

corrupting the liberal ideal that each person should be free to live life as they choose without fear of anyone else interfering with it.Put differently, George Orwell isn’t who you should be reading to understand the dangers inherent to

the NSA’s dragnet. You’d be better off turning to famous French social theorist Michel Foucault. The basic concern with the PRISM program is that it is undoubtedly collecting information on significant numbers of Americans, in secret, who may not have any real connection to the case the Agency is pursuing. PRISM sifts through tech giants’

databases to cull information about suspected national security threats. However, since it uses a 51 percent confidence threshold for

determining whether a target is foreign, and likely extends to individuals that are “two degrees of separation” from the original target, the chances are extraordinarily high that this program is spying on a significant number of Americans. A citizenry that’s constantly on guard for secret, unaccountable surveillance is one that’s constantly being remade along the lines the state would prefer. Foucault illustrated this point by reference to a hypothetical prison called the Panopticon. Designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon is a prison where all cells can be seen from a central tower shielded such that the guards can see out but the prisoners can’t see in. The prisoners in the Panopticon could thus never know whether they were being surveilled, meaning that they have to, if they want to avoid running the risk of severe punishment, assume that they were being watched at all times. Thus, the Panopticon functioned as an effective tool of social control even when it wasn’t being staffed by a single guard. In his famous Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that we live in a world where the state exercises power in the same fashion as the Panopticon’s guards. Foucault called it “disciplinary power;” the basic idea is that the omnipresent fear of being watched by the state or judged according to prevailing social norms caused people to adjust the way they acted and even thought without ever actually punished. People had become “self-regulating” agents, people who “voluntarily” changed who they were to fit social and political expectations without any need for actual coercion. Online privacy advocates have long worried that government surveillance programs could end up disciplining internet users in precisely this fashion. In 1997, the FBI began using something called Project Carnivore, an online surveillance data tool designed to mimic traditional wiretaps, but for email. However, because online information is not like a phone number in several basic senses, Carnivore ended up capturing far more information than it was intended to. It also had virtually no oversight outside of the FBI. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Congress in 2000, “Systems like Carnivore have the potential to turn into mass surveillance systems that will harm our free and open society…Once individuals realize that they have a lowered expectation of privacy on the Net, they may not visit particular web sites that they may otherwise have visited.” Writing in 2004, a group of scholars drew a straight line from this analysis to Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power. “Resembling the ever-present powers of the central watchtower in a prison modeled after the Panopticon,” they wrote “the very fact that the FBI has the potential to monitor communications on a website may lead Internet users to

believe that they are constantly being watched.” We know now that this hypothetical fear about Carnivore has become a reality, courtesy of the NSA. The more people come to see mass online surveillance as a norm, rather than something used only on specific subjects of investigation, the more they’ll tailor their online habits to it. Since people understandably don’t want the government looking at their private information, that’ll mean the internet will over time slowly become less of a place for vibrant self-expression. That should trouble anyone who believes that the best society is one in which people are most free to be themselves in whatever way they find most meaningful. In essence, that should trouble anyone committed to the basic liberal project. Foucault’s point wasn’t that disciplinary power was intrinsically bad; the idea that, for example, pedophiles might be deterred from accessing

child pornography for fear of state surveillance of child porn sites shouldn’t bother anyone. Rather, Foucault warned, disciplinary power was dangerous — used in certain fashions, it could be subtly corrosive of exactly the sorts of freedoms of expression and self-identity that liberal democracies purportedly protected absolutely. The NSA program, especially as its breadth becomes clear, is exactly the sort of overreach his work should warn us against.

6

PrismCorporate data surveillance and government collusion fills in for PRISM -- that turns the aff and widens the panoptic gaze of the surveillance stateSullivan 13 [John L., Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, “Uncovering the data

panopticon: The urgent need for critical scholarship in an era of corporate and government surveillance,” Political Economy of Communication Vol 1, No 2 (2013), http://polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/23/192]

Big data and the panoptic sort In Philip K. Dick’s 1956 science fiction short story, The Minority Report, crime in a futuristic United States has been all but extinguished because the police have discovered the ability to predict future events. In this peaceful dystopia, suspects are arrested and charged before their crimes are even committed. While real-world law enforcement agencies cannot (yet) predict future events, the recent revelations about the scope and nature of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) domestic digital spying program suggest they have developed

some formidable tools to locate would-be terrorists. Privacy advocates were outraged by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s

revelation that the NSA , in cooperation with technology companies, routinely stored, processed and analyzed millions of private emails, video chats, online phone calls, and internet file transfers under the auspices of a program called PRISM. Recent news reports based upon Snowden’s documents have revealed that even encrypted emails, documents, and online banking transactions are being regularly accessed by the NSA (Larson and Shane, 2013). While these revelations about domestic digital wiretapping without court orders have caused a stir in the American and global press, the privacy dangers associated with this type of data surveillance are not new to the scholarly community. Exactly 20 years ago, communication scholar Oscar H Gandy Jr (1993) meticulously outlined the growing threat to individual privacy posed by the cooperation between corporate and government data gathering in a book called The Panoptic Sort. At a time when the internet was in its infancy, when desktop computer processing was a fraction of what it is today, and five years before the founding of Google, Gandy warned that organizations like Equifax, TRW, and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) were amassing huge repositories of consumer data that were gathered passively whenever individuals made purchases via credit cards. When these data are combined with sophisticated matching algorithms and sorted against huge government databases like the census, he argued, they enabled precise tracking of individuals’ behaviors, political views, and other sensitive private information. The precision of such discrimination transforms the routine sorting of personal

data into a powerful form of institutional power. Building upon Foucault’s (1995) seminal analysis of disciplinary systems in society, Gandy

argued that the scale of the data collection and analysis performed by government and corporate institutions created a panopticon wherein citizen actions would eventually become circumscribed within an ever-widening net of personal data surveillance. The end result, he observed, is “an antidemocratic system of control that

cannot be transformed because it can serve no purpose other than that for which it was designed—the rationalization and control of human existence”(Gandy, 1993: 227). We’ve come a long way since 1993. Who could have imagined services like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr that not only encourage, but actively incentivize the voluntary dissemination of personal information online? Over the past 20 years, the centrality of the internet to the global communications infrastructure has made it a target for the type of panoptic sorting that Gandy

described. Now that the world knows about PRISM, it is tempting to imagine that enhanced public scrutiny will effectively limit these programs. I don’t think that is likely. In fact, there are four specific trends that foretell a greater expansion of the data panopticon: convergence and the central place of software in social, commercial and political systems; the growing importance of metadata for routing, storage and sorting of information; the global business of data storage and retrieval; the blurring of lines between corporate and government data mining. The convergence of digital technologies and the importance of software In the previous era of analog technologies, such as wired telephones and reel-to-reel tapes, each specific technology had a limited range of capabilities alongside a specific set of legal standards to accompany their use. The Wiretap Act of 1968, for example, prohibits law enforcement from wiretapping telephones without a court order because doing so would violate the 4th Amendment protections of both the suspect and anyone that

communicates with them. Today, there are few discrete technologies anymore. Thanks to technological convergence, almost all forms of communication today utilize some form of digital communication, and many do this via the Internet. Software has now replaced specific forms of communication hardware as the nexus for new types of digital communication, from Skype and FaceTime to emails and tweets. Creating legal precedents for protecting individual privacy throughout this myriad of new options has been difficult. Indeed, new options are emerging all the time, and software is extremely fungible in functionality as it adapts quickly to new situations

and uses. We lack a coherent legal regime to counteract the interception of these communications. For example, Skype phone calls can be protected under the existing federal wiretap laws, but emails and text messages cannot. The rise of metadata The expansion of online communications has generated an explosion of metadata. Metadata are the transaction records that are generated whenever you send an email or text message. It identifies the location from which the message was sent, when it was sent, the subject of the message, the recipient(s) of the message, the web address of the recipient(s), and more. The Obama Administration has argued that its domestic intelligence program complied with the law because it simply scanned the metadata of email transactions to search for anomalies rather than accessing the content of those emails. As a recent article in The Economist (2013) pointed out, however, while the usefulness of metadata in an analog era was limited (hence the lower evidentiary standards required in courts to obtain that information), today, thanks to the internet, “metadata can now provide a detailed portrait of who people know, where they go, and their daily routines.” (para. 8) Therefore, the argument

7

that random metadata searches do not violate users’ privacy becomes difficult to sustain. The business of data storage and retrieval The cost of storing digital data has fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, making the retention of vast quantities of individual data routine and cheap . This incentivizes the retention of digital information in ‘ the cloud ’ for longer periods of time . This creates a valuable resource for commercial data miners and law enforcement officials alike. As Wired Magazine (Copeland, 2013) outlined in its 20th anniversary edition, in 1993 a gigabyte of computer hard drive space cost almost $1,900.00; today the same amount of digital storage space is worth four cents. This dramatic drop in the cost of storage naturally encourages the retention of digital information by companies and the government. This raises important privacy concerns. Mobile telephone providers, such as Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, regularly store customer metadata (the records of all their telephone communications, including location information) for 18–24 months depending on the carrier. Companies like Google and Dropbox offer generous amounts of online data storage (‘cloud computing’) to users in exchange for the ability to target those consumers with advertising and marketing messages. Companies like Facebook and Twitter profit handsomely by mining their massive storehouses of user data for the purposes of target marketing to specific users.

The blurred line between corporate and government data mining Lastly, the Snowden leaks have revealed th at the wall between corporate and government data mining is paper thin. Since the revelations about the NSA became public, technology companies like Apple and Google have publicized the fact that they have received thousands of NSA requests for individual user data over the past 12 months. While some companies have resisted handing over user data without a specific warrant from the government, other technology companies have complied without challenge, worried about the implication of refusing the federal government. Additionally, as a headline article in The New York Times (Sengupta, 2013)outlined, the NSA and FBI have, increasingly, routinely analyzed huge databases of online communications. They have signed lucrative contracts with Silicon Valley technology companies to perform these analyses. The New York Times also uncovered the existence of a revolving door between technology companies and the government. For example, former Facebook Chief Security Officer Max Kelly was hired by the NSA in 2010 (Risen and Wingfield, 2013). Such arrangements create a clear conflict of interest for the companies to whom we have entrusted our data. For the first time, these companies may have both a legal and financial interest in handing over sensitive personal information to government agencies. Of all of the recent revelations about the mining of individual data, this one is perhaps the most troubling. What’s the harm? Given these threats to individual privacy online, what’s the harm if programs like PRISM have been effective in thwarting potential terrorist attacks? Snowden answered this question himself in his infamous interview with The Guardian

newspaper (Greenwald, 2013) by saying: Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s

getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. (7:14–7:33) Snowden is alluding here to the problem of ‘collateral damage’ arising from the search of online personal data. Innocent citizens may be caught up in data searches that are meant to locate illegal activities. This problem was most recently demonstrated in 2012 when a warrant to search the email account of Paula Broadwell for a harassment charge unwittingly uncovered an extramarital affair between her and David Petraeus, the then CIA Director and former General. These targeted searches also reverse the burden of proof. Once someone is targeted for government scrutiny because of an email they may have sent, it becomes difficult for them to

clear their name. Additionally, we may have started down a path that will be difficult to alter. Once companies and

governments begin collecting and storing citizens’ private data, those institutions will continue to imagine new uses for such data, if only to justify the expense of gathering and storing it. History and human nature tell us that the storage and sorting of online personal data will increasingly become the solution to problems we haven’t even yet encountered, alongside existing problems (tracking terrorists, criminals, tax evaders, copyright violators, etc.) The public and the role of critical scholarship Given that we still live in a liberal democracy, what is the public’s role in this process? Shouldn’t citizens help to shape a proper balance between privacy and security? In The Panoptic Sort, Gandy traced the social origins of privacy and considered the available cognitive strategies for a public trying to grapple with this amorphous concept within a changing techno-cultural environment. In focus group interviews, Gandy explored the types of information consumers had about the technologies that could be used to observe and profile them. Respondents were asked whether they thought these practices were legitimate, and whether they had reflected upon the sharing of private information among interested parties (including sharing between private corporations and government agencies). These 1992 focus group participants were quite sophisticated in their responses, observing that the gathering of personal information may be justified or even beneficial in some cases, but that no information “should ever be used to restrict or limit one’s pursuits, happiness, or joy of life” (Gandy, 1993: 135). Gandy also cited nationwide polling conducted in 1990 by Equifax, which found that 46 percent of respondents were “very concerned” about “threats to... their personal privacy” (Gandy, 1993: 140). Today, in a post-September 11 society, the surreptitious gathering of personal information has reached new heights, yet public opinion on the appropriate boundaries of private information retrieval has shifted markedly. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 56 percent of Americans approve of the NSA’s tracking of phone records as an acceptable method of combatting terrorism (Pew Research Center, 2013). In that same poll, respondents were almost equally divided about the NSA’s policy of scanning all emails to prevent terrorism; 52 percent disapproved while 45 percent approved. We see a somewhat disturbing trend here. While the tools available to gather, store and process personal information have dramatically expanded in the past 20 years, the public’s privacy concerns seem to have abated, albeit only slightly. Increased terrorism fears are no doubt one of the prime catalysts for this, but we should not discount the prospect that popularization of email, search engines like Google and social media have lessened our inhibitions regarding the sharing and monitoring of personal information. As Mark Andrejevic (2005, 2007, 2009) has noted in his impressive corpus of research, citizens are not only being continually monitored by corporations and law enforcement, they are essentially

monitoring each other. This is what he calls ‘lateral surveillance’. At a time when we are encouraged to continually monitor our friends, relatives, neighbors and acquaintances via social networking , the legitimate boundaries surrounding our private information have been blurred . As Snowden’s startling NSA revelations demonstrate, shifts in the nature of digital privacy require a vigorous response from critical scholars. Following Gandy’s 1993 book, there needs to be more research on the political

8

economy of personal data gathering, storage and analysis. Rather than accept these new technological systems as a starting point for analysis , we should question the philosophical and institutional foundations of the modern surveillance state. As Gandy noted in his conclusion, we should not jump on the metaphorical train to the future without first

addressing its path and destination. He wrote: It is the work of critical scholarship to raise doubts in the minds of the other passengers, to give voice to their unspoken concerns about the competence of the engineers, to validate their mistrust of the digitized voices that announce the next station or the final destination. It is the work of critical

scholarship to speak to the engineers, to wonder aloud with them about whether the tracks will carry a train this long, this fast, that far. (Gandy, 1993: 230)

The aff is structurally incapable of solving trust – its only result is to prop up the surveillance state Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a

Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

The corporate-surveillance state collects troves of data, but the groups often targeted by traditional and new

forms of digital surveillance are more often than not those who fall within the parameters of either being a threat to authority, reject the consumer culture or are simply considered disposable under the regime of neoliberal capitalism. The political, class and racial nature of suppression has a long history in the United States and cannot be ignored by whitewashing the issue of surveillance as a form of state violence by making an appeal to the necessity of safety and security. Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it

now inhabits the highest levels of government.61 There is no excuse for intellectuals or any other member of the American public to address the existence, meaning and purpose of the surveillance-security state without placing it in the historical structure of the times. Or what might be called a historical conjuncture in which the

legacy of totalitarianism is once again reasserting itself in new forms. Historical memory is about more than recovering the past; it is also about imputing history with a sense of responsibility, treating it with respect rather than with reverence. Historical memory should always be insurgent, rubbing "taken-for-granted history against the grain so as to revitalize and rearticulate

what one sees as desirable and necessary for an open, just and life sustaining" democracy and future.62 Historical memory is a crucial battleground for challenging a corporate-surveillance state that is motivated by the anti-democratic legal, economic and political interests. But if memory is to function as a witness to injustice and the practice of

criticism and renewal, it must embrace the pedagogical task of connecting the historical, personal and social . It is worth repeating that C.W. Mills was right in arguing that those without power need to connect personal troubles with public issues and that is as much an educational endeavour and responsibility as it is a political and cultural task.63Obama's recent speech on reforms to the NSA serves as a text that demands not just close

reading but also becomes a model illustrating how history can be manipulated to legitimate the worst violations

of privacy and civil rights, if not state- and corporate-based forms of violence.64 For Obama, the image of Paul Revere or the Sons of Liberty is referenced to highlight the noble ideals of surveillance in the interest of freedom and mostly provide a historical rationale for the emergence of the massive spying behemoths such as the NSA that now threaten the fabric of US democracy and massive data on everyone, not just terrorists. Of course, what Obama leaves out is that Paul Revere and his accomplices acted "to curtail government power as the main threat to freedom."65 Obama provides a sanitized reference to history in order to bleach the surveillance state of its criminal past and convince the American public that, as Michael Ratner states, "Orwellian surveillance is somehow patriotic."66 Obama's surveillance state does just the opposite, and the politicians such as Rep. Mike Ford and Feinstein are more than willing to label legitimate whistle-blowers - including, most famously, Snowden, Manning and Hammond - as traitors while keeping silent when high-ranking government officials, particularly James

Clapper Jr., the director of national security, lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee. Obama's appeal to the American people to trust those in the highest positions of government and corporate dominance regarding the use of the mammoth power of the surveillance state makes a mockery out of the legitimate uses of such power , any vestige of critical thought and historical memory. The U nited States has been lying to its people for more than 50 years, and such lies extend from falsifying the reasons for going to war with Vietnam and Iraq to selling arms to Iran in order to fund the

reactionary Nicaraguan Contras. Why should anyone trust a government that has condoned torture, spied on at

least 35 world leaders,67 supports indefinite detention , places bugs in thousands of computers all over the

9

world, kills innocent people with drone attacks , promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily authorizes targeted assassinations?68 Or, for that matter, a president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get government employees to spy on each other and "turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches,"69 which includes "any unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials."70

10

Catastrophe Images The aff’s descriptions of catastrophe constitute a depolicitizing spectacle that creates widespread political apathy and the conditions for self-enforced surveillance Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a

Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

As Heidi Boghosian argues, the omniscient state "in George Orwell's 1984 … is represented by a two-way television set installed in each home. In our own modern adaptation, it is symbolized by the location-tracking cell phones we willingly carry in our pockets and the microchip-embedded clothes we wear on our bodies."35 While such devices can be used for useful applications, they become dangerous in a society in which corporations and government have increased power and access over every aspect of the lives of the American public. Put simply, "the

ubiquity of such devices threatens a robust democracy."36 What is particularly dangerous, as Boghosian documents in great detail, is that: as government agencies shift from investigating criminal activity to preempting it, they have forged close relationships with corporations honing surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques for use against Americans. By claiming that anyone who questions authority or engages in undesired political

speech is a potential terrorist threat, this government-corporate partnership makes a mockery of civil liberties. … As the assault by an alignment of consumer marketing and militarized policing grows, each single act of individual expression or resistance assumes greater importance.37 The dynamic of neoliberal modernity, the homogenizing force of the market, a growing culture of repression and an emerging police state have produced more sophisticated methods for surveillance and the mass suppression of the most essential tools for dissent and democracy: "the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on

corporate malfeasance and government abuse."38 The neoliberal authoritarian culture of modernity also has created a social order in which surveillance becomes self-generated , aided by a public pedagogy produced and circulated through a machinery of consumption that encourages transforming dreams into data bits. Such bits then move from the sphere of entertainment to the deadly serious and integrated spheres of capital accumulation and policing as they are collected and sold to business and government agencies who track the populace for either commercial purposes or for fear of a possible threat to the social order and its established institutions

of power. Absorbed in privatized orbits of consumption, commodification and display, Americans vicariously participate in the toxic pleasures of consumer culture, relentlessly entertained by the spectacle of violence in which, as

David Graeber, suggests, the police “become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture … watching movies or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view."39 It is worth

repeating that Orwell's vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state looks tame next to the emergence of a corporate-private-state surveillance system that wants to tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites around the country and use those data to repress any vestige of dissent.40 Whistle-blowers are not only punished by the government; their lives are turned upside down in the process by private surveillance agencies and major corporations who increasingly work in tandem. These institutions share information with the government and do their own spying and damage control. For instance, Bank of America assembled 15 to 20 bank officials and retained the law firm of Hunton & Williams to devise various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and Glenn

Greenwald, who they thought was about to release damaging information about the bank.41 Some of the most dreadful consequences of neoliberal modernity and cultures of surveillance include the elimination of those public spheres capable of educating the public to hold power accountable, and the dissolution of all social bonds

that entail a sense of responsibility toward others. In this instance, politics has not only become dysfunctional and corrupt in the face of

massive inequalities in wealth and power, it also has been emptied of any substantive meaning. Government not only has fallen into the hands of the elite and right-wing extremists, it has embraced a mode of lawlessness evident in forms of foreign and domestic terrorism that undercuts the obligations of citizenship, justice

and morality. As surveillance and fear become a constant condition of American society , there is a growing indifference, if not distaste, for politics among large segments of the population. This distaste is

purposely manufactured by the ongoing operations of political repression against intellectuals, artists, nonviolent protesters and journalists on the left and right. Increasingly, as such populations engage in dissent and the free flow of ideas, whether online or offline, they are considered dangerous to the state and become subject to the mechanizations of a massive security apparatuses designed to monitor, control and punish dissenting populations.

11

That culture of fear and precarity locks in the surveillance state Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a

Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

One of the most serious conditions that enable the expansion of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus is the erasure of public memory . The renowned anthropologist David Price rightly argues that historical memory is one of the primary weapons to be used against the abuse of power and that is why "those who have power create a 'desert of organized forgetting.'

"49 For Price, it is crucial to reclaim America's battered public memories as a political and pedagogical task as part of the broader struggle to regain lost privacy and civil liberties."50 Since the terrorist attacks of

9/11, America has succumbed to a form of historical amnesia fed by a culture of fear , militarization and precarity . Relegated to the dustbin of organized forgetting were the long-standing abuses carried out by America's intelligence agencies and the public's long-standing distrust of the FBI, government wiretaps and police actions that threatened privacy rights, civil liberties and those freedoms fundamental to a democracy. In the present historical moment, it is almost impossible to imagine that wiretapping was once denounced by the FBI or that legislation was passed in the early part of the 20th century that criminalized and outlawed the federal use of wiretaps.51 Nor has much been written about the Church and Pike committees, which in the 1970s exposed a wave of illegal surveillance and disruption campaigns carried out by the FBI and local police forces, most of which were aimed at anti-war demonstrators, the leaders of the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers. And while laws implementing judicial oversight for federal wiretaps were put in place, they were systematically dismantled under the Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. As Price points out, while there was a steady increase in federal wiretaps throughout the 1980s and 1990s, "in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the American public hastily abandoned a century of fairly consistent opposition to govern wiretaps."52 As the historical memory of such abuses disappeared, repressive legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and growing support for a panoptical surveillance and "homeland" security state increased to the point of dissolving the line between private and public, on the one hand, and tilting the balance between security and civil liberties largely in favor of a culture of fear and its underside, a managed emphasis on a one-dimensional notion of

safety and security. The violence of organized forgetting has another component besides the prevalence of a culture of fear and hyper-nationalism that emerged after 9/11. Since the 1980s, the culture of neoliberalism with its emphasis on the self, privatization and consumerism largely has functioned to disparage any notion of the public good, social responsibility and collective action, if not politics

itself. Historical memories of collective struggles against government and corporate abuses have been deposited down the memory hole, leaving largely unquestioned the growing inequalities in wealth and income,

along with the increased militarization and financialization of American society. Even the history of authoritarian movements appears to have been forgotten as right-wing extremists in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Maine, Florida and other states attempt to suppress long-established voting rights, use big money to sway elections, destroy public and higher

education as a public good, and substitute emotion and hatred for reasoned arguments.53 Manufactured ignorance spreads through the dominant cultural apparatuses like a wildfire promoting the financialization of everything as a virtue and ethics as a liability. The flight from historical memory has been buttressed by a retreat into a politics of self-help and a culture of self-blame in which all problems are viewed as "evidence of personal shortcomings that, if left uncorrected, hold individuals back from attaining stability and security."54

Within the crippling "affective and ideological spaces of neoliberalism," memory recedes, social responsibility erodes, and individual outrage and collective resistance are muted . 55 Under such circumstances, public issues collapse into private

troubles and the language of the politics is emptied so that it becomes impossible to connect the ravages that bear down on individuals to broader systemic, structural and social considerations . Under such circumstances, historical memory offers no buffer to the proliferation of a kind of mad violence and paranoid culture of media-induced fear that turns every

public space into a war zone. Consequently, it is not surprising that the American public barely blinks in the face of a growing surveillance state. Nor is it surprising that intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz can claim that "the lack of fealty to the imperatives of the surveillance community as demonstrated by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange is an assault on the

modern liberal state itself."56 Indeed, what the new apologists for the surveillance state refuse to recognize is a history of abuse and criminal behavior by US intelligence apparatuses that were less concerned with implementing the law, arresting criminals and preventing terrorist acts than they were in suppressing dissent and punishing those groups marginalized by race and class .

12

EconAdministration of biopolitical economic order requires threat inflation and subversion—results in greater overall violenceNeocleous 8 [Mark, Professor of Government at the University of Brunel, Critique of Security, p, 95-8]

In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all – its economic strength – in order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of ‘economic security’ .9 9 Despite the fact that ‘econ omic security’ would never be formally defined beyond ‘economic order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual con

sistency between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By playing on notions of ‘economic

well-being’, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus ‘human’ needs over military ones. The reshaping of global capital, international order and the exercise of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and

‘humanitarian’ . This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal freedom’ and‘social equality’.101

Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102

In the second half of the twentieth century this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest heavily on the logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security. The whole world became a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of security. In the space of fifteen years the concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a comprehensive level of

intervention and policing all over the globe. Global order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of capitalaccumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also‘secured’ everywhere.

Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘intervention’, fusing global issues of economic

management with d omestic policy formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy . Here lies

the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate

their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that

conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism

shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes the moment of violence . This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong side of history’.104

‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,‘there have been about 3,000 major covert

operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt , destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’ . 105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security – ‘making the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing;

13

subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108

Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory ‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged

with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole world was to be included in the new‘secure’ global liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best

we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum figure,

that he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the

slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘economic order’. The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111

14

DronesRegulating the use of drones normalizes their existence and locks in place violent impulses inherent to the legal system Trombly 12 [Dan, Associate Analyst @ Caerus Analytics, National Security/International Affairs Analyst, “The Drone War Does Not

Take Place,” NOVEMBER 16, 2012, http://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/the-drone-war-does-not-take-place]

I’ll try to make this a bit shorter than my usual fare on the subject, but let me be clear about something. As much as I and many others inadvertently use the term, there is no such thing as drone war. There is no nuclear war, no air war, no naval war. There isn’t really even irregular war. There’s just war. There is, of course, drone warfare, just as there is nuclear warfare, aerial warfare, and naval warfare. This is verging on pedantry, but the use of language does matter. The

changing conduct and character of war should not be confused with its nature, as Colin Gray strives to remind us in so many of his writings. When we believe that some aspect of warfare changes the nature of war – whether we do so to despair its ethical descent or praise its technological marvels, or to try to objectively discern some new and irreversible reality – we lose sight of a logic that by and large endures in its political and conceptual character. Hence the title (with some, but not too much,

apology to Baudrillard). There is no drone war, there is only the employment of drones in the various wars we fight under the misleading and conceptually noxious “ War on Terror.” Why does this matter? To imbue a weapons system

with the political properties of the policy employing it is fallacious, and to assume its mere presence institutes new political realities relies on a denial of facts and context. This remains the case with drones. The character of wars waged with

drones is different – the warfare is different – but the nature of these wars do not change, and very often this argument obscures the wider military operations occurring . Long before the first drone strikes occurred in Somalia, America was very much at war there. Before their availability in that theater, the U.S. had deployed CIA and SOF assets to the region. It supported Ethiopia’s armies and it helped bankroll and coordinate proxy groups, whether they were Somali TFG units, militias, or private contractors. It

bombarded select Somali targets with everything from naval guns to AC-130 gunships to conventional strike aircraft. It deployed JSOC teams to capture or kill Somalis. That at some point the U.S. acquired a new platform to conduct these strikes is not particularly relevant to the character of that war and even less to its nature. We sometimes assume drones inaugurate some new type of

invincibility or some transcendental transformation of war as an enterprise of risk and mutual violence. We are incorrect to do so. The war in Somalia is

certainly not risk free for the people who the U.S. employs or contracts to target these drones. It is not risk free for the militias, mercenaries, or military partners which follow up on the ground. Nor is it risk free for those who support the drones. Just ask Abu Talha al-Sudani, one of the key figures behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, who sent operatives to case Camp Lemonier and launch a commando raid – one which looks, in retrospect, very much like the one that crippled Marine aviation at Camp Bastion recently – that might have killed a great

many U.S. personnel on a base then and now critical to American operations in the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden. The existence of risk is an inherent product of an enemy whose will to fight we have not yet overcome. The degree of that inherent risk – whether it is negligible or great

– is a product of relative military capabilities and war’s multifarious external contexts. Looked at through this lens, it’s not drones that reduce U.S. political and material risk, it’s the basic facts of the conflict. In the right context, most any kind of military technology can significantly mitigate risks. A 19th century ironclad fleet could shell the coast of a troublesome principality with basic impunity. When Dewey said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” at Manila Bay, according to most history and much legend he lost only one man – due to heatstroke! – while inflicting grievous casualties on his out-ranged and out-gunned Spanish foes. That some historians have suggested Dewey may have concealed a dozen casualties by fudging them in with desertions, which were in any case were a far greater problem than casualties since the Navy was still in the habit of employing foreign sailors expendable by the political standards of the day is even more telling. Yes, there are always risks and almost always casualties even in the most unfair fights, but just as U.S. policymakers wrote off Asian sailors, they write off the victims of death squads which hunt down the chippers, spotters, and informants in Pakistan or the contractors training Puntland’s anti-piracy forces. And no, not even the American spooks are untouchable, the fallen at Camp

Chapman are testament to that. This is hardly unique to drones or today’s covert wars. The CIA’s secret air fleet in Indochina lost men, too,

and the Hmong suffered mightily for their aid to the U.S. in the Laotian civil war. The fall of Lima Site 85, by virtue or demerit of policy, resonated little with the American public but deeply marks the intelligence community and those branches of the military engaging in clandestine action. The wars we wage in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are not drone wars any more than our war in Laos was an air war simply because Operation Barrel Roll’s bombers elicit more attention than the much more vulnerable prop-driven spotting aircraft or Vang Pao’s men on the ground.

There is a certain hubris in thinking we can limit war by limiting its most infamous weapons systems. The taboo and treaties against chemical weapons perhaps saved men (but not the Chinese at Wuhan, nor the Allied and innocents downwind of the SS John Harvey at Bari) from one of the Great War’s particular horrors, but they did nothing appreciable to check the kind of war the Great War was, or the hypersanguinary

consequences of its sequel but a generation later. The Predators and Reapers could have never existed, and very likely the U.S. would still be seeking ways to carry out its war against al Qaeda and its affiliates under the auspices of the AUMF in all of today’s same theaters.

More might die from rifles, Tomahawks, Bofors guns or Strike Eagles’ JDAMs than remotely-launched Griffins, and the tempo of strikes would abate . But the same fundamental problems – the opaque decisions to kill, the esoteric legal justifications for doing so, the obtuse objectives these further – would all remain. Were it not for the exaggerated and

almost myopic focus on “killer robots,” the U.S. public would likely pay far less attention to the victims, excesses, and contradictions. But blaming drones qua drones for these

15

problems, or fearing their proliferation at home, makes little more sense than blaming helicopters for Vietnam , or fearing airmobile

assaults when DC MPD’s MD-500s buzz over my neighborhood. That concern that proliferation of a weapons system equates to proliferation of the outcomes associated with them, without regard to context, is equally misleading. Nobody in America

should fear the expansion of the Chinese UAV fleet because, like the U.S. UAV fleet, it is merely going to expand their ability to do what similar aircraft were already doing. Any country with modern air defenses can make mincemeat of drone-only sorties, and for that reason China, which unlike Yemen and

Pakistan would not consent to wanton U.S. bombing of its countryside, need not fear drones. For an enormous number of geographical, political, and military reasons, the U.S. ought fear the

“drone war” coming home even less. Drones do not grant a country the ability to conduct the kind of wars we conduct against AQAM. The political leverage to build bases and clear airspaces, and the military and intelligence capabilities to mitigate an asymmetric countermeasure operation do. If another country gains that ability to conduct them against a smaller country, even, it is not because they lacked the ability to put weapons on planes, but because of

the full tapestry of national power and military capabilities gave them such an ability . It was not asymmetry in basic technical ability that

made the U.S. submarine blockade of Japan so much more effective than the Axis’s attempts to do the same against America’s shores, but the total scope of the assets in the field and context of

their use. It was not because of precedent or moral equivalence , or lack thereof that the Axis could bomb Britain or lose the ability to do so, but

because of the cumulative effect of military capabilities and the judgments guiding them. What might expand the battlefield of a “drone war” is much the same. America’s enemies do not refrain from attacking bases in CONUS or targeting dissidents in the U.S. (not that they have not before), they wait for an opportunity and practical reason to do so, and that has very little to do with

drones in particular and even less the nature of the war itself. Fearing that the mere use of a weapons system determines the way in which our enemies will use it without regard to this context is not prophetic wisdom. It is quasi-Spenglerian hyperventilation that attributes the decision to use force to childlike mimesis rather than its fundamentally political purposes. Iran and Russia do not wait on drones to conduct extrajudicial targeted killings, and indeed drones would be of much less use to them in their own political contexts. Focusing on drones and the nature of targeted killings as some sort of inherent link ignores those contexts and ultimately

does a disservice to understanding of wars past, present, and future, and by doing so, does little help – and possibly a great deal of harm – to understanding how to move forward.

Frame of reference is key to discuss drones—vote neg to interrupt their legal discourseKrasman 12 [Susanne, professor, Dr, Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg, “Targeted Killing and Its Law: On

a Mutually Constitutive Relationship,” Leiden Journal of International Law (2012), 25, pg. 67]

The legal debate on targeted killing, particularly that referring to the US practice, has increased immensely during the last decade and even more so very recently, obviously due to a ‘compulsion of legality’.87 Once this state practice of resorting to the use of lethal force has been recognized as systematically taking place, it needs to be dealt with in legal terms. Whether this is done in supportive or critical terms, the assertion of targeted killing as a legal

practice commences at this point. This is due to the fact that the law , once invoked, launches its own claims . To insist on disclosing ‘the full legal basis

for targeted killings’; on criteria, legal procedures, and ‘access to reliable information’ in order to render governmental action controllable; or on legal principles to be applied in order to estimate the necessity and proportionality of a concrete intervention at stake,88 not only involves accepting targeted killing as a legitimate subject of debate in the first place . It requires distinctions to be made between, for example, a legitimate and an illegitimate target. It invokes the production of knowledge and the establishment of pertinent rules. Indeterminate categories are to be determined and thus established as a new reading of positive law. The introduction of international human rights standards into the debate, for example, clearly allows limits to be set in employing the pre-emptive tactic. As Wouter Werner has shown with regard to the Israeli High Court of Justice’s decision on the legality of targeted killing operations,89 this may well lead, for example, to recognizing the enemy as being not ‘outlaws’ but,

instead, combatants who are to be granted basic human rights. Subsequently, procedural rules may be established that restrict the practice and provide criteria for assessing the legality of concrete operations.90 At the same time, however, targeted killing is recognized as a legitimate tactic in the fight against terrorism and is being determined and implemented legally.91 When framed within the ‘theatre of war’,

targeted killing categorically seems to be justifiable under the legal principles of necessity, proportionality, discrimination, and the avoidance of unnecessary suffering. This is true as long as one presupposes in

general terms, as the juridical discourse usually does, both a well-considered proceeding along those principles92 and, accordingly, that targeted killing, by its very nature, is a ‘calculated, precise

use of lethal force’.93 Procedural rules, like the ‘proportionality test’, that are essentially concerned with determination, namely with specifying criteria of intervention for the concrete

case or constellation, certainly provide reliability by systematically inciting and provoking justifications. Their application therefore, we may say, contributes to clarifying a

controversial norm- ative interpretation, but it will never predict or determine how deliberation and justification translate into operational action. The application of procedural rules does not only notoriously remain

16

‘indeterminate’,94 but also produces its own truth effects. The question of proportionality, for example, is intrinsically a relational one . The damage that targeting causes is to be related to the anticipated military advantage and to the expected

casualties of non-targeted operations. Even if there are ‘substantial grounds to believe’ that such an operation will ‘encounter significant armed resistance’,95 this is a presumption that, above all, entails a virtual dimension: the alternate option will never be realized. According to a Foucauldian perspective, decisions always articulate within an epistemic

regime and thus ‘eventualize’ on the political stage.96 There is, in this sense, no mere decision and no mere meaning; and,

conversely, there is no content of a norm, and no norm, independent of its enforcement.97 To relate this observation to our

problem at hand means that, rather than the legal principles’ guiding a decision, it is the decision on how to proceed that constitutes the meaning of the legal principle in question. The legal reasoning, in turn, produces a normative reality of its own, as we are now able to imagine, comprehend, and assess a procedure and couch it in legal terms. This is also noticeable in the case of the

Osama bin Laden killing. As regards the initial strategy of justification, the question of resistance typically is difficult to establish ex post in legal terms. Such situations are fraught with so many possible instances of ambiguous behaviour and risk, and the identification of actual behav- iour as probably dangerous and suspicious may change the whole outcome of the event.98 But, once the public found itself with little alternative but to assume that the prospect of capturing the subject formed part of the initial order, it also had to assume that the intention was to use lethal force

as a last resort. And, once the public accepts the general presumption that the United States is at war with the terrorist organization, legal reasoning about the operation itself follows and constitutes a rationale shaping the perception of similar future actions and the exercise of governmental force in general.99 Part of this rationale is the assumption, as the president immediately

pointed out in his speech, that the threat of al Qaeda has not been extinguished with bin Laden. The identification of a threat that emanates from a network may give rise to the question of whether the killing of one particular target, forming part of a Hydra, makes any sense at all.100 Yet, it equally nourishes the idea that the fight against terrorism, precisely because of its elusiveness, is an enduring one, which is exactly the position the United States takes while considering itself in an armed conflict with the terrorist organization. Targeting and destroying parts of

a network, then, do not destroy the entire network, but rather verify that it exists and is at work. The target, in this sense, is constituted by being targeted.101 Within the rationale of the security dispositif, there continue to be threats and new targets. Hence, at work is a transformation of laws through practice, rather than their amendment. Giorgio Agamben maintains that a legal norm, because abstract, does not stipulate its

application.102 ‘Just as between language and world . . . there is no internal nexus’ between them. The norm, in this sense, exists independent of ‘reality’. This, according to Agamben, allows for the norm in the ‘state of exception’ both to be applied with the effect of ‘ceasing to apply’103 – ‘the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception’104 – and to be suspended without being abolished. Although forming part of and, in fact, being the effect of applying the law, the state of exception, in Agamben’s view, disconnects from the norm. Within a perspective on law as practice, by contrast, there is no such difference between norm and reality. Even to ignore a pertinent norm constitutes an act that has a meaning, namely that the norm is not being enforced. It

affects the norm. Targeted killing operations, in this sense, can never be extra-legal.105 On the contrary, provided that illegal practices come up systematically, they eventually

will effectuate the transformation of the law. Equally, the exception from the norm not only suspends the norm, transforming it, momentarily or permanently, into a mere symbol without meaning and force, but at the same time also impinges upon the validity of that norm. Moreover, focus on the exception within the present context falls short of capturing a rather gradual transitional

process that both resists a binary deciphering of either legal or illegal and is not a matter of suspending a norm. As practices deploying particular

forms of knowledge, targeted killing and its law mutually constitute each other, thus re-enforcing a new security dispositive . The appropriate research question therefore is how positive law changes its framework of reference. Targeted killing, once perceived as illegal, now appears to be a legal practice on the grounds of a new understanding of international law’s own elementary concepts. The crux of the ‘compulsion of legality’ is that legality itself is a shifting reference . Seen this way, the United States does not establish targeted killing as a legal practice on the grounds of its internationally ‘possessing’ exceptional power.

Rather the reverse; it is able to employ targeted killing as a military tactic, precisely because this is accepted by the legal discourse. As a practice, targeted killing, in turn, reshapes our

understanding of basic concepts of international law. Any dissenting voice will now be heard with more difficulty, since targeted killing is a no longer an isolated practice but, within the now establishing security dispositif, appears to be appropriate and rational. To counter the legal discourse , then, would require to interrupt it, rather than to respond to it , and to move on to its political implications that are rather tacitly involved in the talk about threats and security, and in the dispute about targeted killing operations’ legality .

17

Hegemony Hegemony is based on a liberal fantasy of US exceptionalism which necessitates permanent war-making – a more peaceful world order fills in to solve their theoretical impacts, while obscure the real consequences of untold suffering Jackson 11 [Richard, Director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, the University of Otago. Former. Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, The World’s Most Warring Nation, www.e-ir.info/2011/07/02/the-world’s-most-warring-nation]

The history of US foreign policy is a violent and bloody one , although this is not necessarily the dominant perception

of most Americans. From the frontier wars of subjugation against Native Peoples to colonial wars against Mexico, Spain and the Philippines, the Cold War interventions in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Libya and elsewhere, the post-Cold War interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, and the post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya today, the US has an unrivaled record of war and foreign military intervention. There are in fact, few periods in its history when the US has

not been engaged in war or military attacks on other countries. In addition, the US is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter of military weapons, and has a military budget several times greater than all its nearest rivals combined. It is in fact, the most warring nation in modern history . It is in this historical context that we have to try and understand its current military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa and Libya.

Although it is sometimes argued by apologists that these military actions are always defensive in nature rather than proactive

and expansionist, and are the result of real and serious threats to US security or the wider international system,

the virtually impregnable security position of the US, notwithstanding the 9/11 attacks a decade ago, makes this argument unconvincing. The reality is that the size of the US landmass and population, the vast oceans to its eastern and western borders and the friendly countries to its north and south, and the extent of its economic and military power, means that there are no serious obstacles to the adoption of an isolationist foreign policy or even the adoption of a pacifist role in international affairs. In other words,

there is nothing inevitable or predetermined about its long record of war and intervention. Explaining the historical record of US foreign intervention requires a careful evaluation of both its strategic interests and its ideological system, as it is the almost unique combination of these factors and the way in which they underpin and interact with each other which helps to explain why the US continues to be the most violent state in the international system today.

Strategically, the US is today the world’s dominant power. In order to maintain this hegemonic position in the international

system, which is the primary and preeminent goal of all US foreign policy (or at least, no major foreign policy initiative can

seriously contradict this first principle goal), necessitates a number of key measures, such as: maintaining military advantage over rivals, which in turn requires a permanent internal military-industrial complex ; a system of

allies and a military presence in bases stretched around the globe, especially in strategic regions like the Middle East and the Horn of

Africa; influence over or control of strategic resources such as oil; domination or at least influence over the global economic and trading system; significant influence in international institutions; and preventing the rise of serious challengers to its overall hegemony.

At the same time, the US has evolved since the founding of the republic a core set of ideological beliefs which are now deeply

embedded culturally and accepted by both the political elite and the wider society. Some of these beliefs are necessitated by, and functional to, the military power of the US: maintaining a costly and permanent military-industrial

18

complex capable of staying ahead of its rivals, for example, requires a supporting set of cultural values which valorize military prowess, patriotism and sacrifice in war. These values are now part of the military-industrial-media complex in which video games and movies, among others, serve as recruitment tools for the military,

narrative frames for interpreting foreign threats and as propaganda for generating support for foreign military intervention . Importantly, this military-industrial-media complex has come to generate its own material and political interests, in part because it requires actual wars to reproduce and sustain itself .

Other important ideological values include the strongly-held belief that the US has been called by history (or God) to protect the so-called free world from major threats. Thus, it is believed that the US was first called to defeat the threat posed by the Axis powers, then the communist

threat, and today, the global threat of terrorism. This ideological belief rests on the notion that the US is uniquely placed – by virtue of its military and economic power, and its moral values – to ensure the safety of the civilized world; it is the ‘exceptional nation’ which must lead the world. Related to this, the US has come to believe that its core values of liberty and democracy are actually universal values which is it bound to protect at home and spread abroad. As with its military values, these ideological beliefs are ubiquitous in popular and political culture.

It is the combination of the US’s strategic interests and its ideological dispositions in the past two hundred

years or more which explains the frequency and geographical distribution of its military interventions. In some cases, interventions have been launched primarily to protect perceived strategic interests, such as the case of the first Gulf War in which Iraq took control of Kuwait oil reserves and appeared to seriously threaten Saudi oil reserves. In other cases, the US’s strategic interests coincided with strong ideological imperatives, such as the Libyan intervention today where the presence of significant oil reserves and the desire to create a pro-US regime in a strategic region has combined with the US ideological value of spreading democracy and overthrowing a long-term dictator and US opponent. The key point however, is that ideological values such as democracy promotion only rarely generate sufficient will by themselves for military intervention, although Somalia and Kosovo may be considered exceptions (although there were strategic interests involved in both cases). In many other cases, such as Rwanda in the 1990s and Syria today, such ideological imperatives are insufficient on their own to generate US-led military intervention. At the same time, no wars can be justified or defended to the American public, except by claiming that they fit US ideological values; US politicians cannot admit that they are ever at war solely to secure strategic advantage.

Of course, during some periods such as the cold war and to a lesser degree the war on terror, US strategic interests simply overrode ideological commitments to human rights or democracy promotion, as it supported a series of brutal dictatorships in places like Latin America, Asia and Africa. I n some cases, the US even approved of mass murder , such as the Indonesian government’s suppression of Communists in 1965 which killed 500,000 people, its support for the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and its support for Latin American death squad activities in places like Chile and El Salvador. In other special cases, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, US strategic interests override ideological commitment entirely and little real effort is made to promote values-based policies.

The war on terror, particularly the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, demonstrates the interplay of these two factors, with both strategic interests – dealing with the threat of terrorism, the securing of Iraq’s oil and Afghanistan’s potential role as an access-point to Central Asian oil reserves, fashioning pro-US regimes, and the construction of military bases in strategic regions to put pressure on countries like Iran – and ideological imperatives – bringing liberty and democracy to countries wracked by human rights abuses – driving the interventions. Paradoxically, of course, the war on terror, like many previous US interventions, has resulted in massive human rights abuses around the world and the denial of liberty to millions, with torture, rendition, and the denial of civil rights commonplace, among others. At the same time, it has also endangered US strategic interests: the attack on Iraq strengthened and emboldened Iran, destabilized Pakistan, and greatly damaged the reputation and standing of the US in the Middle East and large parts of the Muslim world.

In the end, the culturally and politically embedded ideology of the US – its militarized patriotism – blinds its leaders and public to the interests and consequences of its military interventions, and sustains the likelihood of future interventions. Few Americans accept that its country’s wars have killed, injured and displaced literally millions of people in the last few decades, most often for little or no positive result in either strategic or ideological terms – that in fact the real-world consequences of its interventions are virtually always the denial of its own stated values of liberty and democracy. Fewer still question why the US is willing to sacrifice thousands or even millions of lives to secure its strategic interests, or why the US population is so

perennially vulnerable to ideological appeals by leaders which mask the deeper strategic reasons for violent intervention. While it is unlikely that its strategic interests will change any time soon or that the military-industrial complex can be significantly reduced in size, there is always the hope that new leaders might arise and peace

19

movements might emerge which are able to challenge , and perhaps even change, the militarized patriotism and deeply-

embedded culture of violence which makes the US the most violent state in the world.

20

LegitimacyThe discourse of legitimacy masks the violence of hegemony---the affirmative’s commitment to US leadership recreates masculinist national identity that codes the US as a the shepherd of liberal architecture Landreau 11 [John, associate professor of womenâs and gender studies at The College of New Jersey., Obamas My Dad: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism, www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/landfreau/408]

Both during his campaign, and in his presidential inauguration speech, Barack Obama promised a "new beginning" in American foreign and national security policy (especially in relation to the Middle East) that would both keep us safe from enemies and "restore our moral standing" (Obama, Acceptance). In particular, this new beginning promised to distance U.S. foreign policy from the grim (and largely illegal) features of the Bush administration's "war on terror" such as the executive sanctioning of the torture of prisoners, the maintenance of a gulag of foreign detention centres where prisoners could be treated outside the guidelines of U.S. and international law, and illegal secret initiatives such as the program to assassinate Al-Qaeda operatives directed by Vice President Cheney (Mazzetti and Shane). In his first day in the White House, on January 22, 2009, Obama issued three executive orders that followed through on this promise.[2] In addition to these early executive orders, in the days and months following his election Obama showed great rhetorical sensitivity to the wide-spread negative perception in the Middle East of U.S. imperial behavior and designs, its uncritical support of Israel, and its disregard for civilian casualties and for the civil rights of prisoners. In an effort to reverse the tide of anti-American feeling, Obama's first post-inaugural interview was given to Hisham Melhem of Al Arabiya TV news (Interview). This was followed in April and May by major addresses in Ankara and Cairo whose primary intended audience was Middle Eastern and, more broadly, Islamic. Both of these speeches articulate a new rhetoric of hope for U.S.-Middle Eastern relations. In the speech to the Turkish parliament, for example, Obama declares: I [...] want to be clear that America's relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot, and will not, just be based upon opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree [...]. (para. 38) Hope for a new era of U.S Middle East relations is here embodied by an attitude of respect, by a willingness to negotiate differences and find areas of mutual interest, and by an explicit criticism of the unilateral and monologic focus of the Bush administration on the 'war on terror'. This apparent change in direction in national security and foreign policy seems to be characterized by an alternate version of presidential masculinity and by an alternate telling of the myth of American exceptionalism. Many have commented on the muscular character of George W. Bush's rhetoric of war and national security. Indeed, his policies in what he called the 'war on terror' depended almost exclusively on what Joseph Nye famously called "hard power", and were justified rhetorically by a conspicuously militarist and masculinist narrative about America's role in

world history and politics.[3] In contrast to the "[...] stern projection of a tough national persona" (Ivie and Giner 288) in Bush's rhetoric and policies, Obama seems to articulate a gentler, more reasoned approach to national security and terrorism that includes the use of

'hard' military power but also depends importantly on 'soft' power in the form of diplomacy, international cooperation, and an emphasis on human rights, economic stability and political freedom. Ivie and Giner argue that the success of Obama's rhetorical appeal to 'soft' power during the 2008 presidential campaign was due to his ability to harness and resignify the deeply-resonant myth of American exceptionalism for a more democratic and community-minded projection of America's role in world affairs. In Obama's version of national security, they write: A less tragic sense of order mandated a reduced sense of guilt and thereby decreased the need for redemption via the cult of killing. This expression of national mission in more democratic and practical terms indicated, at least "logologically," the possibility of aligning public culture with a more global and constructive perspective on matters of national security. It revealed the possibility of a founding myth reformed to relax the lethal grip of the Evil One on the conscience of a nation that might do more good in the world if it were burdened less by tragic guilt.[4] (296) This conclusion requires a retrospective reassessment in the light of Obama's decision to

escalate the war in Afghanistan. How do we reconcile Obama's seemingly dramatic shift from progressive

presidential candidate who was proud to have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, and who abolished the use of torture and illegal detention in his

first day in office, to the president who in December 2009 made the decision to pursue and significantly escalate military

violence in Afghanistan? How do we reconcile Obama's seemingly contradictory use of both the soft rhetoric of hope and diplomacy and the hard

rhetoric of fear and military violence in his national security statements and speeches? In the analysis that follows I argue that while Obama at times articulates a softer version of foreign policy, and seems to perform a softer, more inclusive presidential masculinity in the area of global politics and terrorism, this does not fundamentally signify a different orientation to national security as some have argued. I emphasize how Obama's rhetoric and policies fall within the standard rhetorical oscillations that constitute the myth of American exceptionalism and presidential masculinity, and that those oscillations are principally and most

significantly oriented by the more militarist and conventionally masculinist versions of the myth. Presidential Masculinity in the Democratic Nomination Speech Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008 marks the formal shift of his campaign focus from Democratic Party voters towards a national audience, and from his rivalry with Hillary Clinton to a campaign against John McCain. In terms of Obama's national security rhetoric, this is a fascinating moment because, in this new broader context, he makes an attitudinal shift to a more militarized and masculinized mode of speech. In fact, Obama's performance of soft masculinity on issues of national security during the primary campaign was an opportune product of the moment that did not reflect the principal orientation of his thinking.[5] This is quite clear in the nomination speech as he shifts his campaign towards a more

21

conservative national audience, and directs his attention from a female rival to a male rival with military credentials. Obama's first sentence about foreign policy in the nomination speech concerns his own stature and ability to lead American troops into battle, and to battle John McCain for the position of commander in chief. "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next commander-in-chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have." (para. 79) What is most interesting about this lead-in to the topic of national security, terrorism, and foreign policy is that its main rhetorical function is to emphasize Obama's masculine capability. It does this by declaring his presidential mettle, but also through the performance of an 'I dare you' challenge to his political adversary. It seems to say, 'if you want to fight, then let's fight. Bring it on!' Why does Obama begin this section of the speech with a flexing of muscle? In part, it has to do with the histrionics of presidential campaigns, and in this particular campaign with the anticipated challenge to Obama's military masculinity from John McCain, a candidate with a powerful story of military bravery and heroism to his credit. At the same time, the foregrounding of presidential masculinity in terms of the resolve and capacity to lead the armed forces into battle is nothing unusual. The most significant human protagonist in the narrative of American exceptionalism is almost always

the figure of the president. This is especially true in times of danger, crisis or war. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. To him goes the job of

protecting the national family from outside threats and danger. To do this effectively, he must be brave, decisive and rational. He cannot

afford to be feminized by being overly emotional or sympathetic to others; he cannot succumb to doubts, or become scared to act (Cohn, Cuordileone, Hopper, Lakoff, Sylvester, Tickner, Young). It is to this mythos that Obama's beginning performance of masculinity in the speech belongs. In the new context of a national audience, it stands out as a deeply-felt and vigorously articulated orientation towards national security. After this initial show of male plumage, Obama continues the foreign policy section of the nomination speech by contrasting his youthful masculinity to McCain's elderly, bumbling masculinity. For -- for while -- while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats that we face. When John McCain said we could just muddle through in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. (para. 80-81) While McCain turns his sights away from the target, Obama stands up. While McCain muddles, Obama works to finish the fight and "take out" bin Laden if he's "in our sights." In the subtly crafted metaphor of aiming a gun at an enemy that organizes the passage, McCain appears as a distracted old soldier who aims at the wrong target and is generally confused. In contrast, vigorous and youthful, Obama stands up purposely, aims at the target, and fires. These metaphors all work to highlight the differences between McCain and Obama in terms of their embodiment of a properly militarized masculinity: which candidate can stand up, correctly identify the enemy, and fire the necessary shots to kill him. Obama criticizes McCain for standing alone in "stubborn refusal" to recognize the realities of the conflict (that it is with al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, not in Iraq), and therefore for lacking judgment. This lack of judgment is also narrated in terms of a contrast between a

youthful and an aging masculinity: "We need a president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past." (para. 84) Obama declares. The contrast between a man who grasps at the past and one who "faces" the future is coded with messages about age and masculinity: youthful, confident stepping forward into the future versus old, unsteady back-stepping towards the past. At stake in this contrast is which strategy will "defeat" the enemy. "You don't defeat -- you don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq", (para. 85) Obama

argues. These are enemies who must be killed in order to protect the nation. To do this requires a commander-in-chief with masculine resolve and courage who can lead us into battle. This is not work for touchy-feely idealists who want to understand, communicate, and negotiate. And Republicans, Obama points out proudly, are not the only ones with the proper testicular size to lead the army into battle: "We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe." (para. 87) As in his opening statement, part of the effectiveness of these lines is their performance of a kind of "I'm up to the challenge masculinity" that talks tough, is aggressive with challengers ("don't tell me"), and does not back down. The rhetoric of American exceptionalism and presidential masculinity foregrounded here in the nomination clearly constitutes the dominant note of continuity in Obama's national security thinking. This is most evident in his two speeches from December 2009 in which he justifies his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan as the following discussion will show. Reasons for War: the December 1, 2009 Speech at West Point Obama's December 2009 speech at West Point argues for the strategic necessity and ethical correctness of increased war effort in Afghanistan on the basis of history. The history begins with the 19 Al Qaeda operatives who committed the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and moves quickly to focus on the Taliban who provided them with a secure base from which to operate. After 9/11, as Obama tells the story, we made great military inroads against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but then mistakenly turned our attention to Iraq. This provided an opening for the Taliban, and for Al Qaeda, who are now coming back into Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Afghan government cannot fight them off and therefore, he says, summing it all up: "In short, the status quo is not sustainable" (para. 12). How does a rudimentary history like this serve as an explanation or justification for war? What is the mediating logic? The over-simplification of contemporary U.S and Afghan history entailed in this schematic narrative is head-spinning.[6] But, even putting that aside, if one accepts the history at face value, it is still the case that our commitment to war is left unexplained and unjustified by the narrative. The history begins with 19 terrorists, and ends with the large-scale military action on the part of the United States. Should it not take a lot more than saying, 'well, the Taliban are gaining momentum and, remember, they are best friends with Al Qaeda' to justify the deployment of 100,000 U.S. troops, predator drones strikes all over northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, full involvement of the CIA, major flows of capital and materiel, and huge contracts with private military contractors like XE Services (aka Blackwater)? Obama's historical narrative simply does not add up to a political argument for

this kind of war, and for this kind of outlay of capital. As a justification for war, it seems, rather, to be structured like a myth in the sense that Roland Barthes gave the word. Myth, according to Barthes, is paradoxically effective because, formally, it works like an alibi. It is an explanation based on an absence of evidence and meaning rather than its presence . In an

alibi (the accused was absent not present at the scene) the meaning and the evidence are always elsewhere (121-127). Obama's narrative amounts to a mythological explanation for war in the sense that its significance lies not in the history itself but in the formal seriousness of a president telling a story to justify war. That is, its significance lies in the rhetorical gesture that serves to remind the audience of the president's authority as commander in chief and of his role to defend the nation from harm. By telling this story the president in effect quotes an array of motives, intentions, plot sequences and characters that are formally full even if their content in this instance is misleading or empty. To paraphrase Hayden White, in this case the content is the form. Here, the details of the story of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan are significant to the extent that they play a role in a larger narrative already familiar to the American audience: the Unites States stands for peace and prosperity, freedom and democracy but sometimes it is attacked by evil enemies whose irrational desire is to destroy all that is good. In that circumstance, the president must protect the national family through the use of military violence. War is the best and, in fact, the only way to make ourselves secure. Following this schematic historical narrative with which he begins the West Point speech, Obama reassures the audience that his final decision to escalate the war was taken only after a serious and difficult deliberative process. This process, he says, "has allowed me to ask the hard questions, and to explore all the different options, along with my national security team, our military and civilian leadership in Afghanistan, and our key partners. And given the stakes involved, I

owed the American people -- and our troops -- no less." (para. 13) The image of the president very seriously asking questions, exploring options, and consulting experts is one intended to produce a sense of citizen confidence both in the decision and in the decider (as George W. Bush famously called himself) again without revealing any of the details or particulars that constitute the decision. The rhetorical appeal here is essentially charismatic and depends on thick cultural associations with the president as benevolent paternal authority, and as rational but determined protector of the nation. The tone of the passage is that of a father reassuring his family that the big decision he has made

22

today was made with great care, and with their communal welfare in mind. Obama's stress on his careful deliberation process but not on the content of the deliberation is reminiscent of Iris Marion Young's emphasis on the "logic of masculinist protection" in national security thinking. This is a logic that connects the protective role of the father in the patriarchal family with the role of commander in chief. In both cases, she argues that one of the prices exacted by benevolent masculinist protection is that the protected woman/feminized citizen must concede "critical distance from decision-making autonomy." (120). In other words, if the fatherly president's allegiance to citizens and soldiers is expressed in the mindfulness with which he makes communal decisions of this magnitude, then it is equally true that our allegiance to the father-president is expressed in our acceptance of his authority and judgment to do what is best for us in these circumstances. The allegiance to the father quickly becomes the measure of our patriotism. As a rhetorical strategy, then, Obama's description of the seriousness of his decision-making process serves to legitimate his decision to escalate war through an appeal to an image of protective presidential masculinity. This appeal interpellates the audience in the role of a complicit, feminized citizenry that needs such fatherly protection.[7] After the scant historical review, and a summary of where we are and why we are obliged to go to war, Obama devotes a good portion of the West Point speech to making a series of sequential points, statements of fact, and reasoned arguments. For example, he gives three specific goals for the Afghan intervention, and outlines how those goals will be achieved and how it will all be paid for. He also identifies three possible objections to the escalation and gives reasoned arguments for why these criticisms are incorrect. In sum, he says "As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our

responsibility, our means, or our interests." (para. 37).As feminist International Relations scholars have argued, to talk about war in rationalist terms as Obama does here tends to divert attention from the cruelties of war , and to imagine the truth of war " abstracted from bodies " (Ruddick 132). (Ruddick 132). It becomes difficult, in this context, to focus on, or give weight to, the terrible details of war, and in particular to the death and destruction that modern wars exact mostly from civilians not soldiers.[8] As a rhetorical performance, the description of war in terms of rational sequences and formulas also tends to give authority to the rhetorician himself by distancing him from feminized forms of emotionality or care work (Cohn). Obama ends his speech with the conclusion that presidential war speeches commonly have: an eloquent and solemn call to unity and patriotism. "Now, let me be clear: None of this will be easy. The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world." (para. 41) The logic of a bond between our free society and our leadership in the world is presupposed rather than described or explained. Like all heroes, the hero of the exceptionalist narrative faces a test. In this instance, he is us, and our essential quality of being a free society is linked to our dominance in the world. Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs. We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents.We have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies.We have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions -- from the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank -- that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings. We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades -- a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty. For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations.We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.What we have fought for -- what we continue to fight for -- is a better future for our children and grandchildren. And we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples'

children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity (para. 47-49). Unlike other world powers, we are benevolent , seeking only that which will make the world a better place. We are, that is to say, a world power but not a world empire. Our history shows this: our military violence and our leadership have underwritten global security for over sixty years. Strangely, though, our fatherly sacrifice to protect the world from harm is sometimes misunderstood, and "we have not always been thanked for our efforts." Who are the unthankful and

what is their story? In the standard-issue exceptionalist narrative, they are the enemies of freedom, the sowers of chaos, and the ideologically possessed. Obama certainly believes this. At the same time, the statement that "we have not always been thanked for our efforts" also expresses a deep anxiety about the details and the stories that are erased by the great father's version of history. Making War, Talking Peace: The Nobel Peace Prize Speech The Nobel Prize acceptance speech, given just nine days after Obama's announcement of the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, provides a fascinating expansion of the plot of "American as good vs. foreign as evil" that informs the narrative justification for war in the West Point speech. In this speech, Obama contextualizes both American exceptionalism in general, and his specific decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, in a sweeping historical narrative of global progress. "At the dawn of history," Obama declares, "war was routinely pursued between tribes and peoples quite simply as a way of 'seeking power and settling disputes." (para. 6) Later, as "man" progressed, legal and diplomatic efforts were made in an attempt to regulate war and the way it was pursued. Obama invokes just

war theory citing it as one of the principle ways in which humans have tried to regulate and civilize war. In Obama's narrative, the United S tates is located at the upper end of this historical progression because it is the U nited S tates that has provided the leadership to produce the global "architecture" of peace in the form of the United Nations, support for human rights, nuclear arms reductions, and so on. Elaborating on the schematic history of the United States that appeared in the West Point speech, Obama says The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will.We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity (para. 18). J. Ann Tickner argues

that the idea of enlightened self interest corresponds to a masculinist model of international relations in which states are systematic and instrumental they are competitive " profit maximizers that pursue power and autonomy in an anarchic world system ."(52) In this context, if international cooperation

exists, it is explained not in terms of community or an interdependent notion of security and welfare, but rather in terms of rational choice and enlightened self-interest . Here, in Obama's version, we shoulder the burden of world

peace and prosperity both heroically (with American blood and military power) but also as rational actors. We act not as an imperial power, but as a benign power exercising rational choices in a dangerous world in order to protect our interests. By virtue of the incantatory power of the

23

exceptionalist narrative, our interests are identical with democratic values and the cause of economic justice. The awkward context of the Nobel Prize speech both

clarifies and complicates Obama's justification of war. While acknowledging the "moral force" of the theory of non-violence, he also argues that "evil does exist in the world" and that a realist assessment of the world "as it is" sometimes requires violence. This part of the speech is quite subtle, shuttling back and forth between the recognition that war is terrible and the insistence that it is sometimes necessary. The notion that war is sometimes just and sometimes necessary for building peace is modified throughout with an appeal to "responsibility" and to the rational, measured use of military violence.

Turns case – reframing rhetoric is crucial Landreau 11 [John, associate professor of womenâs and gender studies at The College of New Jersey., Obamas My Dad: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism, www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/landfreau/408]

This is precisely what is wrong with the narrative of American exceptionalism, and with Obama's obligation to it. A story whose plot is organized entirely around the character of its hero does not seek to know. It is narcissistic. It shores up what it knows in fear of the Other, and in this gesture reconfirms that its view of the world is the truth. Obama seems oblivious to the contradictions in his assertion of American power as he struggles here to articulate the oxymoron of peace through war . In the end, what "makes sense" in his justification for war is the cultural and political sense that adheres to the image of embodied presidential masculinity, and to his military leadership performed in patriotic service to America's heroic global mission. Conclusion Obama's national security policies and rhetoric are, to be fair, significantly different in many ways than Bush's. Nonetheless, he steeps his rhetoric of hope for a new foreign policy in the old, familiar

language of American exceptionalism. This illustrates how the political logic of a militarized and masculinized nation,

presidency and citizenry has proved to be more enduring, significant and powerful than the strategy differences that have divided Democrats and Republicans over the last 60 years. It is important also because the cultural logic of American exceptionalism guaranteed by military power makes so many questions difficult to ask because the questions themselves seem absurd, effeminately nave, or simply out of rhetorical limits. These are unasked questions such as what violence was required to achieve our affluence and power? How can that violence be justified? Are there models for world peace, prosperity and freedom other than America's dominance and "leadership?" Does military power and violence produce security? What constitutes security? Is invulnerability a legitimate security goal? Is the authority of Commander-in-chief one that automatically adheres to the presidency at all times, or should the executive be more limited in its power as originally envisioned in the Constitution? Is

citizenship best characterized in terms of a militarized and masculinized patriotism? Can terrorism be fought with large-scale military tactics? Of course, it is impossible to know all the ins and outs of how Obama and his advisors reached the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. For those who voted for Obama over Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign because of his clear-spoken commitment to a

different kind of foreign policy, the decision is disappointing to say the least. In that the Obama administration felt at home in and oriented by - the old language of American exceptionalism the final analysis, when the decision was made, and its justification needed to be formulated into public rhetoric, what is clear is. Familiar orientations, as Sara Ahmed argues, are an "effect of inhabitance." That is, their sense, their familiarity and their surety are products of their alignment with an already aligned world (7). My argument here is that the sense Obama makes of war is indebted to and made possible by - the familiarity and common-sense orientation of

American exceptionalism. If the militarism and masculinism of his national security logic seem sensible or reassuring, it is because they are oriented in deeply familiar ways . The rhetoric of war and national security also works, of course, to recreate the familiar orientation from which it emerges. As Susan Jeffords argues, in the post-Vietnam context, heroic narratives about the war had the decisive (but indirectly manifested) effect of "remasculinizing American culture." This is why the work of disorientation that is proposed by feminist International Relations scholars and activists with its specific focus on the hidden injuries of gender

in the familiar discourses of war and security is so important. It is also why it is so difficult. I have argued that Obama's war logic is oriented by, and serves to reorient us towards, a national mythology grounded in narratives of glorified violence and masculinity . The difficulty of challenging and disorienting that prevailing narrative is eloquently described by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "The

24

South." The story serves as an apt allegory of the mythology of American exceptionalism with its multiple commitments to masculinity and violence, and for the ways

this mythology works to make military violence the seemingly inevitable and sensible locus where the national story is both resolved and reinvigorated. The main character in "The South" is named Juan Dahlmann. Dahlmann feels "deeply Argentine" despite the fact that his paternal grandfather was a northern European immigrant. Dahlmann's patriotic sense of identity involves, among other things, having purchased a little ranch in the south that had once been in his mother's family. Dahlmann lives in Buenos Aires, and for him the south has tremendous symbolic resonance as that place that retains the masculinist features of national mythology: the pampa, the gaucho, the singing bard, the tavern, the duel. Dahlmann dreams about the ranch and its old house, and takes comfort in imagining it waiting for him on the pampa, even though he never really gets a chance to actually go there. One day, Dahlmann is struck gravely ill with a terrible infection and is hospitalized with high fever. As is typical of so many of Borges' stories, it is impossible to tell if the subsequent narrated events are products of his hallucinatory state or are really happening to him. In any event, after some days of medical intervention, he is released and boards a train towards the south to convalesce at his ranch. He arrives, enters a tavern where he eats barbeque and drinks wine, and then is taunted by some young men who have been drinking too much. Although the bar owner tells him to pay them no mind, Dahlmann confronts them as any traditional male character in a gaucho story would be required to do. In seeming recognition of his decisive entrance into one of the enduring storylines of nationalist mythology (the knife fight between men at a watering hole on the pampa), the ancient gaucho in the corner of the bar who until now has remained motionless as if frozen in time, becomes "ecstatic" and throws him a dagger. The rest is preordained: Dahlmann will walk out of the tavern with a knife in his hand, he will fight bravely, and then die with the stranger's blade in his gut. It is, the narrator says, "as if the South had decided that Dahlmann should agree to the duel." (203) When he picks up the dagger, he feels two things: first, "that this almost instinctive act committed him to fighting" and, second, "that, in his clumsy hand, the weapon would not serve to defend him, but rather to justify their killing of him" (Borges, 203 translations mine). For me, "The South" is a story about the masculinist mythology of national identity and violence. Intricate and contradictory is it dream or

reality? the myth exercises its force both from within on Dahlmann's imagination and from without on his body. The logic of a militarized and masculinized rhetoric of national security, in concert with the economic logic of our military budget and the imperial logic of our global ambition, serves as our "south " leading us on ward towards the use of large-scale military violence as if in a dream from which we cannot wake . We cannot hear the warnings of the barkeep who tries to tell us that we do not have to kill or be killed in this instance. Like Dahlmann, our politicians even the less bellicose among them when faced with security threats simply cannot imagine any alternative to masculinist bravado and the duel to the death. "The South", then, is a cautionary tale. As long as

presidents and politicians dare not challenge the role of the military budget as the primary organizing principle of our economy, and as long as the militarized and masculinized ideology of American exceptionalism remains the almost unitary language with which we speak of national security and foreign policy, there should be no surprise when ostensible doves from the Democratic Party such as Barack Obama pursue large-scale military campaigns in places like

Afghanistan, and seem to do so as readily as their reputedly hawkish counterparts in the Republican Party. Alternate strategies to large-scale military violence require new story-lines of national identity and national security. We need to give ourselves a choice about whether taking up the knife is what the situation calls for . We need to ask questions about how we got into such a situation in the first place . We need to create alternatives to the logic that defines security as killing or being killed. Clearly,

rhetoric plays a significant role in preparing these choices. But, as Obama's performance indicates, it is unlikely that our presidents and our politicians will do the rhetorical work necessary to disorient the prevailing exceptionalist narrative and reorient the debate towards the ethos of human security. It falls to us - citizens, activists and intellectuals - to turn our political rhetoric away from antagonisms that require violence towards the democratic task of contending with opponents with whom we share the world.

25

Racial profilingThe plan is a violent endorsement of broader surveillance networks – the problem isn’t merely that a totalitarian state surveils identities differently, but a violent surveillance state exists – minor reforms legitimize this enterprise and cultivate widespread political apathy Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

In his videotaped Christmas message, Snowden references Orwell's warning of "the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us,"2 allowing the state to regulate subjects within the most intimate spaces of private life. But these older modes of surveillance, Snowden elaborates, however, are nothing compared to what is used to infringe on our personal privacy today. For Snowden, the threat posed by the new surveillance state can be measured by its reach and use of technologies that far outdate anything Orwell envisioned and pose a much greater threat to the privacy rights of citizens and the reach of sovereign powers. He reiterates this point by reminding his viewers that "a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all - they will never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed

thought."3 Snowden is right about the danger to privacy rights but his analysis fails to go far enough in linking together the question of surveillance with the rise of " networked societies ," global flows of power

and the emergence of the totalitarian state .4

The democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition. Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically in an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange and circulation.

So, too, and in the current period of historical amnesia, privacy has been redefined through the material and ideological registers of a neoliberal order in which the right to privacy has succumbed to the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism's unending necessity to turn every relationship into an act of commerce

and to make all aspects of daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5 In a world devoid of care , compassion and protection , privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. In a world in which the

worst excesses of capitalism are unchecked, privacy is nurtured in a zone of historical amnesia, indifferent to its transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices."6 Consequently, culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven ethic "makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals" and furthers the collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state.7

Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life. In fact, it is more appropriate to analyze the culture of surveillance, rather than address exclusively the violations committed by the corporate-surveillance state. In this instance, the surveillance and security state is one that not only listens, watches and gathers massive amounts of information through data mining necessary for identifying consumer populations but also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of surveillance technologies and privatized commodified values into all aspects of their lives. Personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based websites and gathered daily

as people move from one targeted web site to the next across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy , invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,” all the while endlessly shopping online and texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets , commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like.

Yet the most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting

of information but also in a culture that normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and

26

enticements for consumers who use the new digital technologies and social networks to simulate false notions of community and to socialize young people into a culture of security and commodification in which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help and commodification.

Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion . Authoritarianism in its contemporary manifestations, as evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead has become omniscient in a culture of

control in which the most cherished notions of agency collapse into unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for the spying state. The self has become not simply the subject of surveillance but a willing participant and object . Operating off the assumption that some individuals will not willingly turn their private lives over to the spying state and corporations, the NSA and other intelligence agencies work hard to create a turnkey authoritarian

state in which the "electronic self" becomes public property. Every space is now enclosed within the purview of an authoritarian society that attempts to govern the entirety of social life. As Jonathan Schell points out:

Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these

data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and

illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alon gside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto public property , owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes . Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.8

Social cynicism and societal indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed hallucinatory hopes.9 Surveillance and its accompanying culture of fear now produce subjects that revel in being watched , turning the practice if not the threat posed by surveillance into just another condition for performing the self. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network. Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman echoes this sentiment in arguing that: These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to share.10

The aff is a smokescreen for a massive buildup of public surveillance apparatuses --- otherwise they have no mechanism for enforcing profiling bans Capers 13 [I. Bennett Capers, Professor of Law at Brooklyn College of Law, “Crime, surveillance, and communities,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, 40.3 (Mar. 2013): p959]

Now consider the work camera surveillance can do to address these issues. First, take the racial profiling of minority drivers. Cameras already monitor automated bridge and tunnel tolling systems, (145) and photo-radars already catch red-light violations. (146) But this is

only the start. As Elizabeth Joh has explored, technology already exists to police almost all traffic violations. (147)

Dedicated short-range communications technology (DSRC) means that cars are increasingly being equipped to communicate pertinent data to other devices, including data regarding the car's location and speed, and warnings regarding the car's mechanics or registration. (148) While DSRC is already being used to reduce collisions--by alerting a driver that another car is approaching, for example--this same technology can be used to generate automatic traffic tickets. (149) Clearly, such automated surveillance has the potential to

27

free police to focus on actual policing. But more importantly, it has the advantage of being racially neutral. (150) Rather than using pretext stops

to single out minority motorists, surveillance technology will "ticket" without regard to race . I have argued in other

work that facial profiling does more than simply impose a "racial tax," as Randall Kennedy suggests. (151) In fact,

racial profiling, as a marker of inequality, is citizenship-diminishing. (152) Cameras, by contrast, neither discriminate nor engage in arbitrary policing. (153) They treat all traffic offenders alike and therefore are citizenship-enhancing.

“Cultural” profiling fills in as a euphemism for race – racial biases continue absent the alt’s galvanization of mass change Wade 15 [Peter, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester, “Racism and liberalism: the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Volume 38, Issue 8, 2015]

In the literature on racism, the broad change, since the Second World War, towards the erasure of explicit discourses about racial difference has been widely noted . The story is that with the crumbling of a scientific consensus about the biological basis of racial difference and inequality, and with a global reaction against the Nazi racism that changed the image

of eugenics from that of a progressive and rational movement for social change to that of an odious instrument of biopolitical aggression, it became increasingly difficult to explicitly use a discourse about race in the public sphere . In fact, some countries continue to use an explicit discourse of race – for example, Britain's Race Relations Act, or the census and other

official enumeration categories of race in the USA and Brazil – but these are deployed in the interests of the post-war hegemonic

ideology, that is, anti-racism. The rationale is that, in order to combat racial inequality, it is necessary to measure it and thus to count by racial category. Sometimes in this process, the word ethnicity is used instead of race, thus blurring the explicit presence of a racial

discourse, while clearly referring to categories previously named as racial . ¶ Meanwhile, it is widely argued that racial thinking and racist ideologies and practices continue, despite the widespread public denial of race as an acceptable mode of discourse (Goldberg 2008; Lentin and Titley 2011). This argument often refers to cultural racism – in which reference to biological differences are submerged or replaced by reference to cultural attributes, which serve to differentiate categories of people

that look very similar to the categories of older, more explicitly racial discourses; culture may also be essentialized and naturalized (even biologized) in ways that also blur the difference between cultural and biological modes of reference. A key feature here, noted by various commentators (Stolcke 1995; Miles and Brown 2003), is a discourse about how people naturally prefer to ‘be with their own kind’. The notion of ‘kind’ in this discourse is superficially and convincingly defined in terms of culture – people feeling comfortable with others who share their language, practices, values, beliefs, and so on. However, (1) such a proclivity is said to be a natural human tendency (hardwired in by evolution in sociobiological versions of the argument), thus bringing biology into the equation; and (2) if people do want to ‘stick with their own’, then they will also want to breed with them, which tends to make biology and

culture overlap: kinship is a key domain in which ideas about biocultural difference are reproduced (Wade 2002).¶ Arguments adducing the persistence of racism locate it at different levels. It may be identified in the practices of the state, for example in racial profiling practices – secret and explicitly racial, or open and euphemized as ‘cultural’ – aimed at monitoring ‘security’; or in the idea that British immigration policy after 1950 actively sought to restrict the entry of New Commonwealth (i.e. non-white) immigrants, without mentioning race. Racism may also be identified in the everyday practices of ordinary citizens, most obviously those of a far-right persuasion, but also many who are just ‘doing the best for their families’, when they avoid certain schools and areas, or when they just prefer to ‘stick to their own’. These two levels can come together in the identification of ‘institutional racism’, when the everyday prejudices of state agents (e.g. police ‘canteen culture’) drive practices such as racial profiling, independently of official policy.¶ What we are faced with here is a sea change towards anti-racism and the silencing of race, alongside the persistence of differentiations and discriminations of a racial character (Winant 2004). This deep-seated tension is not unusual. It is a

reflection of the tension in liberalism between ideals of equality and, not just the simple existence of inequalit y, but the way people also actively maintain that inequality, defending what they have or want to have against others seen as competitors, as less deserving, or as a threat. Practices of inclusion always coexist with practices of exclusion in changing ways and with a shifting balance between them: the task of the historian and the social scientist is to identify how these practices operate and interweave.

28

Surveillance ReformFocusing on government surveillance without tackling corporate data collection locks in place corporate domination and authoritarianism Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

The surveillance state with its immense data mining capabilities represents a historical rupture from traditional notions of modernity with its emphasis on enlightenment, reason, and the social contract. The older modernity held up the ideals of justice, equality, freedom, and democracy, however flawed. The investment in public goods was seen as central to a social contract that implied that all citizens should have access to those provisions, resources, institutions, and benefits that expanded their sense of agency and social responsibility. The new modernity and its expanding surveillance net subordinates human needs, public goods, and justice to the demands of commerce and the accumulation of capital, at all costs. The contemporary citizen is primarily a consumer and entrepreneur wedded to the belief that the most desirable features of human behavior are rooted in a "basic tendency towards

competitive, acquisitive and uniquely self-interested behavior which is the central fact of human social life."23 Modernity is now driven by the imperatives of a savage neoliberal political and economic system that embrace what

Charles Derber and June Sekera call a "public goods deficit" in which "budgetary priorities" are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow out the welfare state and drastically reduce social provisions as part of a larger neoliberal counter revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and

mega-corporations while selling off public good to private interests.24 Debates about the meaning and purpose of the public and social good have been co-opted by a politics of fear, relegating notions of the civic good, public sphere, and even the very word "public" to the status of a liability, if not a pathology.25 Fear has lost its social connotations and no longer references fear

of social deprivations such as poverty, homelessness, lack of health care, and other fundamental conditions of agency. Fear is now personalized , reduced to an atomized fear that revolves around crime , safety , apocalypse , and survival. In this instance, as the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once warned, modernity now privileges "a disgraceful combination of 'private opulence and public squalor.' "26 This is not surprising given the basic elements of neoliberal policy, which as Jeremy Gilbert indicates, include the: privatization of public assets, contraction and centralization of democratic institutions, deregulation of labor markets, reductions in progressive taxation, restrictions on labor organization, labor market deregulation, active encouragement of competitive and entrepreneurial modes of relation across the public and commercial sectors.27

Under the regime of neoliberal capitalism, the expansion of government and corporate surveillance measures become synonymous with new forms of governance and an intensification of material and symbolic violence.28 Rather than wage a war on terrorists, the neoliberal security state wages a war on dissent in the interest of consolidating class power. How else to explain the merging of corporate and state surveillance systems updated with the most sophisticated shared technologies used in the last few years to engage in illicit counterintelligence operations, participate in industrial espionage29 and disrupt and attack pro-democracy movements such as Occupy and a range of other nonviolent social movements protesting a myriad of state and corporate injustices.30 This type of illegal spying in the interest of stealing industrial secrets and closing down dissent by peaceful protesters has less to do with national security than it has to do with mimicking the abuses and tactics used by the Stasi in East Germany during the Cold War. How else to explain why many law-abiding citizens "and those with dissenting views within the law can be singled out for

surveillance and placed on wide-ranging watch lists relating to terrorism."31Public outrage seems to disappear, with few

exceptions, as the state and its corporate allies do little to protect privacy rights, civil liberties and a culture of critical exchange and dissent. Even worse, they shut down a culture of questioning and engage in forms of domestic terrorism. State violence in this case becomes the preferred antidote to the demanding work of reflection, analysis, dialogue and imagining the points of views of others. The war against dissent waged by secret counterintelligence agencies is a mode of domestic terrorism in which, as David Graeber has argued, violence is "often the preferred

weapon of the stupid."32Modernity in this instance has been updated, wired and militarized. No longer content to play

out its historical role of a modernized panopticon, it has become militarized and a multilayered source of insecurity, entertainment and commerce. In addition, this new stage of modernity is driven not only by the need to watch but

also the will to punish. Phone calls, emails, social networks and almost every other vestige of electronic communication are now being collected and stored by corporate and government organizations such as the NSA and numerous other intelligence agencies. Snowden's exposure

29

of the massive reach of the surveillance state with its biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies, miniature drones, high speed computers, massive data mining capabilities and other stealth technologies made visible "the stark realities of disappearing privacy and

diminishing liberties."33 But the NSA and the other 16 intelligence agencies are not the only threat to privacy, freedom and democracy. Corporations now have their own intelligence agencies and data mining offices and use these agencies and new surveillance technologies largely to spy on those who question the abuses of corporate power. The emergence of fusion centers exemplifies how power is now a mix of corporate, local, federal and global intelligence agencies, all sharing information that can be used by

various agencies to stifle dissent and punish pro-democracy activists. What is clear is that this combination of gathering and sharing information often results in a lethal mix of anti-democratic practices in which surveillance now extends not only to potential terrorists but to all law-abiding citizens. Within this sinister web of secrecy,

suspicion, state-sanctioned violence and illegality, the culture of authoritarianism thrives and poses a dangerous threat to democratic freedoms and rights. It also poses a threat to those outside the United States who, in the name of national security, are subject to "a grand international campaign with drones and special operations forces that is generating potential terrorists at every step."34 Behind this veil of concentrated power and secrecy lies not only a threat to privacy rights but the very real threat of violence on both a domestic and global level.

Corporate surveillance outweighs – government reform masks more insidious surveillance Giroux 14 [Henry A., Global TV Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, 10 February 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state]

Everything that moves is monitored, along with information that is endlessly amassed and stored by private and government agencies. No one,

it seems, can escape the tentacles of the NSA or the spy agencies that are scouring mobile phone apps for personal data and intercepting computer and cellphone shipments to plant tracking devices and malware in them.11 Surveillance is now global, reaching beyond borders that no longer provide an obstacle to collecting information

and spying on governments, individuals, prominent politicians, corporations and pro-democracy protest groups. The details of our daily lives are not only on full display but are being monitored , collected and stored in databanks waiting to be used for commercial, security or political purposes. At the same time, the right to privacy is eagerly given up by millions of people for the wonders of social networking or the varied seductions inspired by consumer fantasies . The loss of privacy, anonymity and confidentiality also has had the adverse effect of providing the basis for what Bauman and David Lyons call the undemocratic process of "social sorting," in which different populations are subject to differential treatment extending from being protected by the state to being killed by drone attacks launched under the auspices of global surveillance and state power.12Privacy is no longer a principled and cherished civil right. On the contrary, it has been absorbed and

transformed within the purview of a celebrity and market-driven culture in which people publicize

themselves and their innermost secrets to promote and advance their personal brand. Or it is often a principle invoked by conservatives who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled when confronted with ideas or arguments that unsettle

their notions of common sense or their worldviews. It is worth repeating that privacy has mostly become synonymous with a form of self-generated, nonstop performance - a type of public relations in which privacy makes possible the unearthing of

secrets, a cult of commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, self-referencing narratives, all of which serve to expand the pleasure quotient of surveillance while normalizing its expanding practices and modes of repression that Orwell could never have imagined. Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of surveillance, according to Bauman and Lyons, today

30

We seem to experience no joy in having secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines….Everything private is now done, potentially, in public - and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet 'can't be

made to forget' anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private.13Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions, technologies and disciplinary apparatuses

wielded by the new corporate-government surveillance state. Surveillance has not only become more pervasive, intruding

into the most private of spaces and activities in order to collect massive amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday activities so as to be taken-for-granted . Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become normalized. Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive capabilities of the the new high-powered digital technologies

of surveillance and display, nor could he have envisioned the growing web of political, cultural and economic partnerships between modes of government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting almost every form of communication in which human beings engage. What is new in the post-Orwellian world is not just the emergence of new and powerful technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on people and assess personal information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell information to advertising agencies, but the emergence of a widespread culture of surveillance. Intelligence networks now inhabit the world of Disney as well as the secret domains of the NSA and the FBI.I think the renowned intellectual

historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting that surveillance is about more than the violation of privacy rights, however important. Under the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems interested in contesting. And it is precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that puts at risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.14

31

Terrorism Their advantage is a sham rooted in vested interests and violent national identity formation—the impact is expansive structural violence and racist political subjectivityBryan 12 [Research Assistant at Middle East Institute. MScECON Candidate: Security Studies at Aberystwyth University, The

Popularity of the ‘New Terrorism’ Discourse, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/06/22/the-popularity-of-the-new-terrorism-discourse/]

The opening sentence of a textbook on terrorism states, “Terrorism has been a dark feature of human behavior since the dawn of recorded history” (Martin, 2010, 3). If this is the case, what makes the ‘new terrorism’ different from the old? According to the

mainstream orthodoxy on terrorism, the old terrorism was generally characterized by: left wing ideology; the use of small scale , conventional weapons; clearly identifiable organizations or movements with equally clear political and social messages; specific selection of targets and “explicit grievances championing specific classes or ethnonational groups” (Martin, 2010, 28).¶ Also according to the orthodoxy, the shift to the new terrorism, on the other hand, is thought to have emerged in the early 1990s (Jackson, 2011) and took root in mass consciousness with the September 11, 2001

terrorist attacks on the U.S. (Martin, 2010, 3). The new terrorism is characterized by: “loose, cell-based networks with minimal lines of

command and control,” “desired acquisition of high-intensity weapons and weapons of mass destruction” (Martin, 2010, 27), “motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology and it is aimed at causing mass causality and maximum destruction” (Jackson, 2007, 179-180).¶ However, these

dichotomous definitions of the old and new types of terrorism are not without problems. The first major problem is that terrorism has been characterized by the same fundamental qualities throughout history. Some of the superficial characteristics, the means of implementation (e.g. the invention of the Internet or dynamite) or the discourse (communism vs. Islam) may have evolved, but the central components remain the

same. The second major problem is that the characterization of new terrorism is, at best, rooted in a particular

political ideology, biased and inaccurate. At worst, it is racist, promotes war mongering and has contributed to millions of deaths. As David Rapoport states:¶ Many contemporary studies begin … by stating that although terrorism has always been a feature of social existence, it became ‘significant’ … when it ‘increased in frequency’ and took on ‘novel dimensions’ as an international or transnational activity, creating in the process a new ‘mode of conflict’ (1984, 658).¶ Isabelle Duyvesteyn points out that this would indicate evidence for the emergence of a new type of terrorism, if it were not for the fact that the article was written in 1984 and described a situation from the 1960s (Duyvesteyn, 2004, 439). It seems that there have been many new phases of terrorism over the years. So many so that the definition of ‘new’ has been stretched significantly and applied relatively across decades. Nevertheless, the idea that this terrorism, that which the War on Terror (WoT) is directed against, is the most significant and unique form of terrorism that has taken hold in the popular and political discourse. Therefore, it is useful to address each of the so-called new characteristics in turn.¶ The first characteristic is the idea that new terrorism is based on loosely organized cell-based networks as opposed to the traditional terrorist groups, which were highly localized and hierarchical in nature. An oft-cited example of a traditional terrorist group is the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who operated under a military structure and in a relatively (in contrast to the perceived transnational operations of al-Qaeda) localized capacity. However, some of the first modern terrorists were not highly organized groups but small fragmented groups of anarchists. These groups were heeding the call of revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and other contemporary anarchists to achieve anarchism, collectivism and atheism via violent means (Morgan, 2001, 33). Despite the initial, self-described “amorphous” nature of these groups, they were a key force in the Russian Revolution (Maximoff, G.). Furthermore, leading anarchist philosophers of the Russian Revolution argued that terrorists “should organize themselves into small groups, or cells” (Martin, 2010, 217). These small groups cropped up all around Russia and Europe in subsequent years and formed an early form of a “loosely organized cell-based network” not unlike modern day al Qaeda. Duyvesteyn further notes that both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964, and Hezbollah, founded 1982, operate on a network structure with very little central control over groups (2004, 444).¶ The second

problematic idea of new terrorism is that contemporary terrorist groups aim to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction

(WMDs). This belief is simply not supported by empirical evidence. One of the key problems with this theory is that WMDs are significantly more difficult to obtain and utilize than most people understand. Even if a terrorist

group were to obtain a biological WMD, “Biologist Matthew Meselson calculates that it would take a ton of nerve gas or five tons of mustard gas to produce heavy causalities among unprotected people in an open area of one square kilometer” (Mueller, 2005, 488).

And that’s only an example of the problem with the implementation of WMDs, assuming they are acquired, transported and desirable by a terrorist group in the first place. Additional problems, such as the fact that WMDs “are extremely difficult to deploy and control” (Mueller, 2005, 488) and that making a bomb “is an extraordinarily difficult task” (Mueller, 2005, 489),

further diminish the risk. It is interesting to note that, while the potential dangers of WMDs are much lauded, the attacks of September 11th were low tech and had been technologically possible for more than 100 years. Mueller also states,

“although nuclear weapons have been around for well over half a century, no state has ever given

another state (much less a terrorist group) a nuclear weapon that the recipient could use independently” (2005, 490).¶ All of this talk about the difficultly of acquiring and deploying WMDs (by non-state agents), is not to diminish the question of what terrorists have to gain by utilizing these

weapons. It is important to question whether it would even further the aims of terrorists to use WMDs.

The evidence suggests otherwise . In the “Politics of Fear” Jackson states, “Mass casualties are most often

32

counterproductive to terrorist aims – they alienate their supporters and can provoke harsh reprisals

from the authorities […]” in addition, “[…] they would undermine community support, distort the terrorist’s political message, and invite over-whelming retaliation” (2007, 196-197). Despite popular rhetoric to the contrary, terrorists are “rational political actors and are acutely aware of these dangers” (Jackson, 2007, 197). Government

appointed studies on this issue have supported these views.¶ This leads us to the third problem with new terrorism, which is the idea that we are facing a new era of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism rather than political ideology. As stated previously, earlier, so-called traditional forms of terrorism are associated with left wing, political ideology, whereas contemporary terrorists are described as having “anti-modern goals of returning society to an idealized version of the past and are therefore necessarily anti-democratic, anti-progressive and, by implication, irrational” (Gunning and Jackson, 3). Rapoport argues the idea that religious terrorists are irrational, saying, “what seems to be distinctive about modern [religious] terrorists, their belief that terror can be organized rationally, represents or distorts a major theme peculiar to our own culture […]” (1984, 660). Conveniently for the interests of the political elites, as we shall see later, the idea of irrational fanaticism makes the notion of negotiation and listening to the demands of the other impossible. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the U.S. has, for decades, given billions of dollars in aid to the State of Israel, which could be argued to be a fundamentalist, religious organization that engages in the terrorization of a group of people. Further, it is difficult to speak of The Troubles in Northern Ireland without speaking of the religious conflict, yet it was never assumed that the IRA was “absolutist, inflexible, unrealistic, lacking in political pragmatism, and not amenable to negotiation” (Gunning and Jackson, 4). Rapaport further reinforces the idea that religious terrorism goes back centuries by saying, “Before the nineteenth century, religion provided the only acceptable justifications

for terror…” (1984, 659).¶ As we have seen here, problems with the discourse of new terrorism include the fact that these elements of terrorism are neither new nor are the popular beliefs of the discourse supported by empirical evidence. The question remains, then, why is the idea of new terrorism so popular? This question will be addressed next.¶ Political Investment in New Terrorism¶ There are two

main categories that explain the popularity of new terrorism. The first category is government and political investment in the propagation of the idea that a distinct, historically unknown type of terrorism exists. The mainstream discourse [1]

reinforces, through statements by political elites, media, entertainment and every other way imaginable, the culture of violence, militarism and feelings of fear. Through mass media, cultural norms and the integration of neoliberal ideology into society, people are becoming increasingly desensitized to human rights issues, war, social justice and social welfare, not to mention apathetic to the political process in general.¶ The discourse of the WoT is merely the contemporary incarnation of this culture of fear and violence. In the past, various threats have included American Indians, women, African Americans, communists, HIV/AIDS and drugs, to name but a few (Campbell, 1992). It can be argued that there are four main political functions of

terrorism discourse. The first is as a distraction from other, more immediate and domestic social problems such as poverty, employment, racial inequality, health and the environment. The second, more sinister function is to control dissent. In looking at both of these issues Jackson states:¶ There are a number of clear political advantages to be gained from the creation of social anxiety and moral panics. In the first place, fear is a disciplining agent

and can be effectively deployed to de-legitimise dissent, mute criticism, and constrain internal opponents. […] Either way, its primary function is to ease the pressures of accountability for political elites. As instrument of elite rule, political fear is in effect a political project aimed at reifying existing structures of power. (Politics of

Fear, 2007, 185).¶ Giroux further reinforces the idea that a culture of fear creates conformity and deflects attention from government accountability by saying, “the ongoing appeal to jingoistic forms of patriotism divert the public from addressing a number of pressing domestic and foreign

issues; it also contributes to the increasing suppression of dissent” (2003, 5).¶ Having a problem that is “ubiquitous, catastrophic, and fairly opaque” (Jackson, Politics of Fear, 2007, 185) is useful to political elites, because it is nearly impossible to address the efficacy of combating the problem . At least, empirical evaluation can be, and is, easily discouraged in academic circles through research funding directives. Domestic problems such as the unemployment rate or health care reform, on the other hand, are directly measurable and heavily monitored by domestic sources. It is possible to account for the success or failure of policies designed to address these types of problems and the (re)election of politicians often depends heavily on success in these areas. However, the public is neither involved on a participative level nor, often, socially aware of what is happening in murkier and unreachable areas like foreign policy.¶ The third political investment in maintaining the terrorism discourse has to do with economics. “At a

material level, there are a great many vested interests in maintaining the widespread condition of fear, not least for the military-industrial complex which benefits directly from increased spending on national security” (Jackson, Politics of Fear, 2007, 186). This is true with all forms of crime and insecurity as all of them factor into the greater security-industrial complex. Not only do these industries employ millions of people and support their families, they boost the economy. Barry Buzan talks of these the importance of these issues to both the

government and the public in terms of a ‘threat-deficit’ – meaning that U.S. policy and society is dependent on having an external threat (Buzan, 2007, 1101).¶ The fourth key political interest in terrorism discourse is constructing a national identity . This will be discussed more thoroughly in the following section, however, it is important to acknowledge the role the WoT (and previous threats) has had on constructing and reinforcing a collective identity. Examples of this can be seen in the discourse and the subsequent reaction to anyone daring to step outside the parameters of the Bush Administration-established narrative in the days immediately following the September 11th attacks. A number of journalists, teachers and university professors lost their jobs for daring to speak out in criticism of U.S. policy and actions following the attacks. In 2001, Lynne Cheney attacked the then deputy chancellor of the New York City Schools, Judith Rizzo, for saying “terrorist attacks demonstrated the importance of

teaching about Muslim cultures” (Giroux, 2003, 22). According to Giroux, this form of jingoistic patriotism “becomes a euphemism for shutting down dissent, eliminating critical dialogue, and condemning critical citizenship in the interest of conformity and a

33

dangerous departure from what it means to uphold a viable democracy” (2003, 24). The message is, we are not the other (Muslims), patriotism equals agreement and compliance and our identity is based on the shared values of liberty and justice.¶ According to Carol Winkler, “Negative ideographs contribute to our collective identity by branding behavior that is unacceptable … American society defines itself as much by its opposition to tyranny and slavery as it does by a commitment to liberty” (Winkler, 2006, 12). Terrorism, and by association in this case, Islam, functions as a negative ideograph of American values. It thereby tells us what our values and our identity are by

telling us who the enemy is and who we are not. According to Jackson, “[…] some have argued that Western identity is dependent on the appropriation of a backward, illiberal, violent Islamic ‘other’ against which the West can organize a collective liberal, civilized ‘self’ and consolidate its cultural and political norms” (Jackson, Constructing Enemies, 2007, 420).¶ Through this analysis we can see there are four key ways in which the hegemonic system is invested in propagating a culture of fear and

violence and terrorism discourse. Not only is it key for political elites to support this system, it is also crucial that there be an ever renewing threat that is uniquely different from past threats . These new threats allow for the investment of significantly more resources, the continuation of the economy, the renewal of a strong sense of cultural identity and the indoctrination and obedience of new generations of society. This essay will now look at how individual and collective psychology supports the popularity of the new terrorism discourse.¶ Psychology of the Masses¶ The second category of reasons why new terrorism discourse is popular can be called the psychology of the masses. There are a number of factors that fall under this category such as: the hyper-reality of the modern era; the culture of fear; the carryover of historical archetypes and the infiltration of neoliberal values into cultural norms. The topic of social and individual psychology and how it relates to the propagation and acceptance of hegemonic discourse is broad. It is also an important aspect of critical terrorism studies and merits further exploration. However, in this section will outline the basis for the popularity of new terrorism discourse and discuss several ways in which this popularity is manifested and reinforced in contemporary society.

Their method is suspect—positivist echo chambers insulate their authors from criticism – legitimizes racist violenceRaphael 9 [Sam, Kingston University, Critical terrorism studies, ed. Richard Jackson, 49-51]

Over the past thirty years, a small but politically-significant academic field of ‘ terrorism studies’ has emerged from the relatively disparate research efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, and consolidated its position as a viable subset of ‘security studies’ (Reid, 1993: 22; Laqueur, 2003: 141). Despite continuing concerns that the concept of ‘terrorism’, as nothing more than a specific socio-political phenomenon, is not substantial enough to warrant an entire field of study (see Horgan and Boyle, 2008), it is nevertheless possible to identify a core set of scholars writing on the subject who together constitute an ‘epistemic community’ (Haas,

1992: 2–3). That is, there exists a ‘network of knowledge-based experts’ who have ‘recognised expertise and competence in a particular

domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain’. This community, or ‘network of productive authors’, has operated by establishing research agendas, recruiting new members, securing funding opportunities, sponsoring conferences, maintaining informal contacts, and linking separate research groups (Reid, 1993, 1997). Regardless of the largely academic debate over whether the study of terrorism should constitute an

independent field, the existence of a clearly-identifiable research community (with particular individuals at its core) is a social fact.2¶ Further, this community has traditionally had significant influence when it comes to the formulation of government policy, particularly in the United States. It is not the case that the academic field of terrorism studies operates solely in the ivory towers of higher

education; as noted in previous studies (Schmid and Jongman, 1988: 180; Burnett and Whyte, 2005), it is a community which has intricate and multifaceted links with the structures and agents of state power, most obviously in Washington. Thus, many recognised terrorism experts have either had prior employment with, or major research contracts from, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and other key US Government agencies (Herman and O’Sullivan, 1989: 142–190; RAND, 2004). Likewise, a high proportion of ‘core experts’ in the field (see below)

have been called over the past thirty years to testify in front of Congress on the subject of terrorism (Raphael, forthcoming). Either way, these scholars have fed their ‘knowledge’ straight into the policymaking process in the US.3¶ The close relationship between the academic field of terrorism studies and the US state means that it is critically important to analyse the research output from key experts within the community. This is particularly the case because of the aura of objectivity surrounding the terrorism ‘knowledge’ generated by academic experts. Running throughout the core literature is a positivist assumption, explicitly stated or otherwise, that the research conducted is apolitical and objective (see for example, Hoffman, 1992: 27; Wilkinson, 2003). There is little to no reflexivity on behalf of the scholars, who

see themselves as wholly dissociated from the politics surrounding the subject of terrorism. This reification of academic knowledge

about terrorism is reinforced by those in positions of power in the US who tend to distinguish the experts from other kinds of overtly political actors. For example, academics are introduced to Congressional hearings in a manner which privileges their nonpartisan input:¶ Good morning. The Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism meets in open session to receive testimony and discuss the present and future course of terrorism in the Middle East. . . . It has been the Terrorism Panel’s practice, in the interests of objectivity and gathering all the facts, to pair classified briefings and open briefings. . . . This way we garner the best that the classified world of intelligence has to offer and the best from independent scholars working in universities, think tanks, and other

institutions . . .¶ (Saxton, 2000, emphasis added)¶ The representation of terrorism expertise as ‘independent’ and as providing ‘objectivity’ and ‘facts’ has significance for its contribution to the policymaking process in the US.

34

This is particularly the case given that, as we will see, core experts tend to insulate the broad direction of US policy from critique. Indeed,

as Alexander George noted, it is precisely because ‘they are trained to clothe their work in the trappings of objectivity, independence and scholarship’ that expert research is ‘particularly effective in securing influence and respect for’ the claims made by US policymakers (George, 1991b: 77).¶ Given this, it becomes vital to subject the content of terrorism studies to close scrutiny. Based upon a wider, systematic study of the research output of key figures within the field (Raphael, forthcoming), and building upon previous critiques of terrorism expertise (see Chomsky and Herman, 1979; Herman, 1982; Herman and O’Sullivan, 1989; Chomsky, 1991; George, 1991b; Jackson, 2007g), this chapter aims to provide a critical analysis of some of the major claims made by these experts and to reveal the ideological functions served by much of the research. Rather than doing so across the board, this chapter focuses on research on the subject of terrorism from the global South which is seen to challenge US

interests. Examining this aspect of research is important, given that the ‘threat’ from this form of terrorism has led the US and its allies to intervene throughout the South on behalf of their national security, with profound consequences for the human security of people in the region.¶ Specifically, this chapter examines two major problematic features

which characterise much of the field’s research. First, in the context of anti-US terrorism in the South, many important claims made by key terrorism experts simply replicate official US government analyses . This replication is facilitated primarily through a sustained and

uncritical reliance on selective US government sources, combined with the frequent use of

unsubstantiated assertion. This is significant, not least because official analyses have often been revealed as presenting a politically-motivated

account of the subject. Second, and partially as a result of this mirroring of government claims, the field tends to insulate from critique

those ‘counterterrorism’ policies justified as a response to the terrorist threat. In particular, the experts overwhelmingly ‘silence’ the way terrorism is itself often used as a central strategy within US-led counterterrorist interventions in the South. That is, ‘counterterrorism’ campaigns executed or supported by Washington

often deploy terrorism as a mode of controlling violence (Crelinsten, 2002: 83; Stohl, 2006: 18–19).¶ These two features of the

literature are hugely significant. Overall, the core figures in terrorism studies have, wittingly or otherwise, produced a body of work

plagued by substantive problems which together shatter the illusion of ‘objectivity’. Moreover, the research output can be seen

to serve a very particular ideological function for US foreign policy. Across the past thirty years, it has largely served the interests of US state power, primarily through legitimising an extensive set of coercive interventions

in the global South undertaken under the rubric of various ‘war(s) on terror’. After setting out the method by which key experts within the field have been identified, this chapter will outline the two main problematic features which characterise much of the research output by these scholars. It will then discuss the function that this research serves for the US state.

35

Democracy The structure of Democracy legitimized surveillance- worsening biopower Savell ’01 (Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. "Human Rights in the Age of Technology: Can Law Rein in the Medical Juggernaut" [2001] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/SydLRev/2001/19.html)

Hunt and Wickham interpret Foucault as distinguishing law and discipline as 'dual but opposing They argue that whilst Foucault frequently 'counterposes law and discipline in order to highlight the distinctiveness of the modem disciplines"87 he is best understood as 'drawing attention to the interaction and interdependence of disciplinary practices and their legal framework."~~ They offer two interpretations of the relationship between law and discipline in Foucault's thought. The first is the 'broadly historical thesis'ls9 that the 'advent of representational democracy existed side by side with the rise of an expanding disciplinary with the result that law legitimated disciplinary power and merely masked the domination of normalising discourses. The second 'and more interesting'191 interpretation is that law exists in competition with disciplinary power, without resolution . Expanding on this argument they write: I do not think it is possible or desirable for a court to so exercise its jurisdiction. In all proceedings \\here expert opinions are expressed. those opinions are listened to with great respect: but in the end. the validity of the opinion has to be weighed and judged by the court . . . For a court to automatically accept an expert opinion. simpl) because it was concurred in by another appropriate expert. ~vould be a denial of the function of the court.198

Liberal Democracy helps rationalize or obscure power relations- worsens biopower Torgerson ’99 (Professor Trent University “The promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and Public Spheres” 1999)

The democracy actually achieved under liberal democracy has largely come as a result of struggles over the past two centuries or so by subordinated peoples who have sought to gain some measure of power against starkly authoritarian and oligarchical institutions. With the rise of representative government, the gradual extension of suffrage to people who had been formally and informally excluded by class, race, and gender serves as a marker of these historical struggles. But the advent of universal adult suffrage in liberal democracies has by no means eliminated the significance of authoritarian and oligarchical patterns in social, economic, and state institutions. Liberal democracy never pretended to do away with the dramatic economic and social inequalities of capitalism; these were conceived as necessary and legitimate. There was, of course, the supposed equality of the market. All were proclaimed formally equal in the sphere of the market--capitalists and workers, rich and poor alike--whether or not they had anything more to sell than their skins. Demands for social justice were in part eventually (and rather grudgingly) accommodated with welfare-state policies that bolstered consumer demand and promoted mass acquiesence. Still, liberal democracy singles out government as an island of democracy in an undemocratic sea of economic and social relations. The effect is to render democracy largely a governmental formality, something of a symbol that fosters the legitimacy of the established order while helping to rationalize or obscure actual power relations.

36

GovernmentalityFocusing on governmentality in the plan helps exert a form of social control, and therefore biopowerWong ’13 [Jessica Chantelle, is a Junior Consultant with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) in Bangkok,

Thailand. She works with the Inclusive Finance team on a range of ongoing global financial inclusion programmes in the Asia and Pacific region. Jessica holds a Master Degree with a Political Science major from Lund University in Sweden. , “Risk-Management Approaches in the Post 9/11 Era”]

In examining Foucault’s (2007) notion of biopower, it is also important to address the concept of governmentality, or the rationalities of the government, which is an analytical approach for regulating people. Foucault states the concept of governmentality embraces the following three ideas: (1) it is formed through institutions and procedures allowing the exercise of power over the population, (2) it holds greater position over other types of power including sovereignty and discipline and (3) it includes the process of the governmentalization of an administrative state (Foucault 2007, p. 144). Foucault's idea of governmentality can be observed as a method of, “thinking about the nature of the practice of government (who can govern; what governing is; what or who is governed)” (Gordon 1991, cited in Henman, 2011, p. 289). Therefore, the idea of governmentality helps understand the notion of power in which it can be conceived as a form of social control that is embedded within norms and institutions. Governmentality is described as the control of a population exercised over subjects that are free; however, “free in the sense that government entails a subject who is not simply the object of power, but who can both resist it, and reshape its modalities” (Milchman & Rosenberg 2005, p. 339). Foucault (2003, p. 40) argues, resistance towards this form of domination allows for a, “new right that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty”. Foucault’s idea of regimes of biopower and their disciplinary networks suggests that, biopower replaces sovereignty. This appears when technology allows, “man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive” (Foucault 2003, p. 254).

37

Domestic Citizenship“Domestic” deems a person as a citizen of the United StatesTillinghast ’84 [David R, International and corporate tax lawyer. J.D. from Yale, “A Matter of Definition: Foreign and Domestic Taxpayers”, Fall 1984]

From the beginning of the federal income tax system, an individual who is a citizen of the United States has been deemed a domestic taxpayer, subject to tax on world-wide income regardless of the individual's residence or domicile. The Supreme Court quickly held this rule to be constitutional 9 and in practice the rule seems to have raised few problems of interpretation.

The concept of citizenship acts as a mechanism for biopowerHoudt ’08 [Friso van Houdt is Assistant Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He studied criminology and sociology at the same university. Inspired by the governmentality perspective he worked on a dissertation that studied the striking changes in the government of crime, citizenship and migration in the Netherlands and the EU., Citizenship as an instrument of bio-power: Identifying changes in the functioning of citizenship in the Netherlands, 2008]

What has been argued so far is that citizenship can be used strategically by different types of power, for example the nation-state (as a power) or society (as a power) in different types of situations . In the situation of the crisis of the welfare-state and migration the nation-state reacts by using formal citizenship to exclude people from its soil or from entrance to the welfare state whereas citizenship was used before as a mechanism of inclusion. In the situation of the decoupling of the

nation/state and society as a consequence of immigration, ‘ society’ uses citizenship as social closure, first to define itself as a moral space and second for purposes of integration and homogenization. With this in mind it can

be argued citizenship is a mechanism to regulate a population, something Foucault has called ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 1976). Bio-power has developed from the 18th century onwards and can be described as the situation in which the control of the ‘social body’ becomes the end of political power. Political power means for Foucault not only the power of the state, he therefore goes beyond Marx and Weber because the state is merely one manifestation of political power: ‘power constitutes and expresses itself through multiple sources, of which the state is merely one’ (Cohen, 2006, p.252-253). Next to the state for example also society ‘has’ power. Bio-power works both on a micro-level were it tries to influence the individual body (anatomic-politics) as well as on a meso/macro-level were it influences the ‘social body’ (bio-politics). Foucault argues it is sexuality which is positioned at the crossroad of both anatomic- and bio-politic. It is interesting to notice that maybe citizenship too holds this position. Next to sexuality also citizenship holds a junction point of the two politics of

bio-power (anatomic- and bio-politics). Next to sexuality citizenship too is a mechanism of regulating the social body . In

this paper it has been showed that citizenship is an instrument with which it becomes possible to manage a population for example by differentiating them (c.f. Hindess, 2000). This paper also showed that bio-power is not only working in the nation-state but it can also be working in society. Bio-power of the state in relation to citizenship was illustrated by the use of formal citizenship by the nation-state. After a period in which the formal dimension of citizenship was used to include people and as a consequence of the crisis of the welfare state and immigration

as a social problem, formal citizenship is used to exclude people. Consequently a differentiation of persons has taken place.

Based on citizenship it has become possible to differentiate between: citizens (full formal citizenship); denizens (bounded citizenship); aliens (full citizenship in other nation-states) (Hammar, 1990) and; illegals (Entzinger & Engbersen, 2004). In a glocalizing world the nation-state tries to operate and make itself useful by

transforming the functioning of citizenship and regulating the population on its soil. Bio-power of society in relation to citizenship was illustrated by the use of moral citizenship. In a period society has trouble defining itself it uses citizenship to create a moral space and to differentiate between real citizens and unreal citizens. Moral citizenship of society means active participation in society, to contribute to the health of society (social cohesion). Next to (moral) citizenship as political participation in the nation-state stands bio-political participation in society

38

Protection of RightsDeclarations of rights and the protection of rights establish the sovereignty of a citizen over others, reinforcing juridical, sovereign and biopolitical powerAgamben ’95 [Giorgio, an Italian continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg 76-78]

Declarations of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which the passage from divinely authorized

royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished. This passage assures the exception of life in the new state order that

will succeed the collapse of the ancient régime. The fact that in this process the “subject” is, as has been noted, transformed into a “citizen” means that birth – which is to say, bare natural life as such – here for the first time becomes (thanks to a transformation whose biopolitical consequences we are only beginning to discern today) the immediate bearer of sovereignty . The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancient régime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably

united in the body of the “sovereign subject” so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted. It is not possible to understand the “national” and biopolitical development and vocation of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at its basis is not man as a free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare life, the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested with the principle of sovereignty. The fiction implicit here is that birth

immediately becomes nation such that there can be no interval of separation [scarto] between the two terms. Rights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen. Only if we understand this essential historical function of the doctrine of rights can we grasp the development and Metamorphosis of declarations of rights in our century . When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the

devastation of Europe’s geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of the sovereign decision. We are used to condensing the essence of National Socialist ideology into the syntagm “blood and soil” (Blut und

Boden). When Alfred Rosenberg wanted to express his party’s vision of the world, it is precisely to this hendiadys

that he turned. “The National Socialist vision of the world,” he writes, “springs from the conviction that soil and blood constitute what is essential about Germanness, and that it is therefore in reference to these two givens that a cultural and state politics must be directed” (Blut und Ehre, p. 242). Yet it has too often

been forgotten that this formula, which is so highly determined politically, has, in truth, an innocuous juridical origin. The formula is nothing other than the concise expression of the two criteria that, already in Roman law, served to identify citizenship (that is, the primary inscription of life in the state order): ius soli (birth in a certain territory) and ius sanguinis (birth from citizen parents). In the ancien régime, these two traditional juridical criteria had no essential meaning, since they expressed only a relation

of subjugation. Yet with the French Revolution they acquire a new and decisive importance. Citizenship now does not simply identify a generic subjugation to royal authority or a determinate system of laws, nor does it simply embody (as Chalier maintained when he suggested to the convention on September 23,1792, that the title of citizen be substituted for the

traditional title monsieur or sieur in every public act) the new egalitarian principle; citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty and, therefore, literally identifies – to cite Jean-Denis Lanjuinais’s words to the convention – les membres du souverain, “the members of the sovereign .” Hence the centrality (and the ambiguity) of the notion of “citizenship” in modern political thought, which compels Rousseau to say, “No author in France... has understood the true meaning of the term ‘citizen.’ “ Hence too, however, the rapid growth in the course of the French Revolution of regulatory provisions specifying which man was a citizen and which one not, and articulating and gradually restricting the area of the ius soli and the ius sanguinis. Until this time, the questions “What is French? What is German?” had constituted not a political problem but only one theme among others discussed in philosophical anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition, these questions now begin to become essentially political, to the point that, with National Socialism, the answer to the question “Who and what is German?” (and also, therefore, “Who

and what is not German?”) coincides immediately with the highest political task. Fascism and Nazism are, above all,

39

Biopolitics and the rights of man redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when situated – no matter how paradoxical it may seem – in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights. Only this tie between the rights of man and the new biopolitical determination of sovereignty makes it possible to understand the striking fact , which has often been noted by historians of the French Revolution, that at the very moment in which native rights were declared to be inalienable and indefeasible, the rights of man in general were divided into active rights and passive rights. In his Préliminaires de la constitution, Sieyès already clearly stated : Natural and civil rights are those rights for whose preservation society is formed, and political rights are those rights by which society is formed. For the sake of clarity, it would be best to call the first ones passive rights, and the second ones active rights.... All

inhabitants of a country must enjoy the rights of passive citizens ... all are not active citizens. Women, at least in the present state, children, foreigners, and also those who would not at all contribute to the public establishment must have no active influence on public matters . (Écrits politiques, pp. 189-206) And after defining the membres du souverain, the passage of Lan-juinais cited above continues with these words: “Thus children, the insane, minors, women, those condemned to a punishment either restricting personal freedom or bringing disgrace [punition affiletive ou inflammante] ... will not be citizens”

(quoted in Sewell, “Le citoyen,” p. 105). Instead, of viewing these distinctions as a simple restriction of the democratic and egalitarian principle, in flagrant contradiction to the spirit and letter of the declarations, we ought first to grasp their coherent biopolitical meaning. One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty – non political life – is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn. Once zoē is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life is wholly included in the polis – and this much has, by now, already happened – these thresholds pass, as we will see, beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man.

40

Impact

41

General BadBiopower badBerger 4/15, Author at the Foreign Policy Journal, “Empire, Biopower, Spectacle: Notes on Tiqqun,”

https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/empire-biopower-spectacle-notes-on-tiqqun/

Today’s territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. People have been pushed out of their fields, then their streets, then their neighborhoods, and finally and from the hallways of their buildings, in the demented hope of containing all life between the four sweating walls of privacy. The territorial question isn’t the same for us as

it is for the state. For us it’s not about possessing the territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of communes, of circulation, and of solidarities that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.

42

Liberalism bad The impact is a biopolitical protection of life itself, the violent imposition of liberalism that perpetuates structural violence, racism, and global civil war Evans 10 [Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds and Programme Director for

International Relations, “Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century,” Security Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August 2010, pg. 422-424, sage]

Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has been declared .4 Denouncing the illusion that

‘we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored’ (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of peace/civic normality . War accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map- ping out this war–peace continuum than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009). Their ‘liberal war’ thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of making live.

Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission . Hence, while there may still be populations that exist beyond the liberal pale , it is now taken that they should be included. With ‘ liberal peace’ therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination of all forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its own moral and political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is declared in order to achieve it : ‘In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are nonetheless committed also to making war .’ This is the ‘ martial face of liberal power’ that, contrary to the

familiar narrative, is ‘ directly fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing war in its pursuit of peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as

instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize , indeed universalize , war in the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon & Reid’s thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto- theological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with only two possible outcomes: ‘endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul- tures’ (Dillon & Reid,

2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems. Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations , which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear demarcations (them/us, war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit from the possibility of scoring outright victory , retreating , or achieving a lasting negotiated peace by means of political compromise . Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining enmity in advance, war itself becomes just as complex , dynamic , adaptive and radically interconnected as the world of which it is part . That is why ‘any such war to end war becomes a war without end. . . . The project of removing war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and , in principle, continuous and unending process’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on from these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to

suggest that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-chance divide, it is now possible to write of a ‘Global Civil War’ into which all life is openly recruited : Each crisis of global circulation . . . marks out a terrain of global civil war , or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself. . . . What is at stake in this war is the West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms inevitably marks an important

depar- ture. Not only does it illustrate how liberalism gains its mastery by posing fundamental questions of life and death – that is, who is to live and who can be killed – disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a globally ambitious biopolitical imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify their use of military force (Ignatieff,

2003). War, if there is to be one, must be for the unification of the species . This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (‘hearts and minds’) in everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers

43

associated with liberal idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics deployed in the will

to govern illiberal populations. Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood that forms of war have always been aligned with forms of life . Liberal wars are no exception . Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most meaningful expression through the battles waged in its name: At this point we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means . . . . While it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15). What

in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politically settled: political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations of force – the shifting balances, the reversals – in a political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15). David Miliband (2009), without perhaps knowing the full political and philo- sophical implications, appears to subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed deployment: NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our thinking

as our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like our own. The mental models of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st century counterinsurgency . That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the

continuation of warfare by other means. Miliband’s ‘Foucauldian moment’ should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary scale – hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of Newtonian space (i.e. inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he firmly locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war there- fore appearing to be an internal

state of affairs, vanquishing enemies can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has arrived, in which the destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on the success of humanity’s own political strategies. No coincidence, then, that authors like David Kilcullen – a key architect in the formulation of counterinsurgency

strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too much controversy . Viewed from the perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a global civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life . Giving primacy to counter- insurgency, it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-up response in which sovereign/militaristic

forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel- opmental forms of progress (Bell & Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other words a planetary outlook , it collapses the local into the global so that life’s radical interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane

recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the name of local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means . Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast. Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialism’s own brand of warfare by other

means. Foucault was well aware of this his- tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternative histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms – not least ‘civil war’ – for Foucault in particular there was something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily

dangerous simply because location dictates. With enmity instead depending upon the complex , adaptive , dynamic account of life itself , what becomes dangerous emerges from within the liberal imaginary of threat . Violence accordingly can only be sanctioned against those newly appointed enemies of humanity – a phrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species complete, for the sake of planetary survival . Vital in other words to all human existence, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity requires a new moral assay of life that, pitting the

44

universal against the particular , willingly commits violence against any ontological commitment to political difference , even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters . Necessary Violence Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live – selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design – inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman,

1991). Racism thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002). This takes

us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When ‘life itself’ becomes the principal referent for political struggles , power necessarily concerns itself with those biological threats to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making , the biopolitical assay of life necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types : ‘a race that is portrayed as the one true race , the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm , and against those who deviate from that norm , against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage’ (Foucault, 2003: 61).

Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a ‘ permanent presence’ within the political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of threat – the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous ‘Others’ that exist within – that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject , since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt , for political modernity to function one always has to be capable of killing in order to go on living : Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone ; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity ; massacres have become vital . . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to become capable of killing in order to go on living – has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When

Foucault refers to ‘killing’, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: ‘When I say “ killing ”, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder : the fact of exposing someone to death , increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death , expulsion , rejection and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256). Racism makes this process of elimination possible , for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing ‘a break in the domain of life that is under power’s control : the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very

real forms of political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the destiny of a species , when the defence of society gives sanction to very real acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity , that is when the capacity to legitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes altogether more rational , calculated , utilitarian , hence altogether more frightening : When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio- - power’ or ‘bio- politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as

the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’. Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing – the violence that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most ‘ essential characteristics ’ of modern biopolitics is to constantly ‘ redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside’, it is within those sites that ‘ eliminate radically the people that are excluded’ that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a ‘space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media- tion’ (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agamben’s intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence – that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception – has certainly gained wide- spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has

45

been awash with works that have tried to theorize the ‘exceptional times’ in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the ‘Global War on Terror’ have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of

understanding violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when it is associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that take place within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices , there is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be an essential feature of the liberal encounter . Hence, with post-interventionary forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal occupations is removed from the analytical arena .

46

NecropoliticsThe aff’s regulation of the surveillance state is the commission of lawfare --- that animates the necropolitical slaughter of the global periphery Comaroff and Comaroff 7 [John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology,

Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at at Harvard, and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, “Law and disorder in the postcolony,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144]

Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier, the past, too, is being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for having killed local

leaders, unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on.33 By these means is colonialism itself rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to submit to the scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it. And to be reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma.

What imperialism is being indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare : the use of its own penal codes, its administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, to discipline its subjects by means of violence made legible and legal by its own sovereign word. Also, to commit its own ever-so-civilised forms of kleptocracy. Lawfare – the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of

political coercion, even erasure (Comaroff 2001) – is equally marked in postcolonies. As a species of political displacement, it becomes most visible when those who ‘serve’ the state conjure with legalities to act against its citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe regime has consistently passed laws to justify the coercive silencing of its critics. Operation Murambatsvina, ‘Drive Out Trash’, which has forced political opponents out of urban areas under the banner of ‘slum clearance’ – has recently taken this practice to unprecedented depths. Murambatsvina, says the government, is merely an application of the law of the land to raze

dangerous ‘illegal structures’. Lawfare34 may be limited or it may reduce people to ‘bare life’; in Zimbabwe, it has mutated into a necropolitics with a rising body count. But it always seeks to launder visceral power in a wash of legitimacy as it is deployed to strengthen the sinews of state or enlarge the capillaries of capital .

Hence Benjamin’s (1978) thesis that the law originates in violence and lives by violent means; that the legal and the lethal animate one another . Of course, in 1919 Benjamin could not have envisaged the possibility that lawfare might also be a weapon of the weak, turning authority back on itself by commissioning courts to make claims for resources, recognition, voice, integrity,

sovereignty. But this still does not lay to rest the key questions: Why the fetishism of legalities? What are its implications for the play of Law and Dis/order in the postcolony? And are postcolonies different in this respect from other nation-states? The answer to the first question looks obvious. The turn to law would seem to arise directly out of growing anxieties about lawlessness . But this does not explain the displacement of the political into the legal or the turn to the courts to resolve an ever greater range of wrongs. The fetishism, in short, runs deeper than

purely a concern with crime. It has to do with the very constitution of the postcolonial polity. Late modernist

nationhood, it appears, is undergoing an epochal move away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity: a nervous, often xenophobic shift toward heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of neoliberalism – with its impact on population flows, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on geographies of production and accumulation – has heightened this, especially in

former colonies, which were erected from the first on difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because, with growing heterodoxy, legal instruments appear to offer a means of commensuration (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of standardised terms and practices that permit the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and interests across otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage. Hence the flight into a constitutionalism that explicitly embraces heterogeneity in highly individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even where states are paying less and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make human rights into an ever more global, ever more authoritative discourse. But there is something else at work too. A well-recognised corollary of the neoliberal turn, recall, has been the outsourcing by states of many of the conventional operations of governance, including those, like health services,

policing and the conduct of war, integral to the management of life itself. Bureaucracies do retain some of their old functions,

of course. But most 21st century governments have reduced their administrative reach, entrusting ever more to the market and delegating ever more responsibility to citizens as individuals, as volunteers, as classes of actor, social or legal. Under these conditions, especially where the threat of disorder seems immanent, civil

47

law presents itself as a more or less effective weapon of the weak, the strong and everyone in between.

Which, in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare. The court has become a utopic site to which human agency may turn for a medium in which to pursue its ends . This, once again, is particularly so in postcolonies, where bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to begin with; and in which heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the start. Put all this

together and the fetishism of the law seems over-determined . Not only is public life becoming more legalistic, but so, in regulating their own affairs and in dealing with others, are ‘communities’ within the nation-state: cultural communities, religious communities, corporate communities, residential communities, communities of interest, even outlaw communities. Everything , it seems, exists here in the shadow of the law. Which also makes it unsurprising that a ‘culture of legality’ should saturate not just civil order but also its criminal undersides. Take another example from South Africa, where organised crime appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits the means and ends of both the state and the market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen stand-in for those excluded from the national economy (Standing 2003). For their tax-paying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions of government, not least security provision. Illicit corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world often have shadow judicial personnel and convene courts to try offenders against the persons, property and social order over which they exert sovereignty. They also provide the policing that the state either has stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have constitutions. A few are even structured as franchises and, significantly, are said to offer ‘alternative citizenship’ to their members.35 Charles Tilly (1985) once suggested, famously, that

modern states operate much like organised crime. These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states. Self-evidently, the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the criminal underworld feeds the dialectic of law and disorder.

After all, once government outsources its policing services and franchises force, and once outlaw organisations shadow the state by providing protection and dispensing justice, social order itself becomes like a hall of mirrors. What is more, this dialectic has its own geography. A geography of discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties. We said a moment ago that communities of all kinds have become ever more legalistic in regulating their affairs; it is often in the process of so doing, in fact, that they become communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of objectification. Herein lies their will to sovereignty, which we take to connote the exercise of autonomous control over the lives, deaths and conditions of existence of those who fall within its purview – and the extension over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of law. ‘Lawmaking’, to cite Benjamin (1978: 295) yet again, ‘ is power making .’ But ‘power is the principal of all lawmaking’. In sum, to transform itself into sovereign authority, power demands an architecture of legalities . Or their simulacra .

48

Threat inflationThe 1ac’s maintenance of the illusion of legitimacy results in destabilizing arms races, public backlash, and crackdownsGlennon 14 [Michael, Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 5, “National Security and Double Government”, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf]

If Bagehot’s theory is correct, the United States now confronts a precarious situation. Maintaining the appearance that

Madisonian institutions control the course of national security policy requires that those institutions play a large enough role in the decision-making process to maintain the illusion. But the Madisonians’ role is too visibly shrinking, and the Trumanites’ too visibly expanding, to maintain the plausible impression of Madisonian governance.504 For this reason and others, public confidence in the Madisonians has sunk to new lows.505 The Trumanites have resisted transparency far more successfully than have the Madisonians, with unsurprising results. The success of the whole dual institutional model depends upon the maintenance of public enchantment with the dignified/ Madisonian institutions. This requires allowing no daylight to spoil their magic,506 as Bagehot put it. An element of mystery must be preserved to excite public imagination. But transparency—driven hugely by modern

internet technology, multiple informational sources, and social media— leaves little to the imagination. “The cure for admiring the House of Lords,”

Bagehot observed, “was to go and look at it.”507 The public has gone and looked at Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President, and their standing in public opinion surveys is the result . Justices, senators, and presidents are not masters of the universe after all, the public has discovered. They are just like us. Enquiring minds may not have read enough of Foreign Affairs508 to assess the Trumanites’ national security polices, but they have read enough of People Magazine509 to know that the

Madisonians are not who they pretend to be. While the public’s unfamiliarity with national security matters has no doubt hastened the Trumanites’ rise, too many people will soon be too savvy to be misled by the Madisonian veneer,510 and those people often are opinion leaders whose influence on public opinion is disproportionate to their numbers. There is no point in telling ghost stories, Holmes said, if people do not believe in ghosts.511 It might be supposed at this point that the phenomenon of double government is nothing new. Anyone familiar with the management of the Vietnam War 512 or the un-killable ABM program 513 knows that double government has been around for a while. Other realms of law, policy, and business also have come to be dominated by specialists, made necessary and empowered by ever-increasing divisions of labor; is not national security duality merely a contemporary manifestation of the challenge long posed to democracy by the administrative state-cum-technocracy?515 Why is national security different? There is validity to this intuition and no dearth of examples of the frustration confronted by

Madisonians who are left to shrug their shoulders when presented with complex policy options, the desirability of which cannot be assessed without high levels of technical expertise. International trade issues, for example, turn frequently upon esoteric econometric analysis beyond the grasp of all but a few Madisonians. Climate change and global warming present questions that

depend ultimately upon the validity of one intricate computer model versus another. The financial crisis of 2008 posed similar complexity when experts insisted to hastily-gathered executive officials and legislators that—absent massive and immediate intervention—the nation’s and perhaps the world’s entire financial infrastructure would face imminent collapse.516 In these and a growing number of

similar situations, the “choice” made by the Madisonians is increasingly hollow; the real choices are made by technocrats who present options to Madisonians that the Madisonians are in no position to assess. Why is national security any different? It is different for a reason that I described in 1981: the organizations in question “do not regulate truck widths or set train schedules. They

have the capability of radically and permanently altering the political and legal contours of our society.”517 An unrestrained security apparatus has throughout history been one of the principal reasons that free governments have failed. The Trumanite

network holds within its power something far greater than the ability to recommend higher import duties or more windmills or even

gargantuan corporate bailouts: it has the power to kill and arrest and jail, the power to see and hear and read peoples’ every word and action,

the power to instill fear and suspicion, the power to quash investigations and quell speech, the power to shape public debate or to curtail it, and the

power to hide its deeds and evade its weak-kneed overseers. It holds, in short, the power of irreversibility. No democracy worthy of its name

can permit that power to escape the control of the people. It might also be supposed that existing, non-Madisonian, external restraints pose counterweights that compensate for the weakness of internal, Madisonian checks. The press, and the public sentiment it partially shapes, do constrain

49

the abuse of power—but only up to a point. To the extent that the “marketplace of ideas” analogy ever was apt, that

marketplace, like other marketplaces, is given to distortion. Public outrage is notoriously fickle, manipulable, and selective, particularly when driven by anger, fear, and indolence. Sizeable segments of the public—often egged on by public officials—lash out unpredictably at imaginary transgressors, failing even in the ability to identify sympathetic allies.518 “[P]ublic opinion,” Sorensen wryly observed, “is not always identical with the public interest.”519 The influence of the media, whether to rouse or dampen, is thus limited. The handful of investigative journalists active in the United States today are the truest contemporary example of Churchill’s tribute to the Royal Air Force.520 In the end, though, access remains everything to the press.

Explicit or implicit threats by the targets of its inquiries to curtail access often yield editorial acquiescence. Members of the public obviously are in no position to complain when a story does not appear. Further, even the best of investigative journalists confront a high wall of secrecy. Finding and communicating with (on deep background, of course) a knowledgeable, candid source within an opaque Trumanite network resistant to efforts to pinpoint decision-makers521 can take years. Few publishers can afford the necessary financial investment; newspapers are, after all, businesses, and the bottom line of their financial statements ultimately governs investigatory expenditures. Often, a second corroborating source is required. Even after scaling the Trumanite wall of secrecy, reporters and their editors often become victims of the deal-making tactics they must adopt to live comfortably with the Trumanites. Finally, members of the mass media are subject to the same organizational pressures that shape the behavior of other groups. They eat together, travel together, and think together. A case in point was the Iraq War. The Washington Post ran twentyseven editorials in favor of the war along with dozens of op-ed pieces, with only a few from skeptics.522 The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal all marched along in lockstep. 523 As

Senator Eugene McCarthy aptly put it, reporters are like blackbirds; when one flies off the telephone wire, they all fly off.524 More importantly, the premise—that a vigilant electorate fueled by a skeptical press together will successfully fill the void created by the hollowed-out

Madisonian institutions—is wrong.525 This premise supposes that those outside constraints operate independently, that their efficacy is not a function of the

efficacy of internal, Madisonian checks.526 But the internal and external checks are woven together and depend upon one another. 527 Non-disclosure agreements (judicially-enforced gag orders, in truth) are prevalent among those best positioned to criticize.528 Heightened efforts have been undertaken to crush vigorous investigative journalism and to prosecute and humiliate whistleblowers and to equate them with spies under the espionage laws. National security documents have been breathtakingly over-classified. The evasion of Madisonian constraints by these sorts of policies has the net effect of narrowing the marketplace of ideas, curtaining public debate, and gutting both the media and public opinion as effective restraints.529 The vitality of external checks depends upon

the vitality of internal Madisonian checks, and the internal Madisonian checks only minimally constrain the Trumanites. Some suggest that the answer is to admit the failure of the Madisonian institutions, recognize that for all their faults the external checks are all that really exist, acknowledge that the Trumanite network cannot be unseated, and try to work within the current framework.530 But the idea that external checks alone do or can provide the needed safeguards is false . If politics were the effective restraint that some have argued it is,531 politics—intertwined as it is with law—would have produced more effective legalist constraints. It has not. The failure of law is and has been a failure of politics. If the press and public opinion were sufficient to safeguard what the Madisonian institutions were designed to protect, the story of democracy would consist of little more than a series of elected kings, with the rule of law having frozen with the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. Even with effective rules to protect free, informed, and robust expression—which is an enormous assumption—public opinion alone cannot be counted upon to protect what law is needed to protect. The hope that it can do so recalls earlier reactions to Bagehot’s insights—the faith that “the people” can simply “throw off” their “deferential attitude and reshape the political system,” insisting that the Madisonian, or dignified, institutions must “once again provide the popular check” that they were intended to provide.532 That, however, is exactly what many thought they were doing in electing Barack Obama as President. The results need not be rehearsed; little reason exists to expect that some future public effort to resuscitate withered Madisonian institutions would be any more successful. Indeed, the added power that the Trumanite network has taken on under the Bush- Obama policies would make that all the more difficult. It is simply naïve to believe that a sufficiently large segment of informed and intelligent voters can somehow come together to ensure that sufficiently vigilant Madisonian surrogates will somehow be included in the national security decisionmaking process to ensure that the Trumanite network is infused with the right values. Those who believe that do not understand why that network was formed, how it operates, or why it survives. They want it, in short, to become more Madisonian. The Trumanite network, of course, would not mind appearing more Madisonian, but its enduring ambition is to become, in reality, less Madisonian. It is not clear what precisely might occur should Bagehot’s cone of government “fall to earth.” United States history provides no precedent. One possibility is a prolongation of what are now long-standing trends, with the arc of power continuing to shift gradually from the Madisonian institutions to the Trumanite network. Under this scenario, those institutions continue to subcontract national security decisionmaking to the Trumanites; a majority of the public remains satisfied with tradeoffs between liberty and security; and members of a dissatisfied minority are at a loss to know what to do and are, in any event, chilled by widely-feared Trumanite surveillance capabilities. The Madisonian institutions, in this future, fade gradually into museum pieces, like the British House of Lords and monarchy; Madisonians kiss babies, cut ribbons, and read Trumanite talking points, while the

Trumanite network, careful to retain historic forms and familiar symbols, takes on the substance of a silent directorate. Another possibility, however, is that the fall to earth could entail consequences that are profoundly disruptive, both for the government and the people. This scenario would be more likely in the aftermath of a catastrophic terrorist attack that takes place in an environment lacking the safety-valve checks that the Madisonian

institutions once provided. In this future, an initial “rally round the flag” fervor and associated crack-down are followed, later,

by an increasing spiral of recriminatory reactions and counter-reactions. The government is seen increasingly by elements of the public as hiding what they ought to know, criminalizing what they ought to be able to do, and spying upon what ought to be private. The people are seen increasingly by the government as unable to comprehend the gravity of security threats, unappreciative of its security-protection efforts, and unworthy of its own trust. Recent public opinion surveys are portentous. A September 2013 Gallup Poll revealed that Americans’ trust and confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle international problems had reached an all-time low;533 a June 2013 Time magazine poll disclosed that 70% of those age eighteen to thirty-four believed that Edward Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the NSA’s surveillance program.534 This yawning attitudinal gap between the people and the government could reflect itself in multiple ways. Most obviously, the Trumanite network must draw upon the U.S. population to fill the five million positions needed to staff its projects that require security clearances.535 That would be increasingly difficult, however, if the pool of available recruits comprises a growing and indeterminate number of Edward Snowdens—individuals with nothing in their records that indicates disqualifying unreliability but who, once hired, are willing nonetheless to act against perceived authoritarian tendencies by leaving open the vault of secrecy. A smaller, less reliable pool of potential recruits would hardly be the worst of it, however.

Lacking perceived legitimacy, the government could expect a lesser level of cooperation, if not outright obstruction, from the

50

general public. Many national security programs presuppose public support for their efficient operation. This ranges from compliance with national

security letters and library records disclosure under the PATRIOT Act to the design, manufacture, and sale of drones, and cooperation

with counterintelligence activities and criminal investigations involving national security prosecutions. Moreover, distrust of government tends

to become generalized; people who doubt governmental officials’ assertions on national security threats are inclined to extend their skepticism. Governmental assurances concerning everything from vaccine and food safety to the fairness of stock-market regulation and IRS investigations (not without

evidence536) become widely suspect. Inevitably, therefore, daily life would become more difficult. Government, after all, exists for a reason. It carries out many helpful and

indeed essential functions in a highly specialized society. When those functions cannot be fulfilled, work-arounds emerge, and social dislocation results. Most seriously,

the protection of legitimate national security interests would itself suffer if the public were unable to distinguish between measures

vital to its protection and those assumed to be undertaken merely through bureaucratic inertia or lack of imagination. The government itself, meanwhile, could not be counted upon to remain passive in the face of growing public obduracy in response to its efforts to do what it thinks essential to safeguard national security. Here we do have historical

precedents, and none is comfortably revisited. The Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s;537 the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920;538 the

round-up of Japanese-American citizens in the 1940s;539 governmental spying on and disruption of civil rights, draft protesters, and anti-war activists in the 1960s and 1970s;540 and the incommunicado incarceration without charges, counsel, or trial of “unlawful combatants” only a few short years ago541

—all are examples of what can happen when government sees limited options in confronting nerve-center

security threats. No one can be certain, but the ultimate danger posed if the system were to fall to earth in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack could be intensely divisive and potentially destabilizing—not unlike what was envisioned by conservative Republicans in Congress who opposed Truman’s national security programs when the managerial network was established.542 It is therefore appropriate to move beyond explanation and to turn to possibilities for reform—to consider steps that might be taken to prevent the entire structure from falling to earth.

Even if 1ac threats are real, unintended consequences and corrupt scholarship are reasons to vote neg on presumptionPieterse 7 [Jan Nederveen, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 3,

Aug., “Political and Economic Brinkmanship,” p. 473-4]

Brinkmanship and producing instability carry several meanings. The American military spends 48% of world military spending (2005) and rep resents a vast, virtually

continuously growing establishment that is a world in itself with its own lingo, its own reasons, internecine battles and projects. That this large security establishment is a bipartisan project makes it politically relatively immune. That for security reasons it is an insular world shelters it from scrutiny. For reasons of 'deniability' the president is insulated from certain operations (Risen, 2006). That it is a completely hierarchical world onto itself makes it

relatively unaccountable. Hence, to quote 'stuff happens'. In part this is the familiar theme of the Praetorian Guard and the shadow state (Stockwell, 1991). It includes a military on the go, a military that seeks career advancement through role expansion, seeks expansion through threat inflation , and in inflated threats finds rationales for ruthless action and is thus subject to feedback from its own echo chambers . Misinformation broadcast by part of the intelligence apparatus blows back to other security circles where it may be taken for real (Johnson, 2000). Inhabiting a hall of mirrors this apparatus operates in a perpetual state of self hypnosis with, since it concerns classified information and covert

ops, limited checks on its functioning. The military stages phirric victories that come at a price of lasting instability. In Afghanistan the US staged a swift settlement by backing and funding the Northern Alliance, which brought warlords and drug lords to power and a corrupt power structure that eventually precipitated the comeback of the Taliban. In Iraq the US backed the Kurds and permitted Shiite militias to operate (until the Samarra bombing of

April 2006) and thus created conditions for lasting instability. The American rules of engagement are self-serving. But because the military inhabits a parallel universe and the media are clogged with 'defense experts' , discussion of these tactics and hence the capacity for self-correction is limited. Part of the backdrop is the trend of the gradual erosion of state capacities because

of 25 years, since the Reagan era, of cutting government services except the military and security. The laissez-faire state in the US has created an imbalance in which the military remains the major growing state capability, which leaves military power increasingly unchecked because monitoring institutions have been downsized or dismantled too. When recently the Pentagon wanted to review all the subcontracts it has outsourced this task was outsourced too. This redistribution of power within the US government played a key part leading up to the war and in the massive failure in Iraq. Diplomacy was under resourced, intelligence was manipulated and the Pentagon and the Office of Strategic Planning ignored experts' advice and State Department warnings on the need for postwar planning (Packer, 2005; Lang, 2004).

51

Root Cause of WarBio-power is the root cause of war and violence Dillon & Reid 2001 (Michael and Julian, Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster and Julian Reid is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster , Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security, and War, 2001Millennium - Journal of International Studies, pp.39-40)

For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal.1 [U]ltimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy…In this central and centralised humanity…we must hear the distant roar of battle.2 Intimately allied with the globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and diverse ensemble of power known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global

liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so that they

can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal forms o f power, of what Michel Foucault called the ‘great economy o f power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once ‘the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged’.3 Foucault called this kind of power—the kind of power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of po wer that threatens death— biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics.4 We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in which biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent face and, ‘gives to the power to inflict legal punishment

a context in which it appears to be free of all excess and violence’.5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the

socio -economic and cultural net works of bio political relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the relation between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war b y other means. We are also concerned, however, to note how the conceptualisation and practice of war itself changes via the very process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of biopolitical order; and we concentrate on that point in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek to extend Foucault’s project.

52

Root Of RacismBiopower is the root cause of racism Mbembe Research Professor Institute of Social and Economic Research University of Witwatersrand 2008 Achille Foucault in an Age of Terror ed Morton & Bygrave page 156-157

In Foucault's formulation, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field - which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups d the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. 17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever-present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever presence and the phantom-like world of race in general, Hannah Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. 18 Indeed, in Foucault's terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, 'that old sovereign right of death'. 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, 'the condition for the acceptability of putting to death'.20

53

ExtinctionBio-power’s obsession with survival guarantees extinctionKouros 1997 (George, Yale Law Graduate, And Holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory. “Become What You Are”)

Although the consequences are grave, the administrative practices of biopower go largely unchallenged precisely because they promise the opportunity of vastly improving the quality of life. But a system primarily concerned with technological exigencies of ensuring survival paradoxically is no longer able to assign meaning to the value of life. Life is something to be secured at all costs, and by any means, as the American military motto of "you have to kill to save" during the Vietnam War demonstrates. For Foucault, this technological imperative to secure survival is what brings us closest to the possibility of our own extinction: [T]his formidable power of death ... now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars ... are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's existence . . . If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life , the species, the race. (HS 137) In the interest of optimizing life we find ourselves possessing the capabilities to wipe out all of humanity as we know it. Heidegger, much like Foucault, understands "the atomic situation" as the product of a technological process that seeks to create "a happier human life."8 But he also emphasizes that "precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved" that we face the greatest danger (DT 52). Responding to a chemist's proclamation that "The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will," Heidegger writes: "We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little" (DT 52). In other words, in the absence of a nuclear holocaust we assume that we have managed to keep technology in hand. Without the sound of an explosion to alert us, we become complacent to the deadliness of our own technological achievements. For example, the chemist's ability to manipulate DNA and genetically screen out undesirable traits, while promising the possibility of a "happier human being," maintains the conditions for a eugenic nightmare.

54

Death of POC The Murderous Patriot Subject is at the back drop of the social projects of terror and which leads to the death of millions of people of color Itwaru 09 ( Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on the project named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica “Master Race, Murder and Gory Globalization” in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79)

The murderous patriot-subject force is celebrated for eliminating those who would prevent, or who just happen to be in the way of capitalist accumulation. The truth of this tyranny is all obfuscated in the claim that those killed somehow deserve" to die, and they are demeaned as "insurgents" or "illegal combatants" or "collateral damage" or demonized as "terrorists." They are dehumanized and their humanity is completely destroyed. They become unspecified "casualties" of the superior forces of oppression. These are the continuing formulations of racial hatred which tend to be named away in this war on terrorism but which are fundamentally there nonetheless. Othered peoples are those whose dispossession and murder assure the victorious order of the rule of the accumulative. White supremacist globalizational capitalist project. The desired Western citizen, the national character, is the loyal subject the state-order requires to perpetuate itself in power. This is the imperialist superiority complex normalized and ecstatically , romanticized as national heroism. It is where the murderous patriot-subject is catapulted as the heroic maker of this supremacist civilization, always on guard against the inferior yet threatening other. This imperialist superiority complex, Balibar tells us, originated among the colonial castes of various nationalities in the West: the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, and others, working collectively to forge the idea of "White· Supremacy," of European civilization as an interest which has to be defended against the "savages" they were out to violate and conquer, with the "White Man's Burden" working in a decisive way to mould the modern notion of a supra-national' European or Western identity.3o This supra-national Western, identity has expanded over the centuries into the supremacist" cult of Western civilization. It is now the consolidation of the imperialist states of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Canada, Australia, and the United States of America, its most militarized and aggressive partner, in the current internationalization of the new imperialism for global capitalist exploitation. The northern European states of Poland, Denmark, and Finland are now part of this Western alliance, and attempts to annex certain eastern European states in this order are currently being made. We have here the reorganization of the lucrative business of the former individual Western , imperialist orders with their new alliance, united in capitalist accumulation which continues to devastate those Othered

peoples from whom wealth for the industrially developed "First World" is mostly extracted. In the imperialist superiority complex, demonstrated in the very notion of "The First World," the imperialized vision ap proves of the killing of people whom the State has declared the threatening terrorist-enemy. In the imperialized vision human slaughter is not abhorrent or morally or ethically opprobrious, but rather admired as a practical act of courage, nasty, brutish, but necessary for the defense of the ostensibly threatened Western nation-state and the assurance of peace and prosperity. The oppression

and destruction of the demonized Other brings peace and prosperity in the West. There is a gyuesome history to this. These self-declared superior Western civilizational orders have all committed the mass murder and genocide of hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples of the world31 over the centuries. The enslavement, torture and deaths of millions of Africans,32 the killing of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian peoples, the organized military murder of thousands of Nicaraguan,

Panamanian, Chilean and many other peoples in the world33 also fonn part of the gyuesome history of these Western

imperialist orders. It is within this historical background that the imperialist superiority complex has been institutionalized as the governing force of the euro-supremacist settler-occupier states of the United States of America and Canada. These conquest states, we should always bear in mind, were violently forged by the shock troops of empire "pioneering" Europeans to establish control over peoples whose land they have usurped and occupied. They are racist-supremacist in their very origination, violent states and states of violence

55

No value to life No value to life—bare life is incalculably worse than deathAgamben ’99 (Giorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the

Archive, 1999, pg. 68-69)

There are good reasons for this impossibility of reconciling love and dignity. Both in the case of legal dignitas and in its moral transposition, dignity is something autonomous with respect to the existence of its bearer, an interior model or an external image to which he must conform and

which must be preserved at all costs. But in extreme situations - and love, in its own way, is also an extreme situation- it is not possible to maintain even the slightest distance between real person and model, between life and norm. And this is not because life or the norm, the internal or the external, in turn takes the upper hand. It is rather because they are inseparable at every point, because they no longer leave any space for a dignified compromise. (St. Paul knows this perfectly when, in the Letter to the Romans, he defines love as the end and

fulfillment of the Law.) This is also why Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor con forms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely imma nent. And “the ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species” cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity. The good that the survivors were able to save from the camp —if there is any sense in speaking of a “good” here — is therefore not dignity. On the contrary,

the atrocious news that the sur vivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is pre cisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination , that there is still life in the most extreme degrada tion. And this new knowledge now becomes the touchstone by which to judge and measure all morality and all

dignity. The Muselmann, who is its most extreme expression, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends. And Levi, who bears witness to the drowned, speaking in their stead, is the cartographer of this new terra ethica, the implacable land-surveyor of Muselmannland.

56

Root cause of genocide / racismBiopower is the basis for genocide and racismStoler ’95 [Ann Laura Stoler, Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the The New School for Social Research in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, Foucalt’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, 1995]

Biopower was defined in similar terms, as a power "organized around the management of life," where wars were "no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended," but on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able

to wage so many wars, causing so many men [sicl to be killed ... at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population. For Foucault, this is the point where racism intervenes. It is not that all racisms are invented at this moment. Racisms have

existed in other forms at other times: Now, "what inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is the emergence of biopower. ... racism inscribes it self as a fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states." What does racist discourse do? For one, it is a "means of introducing ... a fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die" (TM: S3). It fragments the biological field, it establishes a break inside the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as "good," fit, and superior.

57

Eradication of PopulationsBiopower causes eradication of entire populationsDean ‘01 [Mitchell Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty.” Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 55-58]

Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled "Right of Death and Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as "the right to take life or let live"; the power over life as the power "to foster life or disallow it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power by Its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies but to disqualify the life—the mere existence—of those who are a threat to the life of the population, to disallow those deemed "unworthy of life," those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136—37). In Foucault's account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process of the power to put whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killing—whether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the Utopia to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this homogeneity always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 84—85). For Foucault, the

58

primary function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those who must die, and to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among population, the internal organization of states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot the ranking of individuals, populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure eflicienqp6 However, the series "population, evolution, and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates and the abnormals in one's own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and most important function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the population, its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the elimination of internal and external threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunctions of the eugenic project: identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced sterilization: encourage those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence and of moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism, however, we need to take into account another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of the juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a: 148). For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in blood—as a reality and as a symbol—just as one might say that sexuality becomes the key field on which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance, "blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor, fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault 1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 149—50), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exaltation of blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immensely cynical and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of the life of the population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education.'Nazism generalized biopower without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with sovereignty. Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of the individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood and the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland. In such an articulation of these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the administration of life and the right to kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary relation. The administration of life comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore war, will be exercised at the level of an entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of other races becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only one face of the purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hitler's last acts, the order to destroy the bases of bare life for the German people itself "Final Solution for other races, the absolute

59

suicide of the German race" is inscribed, according to Foucault. in the functioning of the modern state (232).

60

Nuclear ominicide Magnitude—biopolitics is the root cause of nuclear omnicideFoucault ’78 (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1978, p. 136-137)

Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces,

making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social

body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But

this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly

expanded its limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that

endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a

turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become

the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

61

AltsAlt – reject the aff Godiwala ‘6 Godiwala, Dimple. [Dimple Godiwala was educated at the Universities of Bombay and Oxford. She is the author of

'Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream] "The Western patriarchal impulse" Interactions 15.1 (2006): Web. Dimple is quoting Foucault in this.

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover   what we are, but to refuse   what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could   be to get rid of [a] political 'double bind',which is the simultaneous

individualization and totalization of   modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is notto try and liberate the individual from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of   subjectivity through refusal of this kind of   individuality which has been imposed upon us for several centuries.

62

Neg Answers To

63

AT Perm

64

Perm doesn’t solveBio-poltical control is constantly shifting – the permutation doesn’t solveDillon & Guerrero 2008 (Michael and Luis L., Phd in international studies and head of Department of Security and War at

Lancaster University, Deputy Postgraduate Research Director, Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century, Review of International Studies, January 2008, pp.4-6)

This paper does precisely that. It explains how the biopolitics of biopower is necessarily also allied with freedom and what kind of ‘freedom’ is understood to be at work in it. In explaining precisely what Foucault understands, in addition, by ‘security’, and how this understanding of security differs from traditional geopolitical accounts of security derived from ontologies and anthropologies of political subjectivity, the paper also clarifies why Foucault concludes that biopolitics simply is a “dispositif de sécurité”.

Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no biopolitics which is not simultaneously also a security apparatus. There

is no biopolitics of this, or a biopolitics of that. When one says biopolitics one says security; albeit in a certain way. Biopolitics arises at the beginning of the modern age but it does not spring fully formed at its beginning. It would run entirely counter to Foucault’s approach to the analytic of power relations to pretend otherwise. While acknowledging a certain kind of precursor in the pastoral power of the Church, with which it appears superficially similar but from which it diverges in its specificities, what Foucault begins to draw-out is the logic of formation which takes hold when power takes species life as its referent object, and the securing of species life becomes the

vocation of a novel and emerging set of discursive formations of power/knowledge. This biopolitical logic of formation also expresses a new and emergent experience of the real. A logic of formation is therefore historical, local and

particular. It also installs an ontopolitics as it experiments with novel ensembles or technologies of social practice. However generalised it may become, biopolitics is not itself a universal phenomenon. It is the actualisation instead of a specific historical and, we would argue, evolving economy of power relations. Such ensembles of practices do not actualise themselves in perfect realisation of their logic. First, because their logic is always a contested epistemic object for them. Second, because things always

change in unintended ways. Biopolitical security practices do not articulate a design in nature. They are contingent achievements reflecting the partial realisation of designs which seek to enact ‘natures’. In the process, there are slippages and breakages, shifts and revisions, for which the original drivers and concerns of biopolitics no longer account. There is nothing unusual in this. It would be unusual if it did not happen.

Mutation of the biopolitical order of power relations has continued tomerely entailed a change at the level of practice. Any change in practice is simultaneously also accompanied by a change in the experience of the real. In general terms the shift in the nature of the real associated with biopolitics, now, is captured by the term ‘emergence’.

The alternative is a process of agonism against the affirmative – we can create a space for freedom and for resistance against the bio-political notions of peace the affirmative endorses Shinko Ass’t Prof of IR at Bucknell 2008 Rosemary Millennium – Journal of International Studies Sage Publishing

According to Foucault agonism refers to a political relationship which opens up a site from within which relations of power can be resisted and altered.59 In this agonistic space individuals encounter one another and carve out the parameters of their ethical interactions. Foucault identifies the unmasking of political violence as the ‘real political task in a society’ because

it is only by making the operation of power visible that we can then strategise how to fight against it. Thus we engage in power struggles in order

to alter power relations.60 What we seek to alter are those processes of governmental individualisation which ‘separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way’.61 Agonism functions as the critical terrain located between the interplay of power and freedom where ‘the recalcitrance of the will and the

intransigence of freedom’ emerge as constant provocations.62 Agonism involves a ‘relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle’, however; such a struggle is intended to remain open and serve as a type of permanent provocation rather than devolving into a paralysing confrontation.63 Foucault specifically rejects the idea of an essential antagonism, but he does indicate that there is an essential obstinacy affiliated with the exercise of

freedom. Thus our relations with one another are not characterised by a primordial essence that would

65

determine our relations to be fundamentally antagonistic, but principles of freedom on the other hand, do indicate points of insubordination and struggle. An agonistic stance emerges in response to a political determination that an intolerability has been identified, which according to Foucault, threatens to break our connections (whether personal or communal) with one another, isolate us, and/or attempt to bind us to an identity which limits and constrains us. Agonism is a particular type of resistant response that seeks to change the political dynamic that would usher in and or sustain such isolating and constraining effects. Agonistic engagements are characterised by the search for difficult truths where morality itself is at stake, because within the terms of an agonistic encounter ‘the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion [emphasis added]’.64

66

The permutation engages in a normalizing form of resistance – cannot solve the criticism and independently risks our impact arguments Thomas Dumm 96, Professor of Political Science @ Amherst College, 1996 “Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom.” P. 116-117

Here I am slightly ahead of myself. The problem of the normalization of norms is perhaps better discussed under the rubric “bio-power.” The emergence of this more complete normalizing discourse is itself not neatly or completely separate from its own genealogy within disciplinary

society. However, in working to normalize even that which resists normalization, in normalizing the forms of resistance as they

emerge from delinquency, those who engage in contemporary exercises of power may have been able to put at risk more than just a mode of freedom but the very possibility of free existence itself. Normalizing the

norm—is there a more succinct definition of cybernetics than that? Normalizing the norm---is this not the great

(unannounced) e nd of the various strategies aimed at human extinction? A question that emerges for us at the end of

the twentieth century is whether the style of freedom that has accompanied disciplinary society and that has been nurtured by it—and for the sake of brevity let us call that freedom liberal freedom---has itself been the reason leading humankind to this moment of terminal risk . But even if it has, this does not mean that liberal freedom has not been a way of being free. Instead, what it may suggest is that the freedom that has been so long associated with a particular organization under the banner of sovereign right may need to be rethought so that we may better understand and give shape to a politics of freedom more commensurate with the conditions of late modernity. I believe that this is what Foucault may be thinking when he urges us to rethink the form that the idea of right might take as sovereignty and normalization vitiate the very possibility of repression in a disciplinary age.

67

Reject the permReject their spin about the aff complementing the alt—they prefigured the debate to occur on liberal terms—if we can’t contest ideological framing then alternative orientations are impossibleKnox 12 [Robert, PhD Candidate, London School of Economics and Political Science, paper presented at the Fourth Annual Conference

of the Toronto Group for the Study of International, Transnational and Comparative Law and the Towards a Radical International Law workshop, “Strategy and Tactics”]

This warning is of great relevance to the type of ‘strategic’ interventions advocated by the authors. there are serious perils involved in

making any intervention in liberal-legalist terms for critical scholars. the first is that – as per their own analysis – liberal legalism is not a neutral ground, but one which is likely to favour certain claims and positions. Consequently, it will be incredibly difficult to win the argument. Moreover, even if the argument is won, the victory is likely to be a very particular one – inasmuch as it will foreclose any wider consideration of the structural or systemic causes of any particular ‘violation’ of the law. All of these issues are to some degree considered by the authors.44 However, given the way in which ‘strategy’ is understood, the effects of these issues are generally confined to the immediate, conjunctural context. As such, the emphasis was placed upon the way that the language of liberal legalism blocked effective action and criticism of the war.45 Much less consideration is placed on the way in which advancing such argument impacts upon the long term effectiveness of

achieving the strategic goals outlined above. Here, the problems become even more widespread. Choosing to couch the intervention in liberal legal terms ultimately reinforces the structure of liberal legalism , rendering it more difficult to transcend these arguments.46 In the best case scenario that such an intervention is victorious, this victory would precisely seem to

underscore the liberal position on international law. Given that international law is in fact bound up with processes of exploitation and

domination on a global scale, such a victory contributes to the legitimation of this system, making it very difficult to argue against its

logic. this process takes place in three ways. Firstly, by intervening in the debate on its own terms, critical scholars reinforce those very

terms, as their political goals are incorporated into it. 47 It can then be argued the law is in fact neutral, because it is able to encompass such a wide variety of viewpoints. Secondly, in discarding their critical tools in order to make a public intervention, these scholars

abandon their structural critique at the very moment when they should hold to it most strongly. that is to say, that at the point where there is actually a space to publicise their position, they choose instead to cleave to liberal legalism. thus, even if, in the ‘purely academic’

context, they continue to adhere to a ‘critical’ position, in public political terms, they advocate liberal legalism. Finally, from a purely ‘personal’ standpoint, in advocating such a position, they undercut their ability to articulate a critique in the future, precisely because they will be contradicting a position that they have already taken. the second point becomes increasingly problematic absent a guide for when it is that

liberal legalism should be used and when it should not. Although the ‘embrace’ of liberal legalism is always described as ‘temporary’ or ‘strategic’, there is actually very little discussion about the specific conditions in which it is prudent to adopt the language of liberal legalism. It is simply noted at various points that this will be determined by the ‘context’.48 As is often the case, the term ‘context’ is invoked49 without specifying precisely which contexts are those that would necessitate intervening in liberal legal terms. Traditionally, such a context would be provided by a strategic understanding. that is to say, that the specific tactics to be undertaken in a

given conjunctural engagement would be understood by reference to the larger structural aim. But here, there are simply no considerations of this. It seems likely therefore, that again context is understood in purely tactical terms. Martti Koskenniemi can be seen as representative in this respect, when he argued: What works as a professional argument depends on the circumstances. I like to think of the choice lawyers are faced with as being not one of method (in the sense of external, determinate guidelines about legal certainty) but of language or, perhaps better, of style. the various styles – including the styles of ‘academic theory’ and ‘professional practice’ – are neither derived from nor stand in determinate hierarchical relationships to each other. the final arbiter of what works is nothing other than the context (academic or professional) in which one argues.50 On this reading, the ‘context’ in which prudence operates seems to the immediate circumstances in which an intervention takes place. this would be consistent with the idea, expressed by the authors, that the ‘strategic’ context for adopting liberal legalism

was that the debate was conducted in these terms. But the problem with this understanding is surely evident. As critical scholars have shown time and time again, the contemporary world is one that is deeply saturated with, and partly constituted by, juridical relations.51 Accordingly, there are really very few contexts (indeed perhaps none) in which political debate is not conducted in juridical terms. A brief perusal of world events would bear this out.52 the logical conclusion of this would seem to be that in terms of abstract, immediate effectiveness, the ‘context’ of public debate will almost always call for an intervention that is couched in liberal legalist terms. This raises a final vital question about what exactly distinguishes critical scholars from liberal scholars. If the above analysis holds true, then the ‘strategic’ interventions of critical scholars in legal and political debates will almost always take the form of arguing these debates in their own terms, and simply picking the ‘left’ side. thus, whilst their academic and theoretical writings and interventions may (or may not) retain the basic critical

tools, the public political interventions will basically be ‘liberal’. The question then becomes, in what sense can we really characterise such interventions (and indeed such scholars) as ‘critical’? The practical consequence of understanding ‘strategy’ in essentially tactical terms

seems to mean always struggling within the coordinates of the existing order . Given the exclusion of strategic

68

concerns as they have been traditionally understood, there is no practical account for how these coordinates will ever be transcended (or how the

debate will be reconfigured). As such, we have a group of people struggling within liberalism, on liberal terms , who may or may not also have some ‘critical’ understandings which are never actualised in public interventions. We might ask then, apart from

‘ good intentions’ (although liberals presumably have these as well) what differentiates these scholars from liberals? Because of course

liberals too can sincerely believe in political causes that are ‘of the left’. It seems therefore, that just as – in practical terms – strategic essentialism collapses into essentialism, so too does ‘strategic’ liberal legalism collapse into plain old liberal legalism.53

Sequencing DA—jumping to include legal reform whitewashes the biopolitical security project and sidelines criticismKrasmann 12 [Susanne, Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg, “Law’s knowledge: On the susceptibility and

resistance of legal practices to security matters” Theoretical Criminology 16 (4) p. 380-382]

In the face of these developments, a new debate on how to contain governmental interference in the name of security has emerged. What is remarkable about this debate is that, on the one hand, it aims at establishing more civil and

human rights and attendant procedural safeguards that allow for systematically calling into question the derogation of laws and

the implementation of new laws in the name of security. On the other hand, it recognizes the existence of a new dimension of threats, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. As John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino (2004: 228), for instance, contend: We are faced, nowadays, with serious threats to the public safety that can occur anywhere and that cannot terminate definitively. … If we think that the capacity to deal effectively with emergencies is a precondition for republican government,

then it is necessary to ask how emergency powers can be controlled in modern circumstances. Adequate legal frameworks and institutional designs are required that would enable us to ‘reconcile’ security with (human) rights, as Goold and Lazarus (2007b: 15) propose, and enduring emergency situations with the rule of law. Traditional problems in the relationship between law and security government within this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations:2 emergency government today, rather than facing the problem of gross abuses of power, has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional becoming normal (see Poole, 2008: 8). Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as ‘necessary’.3 Hence, law not only constrains, but at the same time also authorizes governmental

interference. Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try to balance security and liberty are rarely able, or

willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative presuppositions: ‘[T]he metaphor of balance is used as

often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them’ (Zedner, 2005: 510). Finally, political responses to threats never overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events. To ignore this uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They establish political spaces of dispute and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a ‘culture of justification’, as David Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be ‘justified by law’, in a fundamental sense of a commitment

to ‘the principles of legality and respect for human rights’ (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most of these accounts, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and institutional arrangements that are well known to us. To frame security as a public good and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example

demand, is a promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be ‘civilized’, though, once again

echoes the truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality and a political ‘culture of justification’ (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the

following section. Those normative endeavours will be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice.

Contrary to the idea that law can be addressed as an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to normative aspirations, the present account renders law’s reliance on forms of knowledge more

discernable. Law is susceptible, in particular to security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms itself and, notably, articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of knowledge brought into play. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this perspective enables us, on the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law in a way that goes largely unnoticed. This point will be

discussed on the example of automated surveillance technologies, which facilitate a particular rationality of pre-emptive action. The conception of law as a practice, on the other hand, may also be understood as a tool of critique and dissent. The recent torture debate is an extreme example of this, whereby torture can be regarded as a touchstone of law’s resistance to its own

69

abrogation. Law and reasoning The idea that a political and juridical ‘culture of justification’ would be able to bring about the desired results should be treated with caution—for one thing, with regard to the particular logic of legal reasoning and justification and, for another thing, because of at least two empirical observations that shed light on law’s limitations vis-a-vis the governance of security. First of all, the establishment of a ‘culture of justification’ itself presupposes what has yet to arise, namely a common concern about governmental encroachment in the name of security and a willingness of all parties to join in that discourse, if not share in its related arguments. This presupposition, to be sure, is indispensable for inspiring communication and facilitating the exchange of arguments. Moreover, in order to take effect the tried and true

liberal legal principles, like that of proportionality and necessity, clearly need to be concretized by reasoning about actual cases. Yet, the assumption of a common concern goes hand in hand with a general trust in a form of communicative reason that will allow for transparency eventually on the matters at stake. Reason and to reason within ‘a transparent, structured process of analysis to determine what degree of erosion is justifiable, by what measure, in what circumstances, and for how long’ (Zedner, 2005: 522), is considered basic to the solution. However, just as legal norms and principles are open to interpretation, they do not determine any normative orientations underlying the interpretative process. As Benjamin Goold and Liorna Lazarus (2007b: 11; see also Poole, 2008: 16) observe: ‘[P]re-emptive measures designed to increase security can never be truly objective or divorced from our political concerns and values.’ Typical for the acknowledgement of competing claims still to be weighed (Zedner, 2005: 508),

therefore, is that they end up being couched in a rather appealing rhetoric (‘we should’, ‘judges should’). In a liberal vein, this requires a resorting to the least intrusive measures. Competing claims are thus relegated to the normative framework of balance (see Waldron, 2003; Zedner, 2005: 528). As regards the empirical observations, there is, first, a move in security legislation that is noticeable in western countries in which the threshold of governmental intervention has been gradually disposed in order to forestall actual offences, concrete suspicion and danger. 9/11 may be regarded as a catalyst here, as well as the fight against terrorism in general. But rather than being recent phenomena, these transformations in fact represent a continuity over decades in the identification of ever new dimensions of threats, from sexual offenders and organized crime right up to transnational terrorism.4 Although a tendency can be discerned, this

is not to suggest that there have not been any disruptions to it. Civil and human rights organizations have time and again countered these developments, and so have higher-court rulings. Even new basic rights have been established.5 Though successful, these processes were unable to thwart the general trend of making private space accessible to surveillance in a way that would have been unimaginable decades ago. In this sense, paradoxically, new basic rights are rather indicators of new spaces of vulnerability. A closer look at higher courts’ decisions on security legislation and additional

recommendations by human rights bodies suggests that these lead to the amendment of the laws in question but not necessarily to a change in practice. ‘For, as law becomes ever more closely intertwined with a proliferating assemblage of expertise, risk consulting, administration, and discretion, it inhabits an inescapable paradox’, as Louise Amoore (2008: 849) neatly put it. Law for civil and human rights activists and lawyers is the very medium for challenging governmental encroachment, and, notably, the ‘rule of law’ represents the very principle to be defended. Under review, however, law encounters its own legislation—the modes of risk management it once itself authorized, and that will now have to be amended in accordance not only with the principles of the rule of law but also with the identified necessities of security government.

70

AT Alt

71

AT Alt failsThe world is in a constant state of change – proper theorization is necessary to mobilize effective counter-discourses that can combat liberalismGuillaume and Der Derian 10 [Laura, PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University, and James, Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies and Research Professor of International Studies at Brown University, “Revolutionizing Virtual War: An Interview with James Der Derian,” Theory & Event 13:2, 2010]

This means that the world order, to the extent we can even call it such, is permanently becoming different, and, pace

Foucault, that this century, the twenty-first, might well become known as Deleuzian. A premium will be placed on how quickly we will adapt to de-territorialized global events, networked accidents, and the other in your face with

every 24/7 global news cycle. On how easily we will feel at home rather than seek refuge from the

singularities of world politics that appear as paradoxes, synchronicities, feedback, white noise, phase shifts, spatio-

temporal rifts, and, not least, dreams. On how easily technologies, especially those in the service of war, can actualize the worst as well as the best possibility. Or how important, when observation (let alone

participation) can actualize an event, reflexivity and responsibility becomes. This all comes with a hard-earned

caveat. We need to recognize that such open-ended attitudes often produce defensive actions in others and even inactivity in oneself; or as William Connolly once told me, ‘a little vertigo is a good thing but a lot can turn you into a zombie.’ Back to the

undead! The social sciences—more so than the latest theories in the physical sciences—are least comfortable with these free-floating ideas of spatio-temporal rifts where simulacra reverses causality, being is simultaneously here

and there, and identity is deterritorialised by interconnectivity. It’s easy to theorize but how to live in this interzone, where critical ethical interventions routinely precede the retrieval of facts (empirical or social) and technical media constitute new virtual states of meaning and being? Obviously, both war and peace still need approaches that study what actually happened (realism) and what needs to be

changed (idealism). But what Deleuze teaches us is how world politics is also in need of virtual approaches that explore how reality is seen, framed, read, and generated in the conceptualisation and actualisation of the global event. I understand why this kind of talk makes many traditional scholars of international politics nervous. I have witnessed firsthand the displacement of global contingency as an unease or even anger toward the messenger rather than the mess itself. Identifying conditions of relativism and nihilism is not the same as advocating them; but that does not stop critics of Deleuze et al from disparaging them as ‘cultural relativists’ or ‘nihilists.’ I’ve taken a few licks like this, and not matter how often you repudiate the shoddy thinking behind it, you know there will always be more to come. I have also witnessed how the narcissism of petty differences among social critics can lead to radically impossible prescriptions. This makes me reluctant to offer any of my own as universally applicable across differing historical epochs and political circumstances. Guillaume I suppose what I am asking is: what is the status of the idea of newness as applied to twenty first century war and politics? And, what are the

tensions contained within the idea of being Critical itself, taking into account everything Deleuze has to say about flight and breakthrough. In deploying Deleuze to diagnose and critique contemporary machinations of power, are we actually missing

what is most potentially productive in his thinking? Der Derian I think the answer lies less in Deleuze’s philosophy per se and more in what he—along with Benjamin, Heidegger, Barthes, Virilio, Baudrillard and others—chose to philosophize about: the newest technologies of reproduction that were changing how we frame the world. That means we need to not just study and critique but to create media as ubiquitous, diffuse, and appealing as what the infosphere currently has on offer. Contrary to what uber-pundit Thomas Friedman said recently—and perhaps prematurely—about the role of Facebook, blogs, and Twitter in

the fraudulent elections in Iran, sometimes tweet-tweet can beat bang-bang. We have seen how global media has become essential for the global circulation of power, the waging of war, and the imagining of peace. It is now an unparalleled force in the organisation, execution, justification, and representation of global violence, as witnessed in the first Gulf War, the Kosovo campaign, 9/11, the Iraq War, and what has followed. Global media continues, in spite of concentrated efforts by a variety of countries and technical fixes, to evade national management and control. Networked terror, network-centric warfare, and network attacks will continue to have an intense if intermittent transnational impact. We need to respond with new strategies, concepts, and policies. But how? Fighting fire with fire,

media with media, and infowar with infopeace. That means dispensing with the conceit, stretching from Descartes through Marx

to Chomsky, that there exists a universal truth waiting to be discovered once the veil of superstition,

72

religion, media, or false consciousness of one sort or another is lifted by the right technology of knowledge. It might once

have been true but in our current multicultural, multimedia, heteropolar world; it is one more truth competing among a host of others. To counter the ubiquitous surveillance, information overload, and fundamentalist thinking that has transformed global media into weapons of mass distraction, deception, and destruction, we need to not just consume but produce counter-media now. It will not happen by primetime broadcast or even on public television: whatever independence they once enjoyed has been hijacked by corporate interests, partisan politics, and the need to meet the lowest common denominator

of public culture. I think it falls upon universities and non-governmental organizations, as the last quasi-independent

institutions, to develop the content as well as techniques for counter-media.

73

AT No Alternative Outlining a specific discourse of resistance is a totalitarian means of exercising power: we must outline a broad alternative means of resistance to powerPickett 05 Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College 2005 [On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics pp.

47]

Any reasonable interpretation of Foucaultian resistance will necessarily have a large amount of indeterminacy. While it is non-hierarchical and concerned with memory and the body and the negation of power while still potentially affirmative of something else, these various elements of resistance are compatible with a range of practical political engagements, such as broadly liberal or even anarchist positions. This is because Foucault cannot lay down how or why one should struggle. Such a globalistic theory would become one more agent of power; a

totalizing theory is itself "totalitarian. " 66 Still, it is possible to draw a broad political orientation out of Foucault's celebration of struggle.67 If resistance is worthwhile, as Foucault clearly believes it is, then the conditions which make struggle possible should be fostered. This is why Foucault believes there is a daily "ethico-political" choice to be made.68 We need to decide what constitutes the greatest danger and struggle against it. From this vantage point it is possible to see why the charge of pessimism or hopelessness that is frequently brought against Foucault is misguided. He is accused of presenting power as something so ubiquitous and overwhelming that all resistance becomes pointless. On the contrary, the fact that everything is dangerous means that there are multiple opportunities for resistance. And far from being pointless, Foucault maintains that engagement presents several possibilities. Resistance gives us the possibility of changing the practices he labels 'intolerables.' Once the asylum inmate, factory worker, or "sexual deviant" is enabled to speak, and his memory of struggles and subjugated knowledge is allowed its insurrection, those who are subjected to power can force change.

74

75

AT Impacts

76

AT Biopower GoodWe have never said all biopower is bad --- just the biopolitical surveillance of life in liberal modernity – our alternative’s conception of power is key to transformative change Chambon 99 [Adrienne, director of Ph. D program at U Toronto, Ph. D in Social Work from U Chicago, Columbia University Press

New York , Reading Foucault for Social Work, “Foucault’s Approach,” p. 67-8]

More fundamentally, Foucault spoke to the transformative potential of his work. Transformative work shows that the present is not natural and need not be taken as inevitable or absolute. Change can come

from the realization of the precarious nature of established ways and by inviting the development of alternatives. This holds true for the client and for the worker and is of particular relevance to the academic social worker, researcher, and educator. We come close here to the definition of the role of the intellectual, as well as its limits: "The work of the intellectual ... is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is" (Foucault 1983:206). Foucault concluded: These [forms of rationality] reside on a base of human practice and human history; and that since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.... Any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation. (206)

Because power is productive, it is up to us to produce new forms, after seeing through that which is all too familiar, and to realize that those new forms will generate new possibilities as well as new constraints.

77

AT Biopolitics Solves War The biopolitical imperative to secure life, in any instance, through the prevention of war by liberal means, powers a global war machine that exponentially expands in lethality Evans and Hardt 10 [Brad, lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, Michael,

Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University, “Barbarians to Savages: Liberal War Inside and Out,” Theory & Event 13:2, 2010]

Evans: One of the most important aspects of your work has been to argue why the original sentiment which provoked Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology narrative needed to be challenged. With the onset of a global war machine which showed absolutely no respect for state boundaries, matched by the rise of many local fires of resistance which had no interest in capturing state power, the sentiment that “History is always written from the victory of States” could now be brought firmly into question. On a theoretical level alone, the need to bring the Nomadology Treatise up to date was an important move. However, there was something clearly more at stake for you than simply attempting to canonise Deleuze and

Guattari. One gets the impression from your works that you were deeply troubled by what was taking place with this new found humanitarianism. Indeed, as you suggest, if we accept that this changing political terrain demanded a rewriting of war itself—away from geo-political territorial struggles which once monopolised the

strategic field, towards bio-political life struggles whose unrelenting wars were now to be consciously fought for the politics of all life itself, then it could be argued that the political stakes could not be higher. For not only does a bio-political ascendency force a re-conceptualisation of the war effort—to include those forces which are less militaristic and more developmental (one can see this best reflected today in the now familiar security mantra “War by Other Means”), but through this process a new paradigm appears which makes it possible to envisage for the first time in human history a Global State of War or a Civil War on a planetary

scale. Whilst it was rather easy to find support for this non-State paradigm during the 1990’s—especially

when the indigenous themselves started writing of the onset of a Fourth World War which was enveloping the planet and consuming everybody within, some have argued that the picture became more clouded with the invasion of Iraq which was simply

geo-politics as usual. The familiar language that has been routinely deployed here would be of US Exceptionalism. My concern is not really to attend to this revival of an out-dated theoretical persuasion. I agree with your sentiments in

Multitude that this account can be convincingly challenged with relative ease. Foucault has done enough himself to

show that Liberal War does not demand a strategic trade-off between geo-political and biopolitical aspirations. They can be mutually re-enforcing, even, or perhaps more to the point, especially within a global Liberal Imaginary. And what is more, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was when major combat operations were effectively declared over, that is when the borderlands truly ignited. My concerns today are more attuned to the post-Bush era, which going back to the original War on Terror’s life-centric remit is once again calling for the need to step up the humanitarian war effort in order to secure the global peace. Indeed, perhaps more worrying still, given that the return of the Kantian inspired humanitarian sensibility can now be presented in an altogether more globally enlightened fashion, offering a marked and much needed departure from the destructive but ultimately powerless (in the positive sense of the word) self-serving neo-con, then it is possible to detect a more intellectually vociferous shift taking place which is rendering all forms of political difference to be truly dangerous on a planetary scale. With this in mind, I would like your thoughts on the Global State of War today. What for instance do you feel have been the most important changes in the paradigm since you first proposed the idea? And would you argue that war is still the permanent social relation of global

rule? Hardt: The notion of a global civil war starts from the question of sovereignty. Traditionally war is conceived (in the field of international relations, for instance, or in international law) as armed conflict between two sovereign powers whereas civil war designates conflict within a single territory in which one or both of the parties is not sovereign. War designates, in other words, a conflict in some sense external to the structures of sovereignty and civil war a conflict internal to them. It is clear that few if any of the instances of armed conflict around the world today fit the classic model of war between sovereign states. And perhaps even the great conflicts of the cold war, from Korea and Vietnam to countries throughout Latin America, already undermined the distinction, draping the conflict between sovereign states in the guise of local civil wars. Toni Negri and I thus claimed that in our era there is no more war but only civil wars or, really, a global civil war. It is probably more precise to say instead that the distinction between war and civil war has been undermined, in the same way that one might say, in more metaphorical terms, not that there is no more outside but rather that the division between inside and outside has been eroded. This claim is also widely recognized, it seems to me, among military and security theorists. The change from the framework of war to that of civil war, for instance, corresponds closely to thinking of armed conflicts as not military campaigns but police actions, and thus a shift from the external to the internal use of force. The general rhetorical move from war to security marks in more general terms a similar shift. The security mantra that you cite – “war by other means” – also indicates how the confusion between inside and outside implies the mixture of a series of fields that are traditionally separate: war and politics, for example, but also killing and generating forms of social life. This opens a complicated question about the ways in which contemporary military actions have become biopolitical and what that

78

conception helps us understand about them. Rather than pursuing that biopolitical question directly, though, I want first to understand better how

the shift in the relationship between war and sovereignty that Toni and I propose relates to your notion of liberal and humanitarian war. In a war conventionally conceived, it is sufficient for the two sovereign powers to justify their actions primarily on the basis of national interest as long as they remain within the confines of international law. Whereas those inside ,

in other words, are at least in principle privilege to the liberal framework of rights and representation, those outside are not. When the relationship of sovereignty shifts, however, and the distinction between inside and outside erodes, then there are no such limits of the liberal ideological and political structures. This might be a way of understanding why

contemporary military actions have to be justified in terms of discourses of human rights and liberal values. And this might be related, in turn, to what many political theorists analyze as the decline of liberal values in the US political sphere at the hands of neoliberal and neoconservative logics.1 In other words, perhaps when the division declines between the inside and outside of sovereignty, on the one hand, the liberal logic must be deployed (however inadequately) to justify the use of violence over what was the outside while, on the other, liberal logics are increasingly diluted or suppressed in what was the inside. Evans: What I am proposing with the “Liberal War Thesis” borrows from some pioneering works which have already started to cover the main theoretical ground2 . Central to this approach is an attempt to critically evaluate global Liberal governance (which includes both productive and non-

productive elements) by questioning its will to rule. Liberal Peace is thus challenged, not on the basis of its abstract claims to

universality—juridical or otherwise, but precisely because it’s global imaginary shows a remarkable capacity to wage war—by whatever means—in order to govern all species life. This is not, then, to be confused with some militaristic appropriation of the democratic body politic—a situation in which Liberal value systems have been completely undermined by the onslaught of the military mind. More revealing, it exposes the intricate workings of a Liberal rationality whose ultimate pursuit is global political dominance. Traces of this account can no doubt be found in Michael Ignatieff’s (completely sympathetic) book Empire Lite, which notes how the gradual confluence between the humanitarian and the military has resulted in the onset of an ostensibly humanitarian empire that is less concerned with territory (although the State no doubt still figures) than it is with governing life itself for its own protection and

betterment. Liberalism as such is considered here (à la Foucault) to be a technology of government or a means for strategising power which taking life to be its object feels compelled to wager the destiny of humanity

against its own political strategy. Liberalism can therefore be said to betray a particularly novel strategic field in which the writing of threat assumes both planetary (macro-specific) and human (micro-specific)

ascriptions. Although it should be noted that it is only through giving the utmost priority to life itself—working to secure life from each and every threats posed to an otherwise progressive existence, that its global imaginary could ever hold sway. No coincidence then that the dominant strategic paradigm for Liberals is Global Human Security. What could

therefore be termed the Liberal problematic of security of course registers as a Liberal bio-politics of security, which in the process of promoting certain forms of life equally demands a re-conceptualisation of war in the sense that not every life lives up to productive expectations, let alone shows its compliance. In a number of crucial ways, this approach offers both a theoretical and empirical challenge to the familiar IR scripts which have tended to either valorise Liberalism’s visionary potential or simply castigate its misguided idealism. Perhaps the most important of these is to insist upon a rewriting of the history of Liberalism from the perspective of war. Admittedly, there is much work to be done here. Not least, there is a need to show with greater historical depth, critical purpose, and intellectual rigour how Liberal war (both externally and internally) has subsequently informed its juridical commitments and not vice versa. Here I am invariably provoking the well rehearsed “Laws of War” sermon, which I believe more accurately should be rephrased to be the “Wars of Law”. Nevertheless, despite this pressing need to rewrite the Liberal encounter in language whose familiarity would be capable of penetrating the rather conservative but equally esoteric/specialist field of International Relations, sufficient contemporary grounds already exist which enable us to provide a challenging account of global civil war from the perspective of Liberal bio-political rule. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s The Liberal

Way of War encapsulates these sentiments, with the following abridged passage worth quoting: A bio-political discourse of species existence is also a bio-political discourse of species endangerment. As a form of rule whose referent

object is that of species existence, the liberal way of rule is simultaneously also a problematisation of fear and danger involving threats to the peace and prosperity of the species. Hence its allied need, in the pursuing the peace and prosperity of

the species, to make war on whatever threatens it. That is the reason why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species... There is, then, a

martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of war... Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be able to say how much killing is enough...[However] it has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing’3 . This brings me to the problem of the inside/outside. On the

face of it, it is quite suggestive to account for this conflation by acknowledging the onset of a global

79

political imaginary that no longer permits any relationship with the outside. One could then support the types of hypothesis you mention, which rather than affirming the best of the enlightened Liberal tradition actually correlate the hollowing out of Liberal values to the inability to carve out any meaningful distinctions between inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy, good/evil, truth/falsehood and so forth. However, whilst this approach would no doubt either re-enforce the militaristic paradigm or raise further critical doubts about the post-modern/post-structural turn in political thought, it is nevertheless

misleading. The collapses of these meaningful distinctions are not inimical to Liberal rationality. To the

contrary, the erosion of these great dialectical interplays now actually provides Liberalism with its very generative principles of formation. I felt that you began to explore this in Empire by noting how Foucault’s bio-politics was inadequate to our complex, adaptive and emergent times. To rectify this, Deleuze’s notion of Control Societies was introduced which is more in line with contemporary systems of rule.

80

AT Democracy Checks BiopoliticsGroup their liberalism defenses – they are ultimately all semantic redefinitions, saying “well, if we called liberalism something else, and that system was good, then liberalism is good” – our alternative is crucial to foment that transformationBeaulieu 10 [Alain Beaulieu, professor of philosophy at Laurentian University in Canada, “Towards a Liberal Utopia: The connection between Foucault’s reporting on the Iranian revolution and the ethical turn,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 801-818, sage]

As we know, the principle of calculation is constitutive of biopower which ‘gave itself the function of administering life [of the population]’.25 In a ‘post-biopolitical’ context (i.e. in a neo-liberal environment), this calculation paradigm remains effective. It finds its expression in various techniques of domination that administer virtual possibilities (not facts) considered to be dangerous. However, calculation is not the only

component of the new liberal art of governing. Foucault states that in a socio-political environment where technologies of domination prevail over disciplines there is also room for a specific mode of counter-conduct associated with the spiritualization of the self. Foucault’s interest in spiritual exercises (techniques of liberation) is part of a larger topic he explores in his ethics. Therein, Foucault ‘commemorates’ the old traditions of the ‘care of the self’ (epimeleia heautou) and the ‘art of living’ (techneˆ tou biou), which he now presents in terms of ‘aesthetics of existence’, ‘ethopoietic’ or ‘ art of existence’ to better designate the transformative process of the self in a world deprived of cosmic and divine orders. Are the spiritual transformations of the self merely irrational? It is perhaps this interesting question that opened the dialogue between the later Foucault and the Frankfurt School. The representatives of the Frankfurt School (at least those of the first generation) worked and thought on the opposition between power and freedom: the less capitalistic power is exercised over it, the higher level of freedom this consciousness will ideally attain. According to Foucault, this view is typical of the ‘ general intellectual’ who, in search of universalities, misses the subtleties of power. For Foucault, freedom cannot be dissociated from power, and escape from all forms of power relations is impossible. Therefore, let us use forms of power intelligently, to liberate ourselves . In a neo-liberal environment, certain types of power over the self, namely spiritual exercises, can be useful for giving a specific sense of resistance and liberation. This is precisely what spiritual improvement is about. Foucault’s ‘ critical ontology of ourselves’ presented in the various versions of his text on Kant and the Enlightenment 26 constitutes an answer to the Frankfurt School’s ‘critical theory of society’. The critical ontology of ourselves states that we are not merely theoretical observers , but rather are directly, unceasingly and locally involved in practical process of transformation . Above all, critique for Foucault pursues ethical aims of self-transformation; for instance, those associated with the creation of innovative relations with the media, the creation of new duties for independent journalists, the formation of non-ideological views by individuals who put themselves in danger, etc. Foucault believes that the creative process of self-transformation eventually leads to the creation of a ‘better’ or more tolerant society . This

self-fashioning has nothing to do with individualism. Indeed, Foucault vigorously denounced what he once called the ‘Californian cult of the self’,27 clearly pointing out that the veritable control of the self ‘can only be practiced within the group’28 and that it implies a ‘functional relation [lien de finalite´ ] between taking care of the self and taking care of others’.29 Therefore, for two reasons one must answer ‘No’ to the question ‘Are the spiritual exercises irrational?’ First, and as we mentioned earlier, Foucault’s spirituality has no religious finality. Therefore, any attempt to show that the later Foucault became some kind of enlightened Christian mystic is bound to fail. Second, secularized spiritual power developed through a series of rational exercises shows a sense of responsibility towards the improvement of the self and others. Thus, any attempt to show that ‘anything goes’ in Foucault’s ethics is also predestined for failure . Foucault’s conception of spirituality can perhaps be considered to be ‘irrational’ in a narrow sense in that spiritual exercises are not universal. In order to maximize improvement, some of those exercises have to be adapted and others have to be created knowing that, unlike Marx and his followers, emancipation is given in a series of singular and local processes which are never and will never be achieved once and for all. Towards the end of (or right after) his coverage of the Iranian events, it became obvious to Foucault that, although revolutionary, the introducing of a spiritual dimension into practical life, is not a universal driving force of history. In that sense, Foucault’s interest in multiple spiritual exercises developed within the western tradition can be understood as part of the self-critique of his journalistic experience in Iran. The Iranian Revolution gave Foucault the opportunity he needed to see spirituality as a condition of revolutions to come ; after his condemnation of the Khomeini regime, however, it became obvious that society does not need to regress to an age of spiritual leaders or create a new, identical era. Therein lies the importance of reading Foucault’s texts on the Iranian Revolution and those on the Enlightenment in tandem. If there is hope of reorganizing society, this transformative impulse will come from autonomous, yet singular , subjects able to select spiritual exercises and use these exercises to improve themselves . This rational government of the self will lead to a different, and likely better or more tolerant, government of others . This freedom of selection of spiritual exercises has the highest chance of being fulfilled in a liberal environment. However, liberalism left without guidance tends to develop a roughly hewn and materialistic vision of the world. This is why we can see Foucault’s post-Iranian writings and meditations as an attempt to spiritualize the liberal tradition. Presenting Foucault’s ethics in terms of a ‘Khomeinization of the Shah’ may sound baroque. Nonetheless, this

seems to be the case. By introducing a spiritual dimension into liberalism, the later Foucault’s ethics combine the best of the two worlds he saw in action during the Iranian uprising. In his dialogue with Iranian writer Baqir Parham, Foucault asserts that there have been two ‘painful experiences’ in the last two centuries of western culture. 30 The first was the ‘theory of the all-powerful state’ endorsed by the French and German intellectuals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries; Foucault is referring here to the Napoleonic Empire resulting from the French Revolution and the Prussian Empire legitimized by German idealists. The

81

second was the Marxist socialist state. Foucault’s (unachieved) ‘political spirituality’ is an alternative to those experiences . Is it Utopian to think that the spiritualization of liberalism will neutralize the principle of calculation? Is it Utopian to think that the technologies of the self will help improve ourselves and resist the technologies of domination? Is it Utopian to think that the tradition of the care of the self can still play a concrete role in the reorganization of society? Is it Utopian to think that spiritual exercises are not other means to discipline bodies? The answer to all of these questions is Yes. But would not there be different types of Utopias? The search for a ‘liberal Utopia’ was one of the later Foucault’s preoccupations. Beaulieu 8118

Liberalism can’t check the worst excesses of biopolitics. Mitchell Dean, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, 2OO1 (“Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty.”

Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 50-1)

Finally, although liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the optimization of life, it has shown itself permanently incapable of arresting—from eugenics to contemporary genetics---the emergence of rationalities that make the optimization of the life of some dependent on the disallowing of the life of others. I can only suggest some general reasons for this. Liberalism is fundamentally concerned to govern through what it conceives as processes that are external to the sphere of government limited by the respect for rights and liberties of individual subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters forms of knowledge of vital processes and seeks to govern through their application. Moreover, to the extent that liberalism depends on the formation of responsible and autonomous subjects through biopolitics and discipline, it fosters the type of governmental practices that are the ground of such rationalities.

Further, and perhaps more simply, we might consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics are so heterogeneous to one another that the derivation of political norms from the democratization of the former cannot act as a prophylactic for the possible outcomes of the latter. We might also consider the alternative to this thesis, that

biopolitics captures and expands the division between political life and mere existence, already found within sovereignty. In either case, the framework of right and law can act as a resource for forces engaged in contestation of the effects of biopower; it cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy of such struggle and may even be the means of the consolidation of those effects.

Mills’ and other liberalism apologists are so vague and amorphous that it’s political useless – even if there is a theoretical philosophy of perfect liberalism that can exist, our links and DAs to the aff prove it’s not them Schmitt 12 [Richard, professor emeritus of philosophy at Brown University, “Comment on Charles Mills, "Occupy Liberalism!",” Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 15 number 2 (2012): 331-336]

Mills's argument begins with a distinction between Liberalism (capital "L") as theory and liberalism as practices and institution. The dominant liberalism that radicals are so critical of is not the core Liberal theory but a particular incarnation of that theory. Liberalism as theory is an "umbrella" that can be constitutive of the views of Rawls, as well as of Nozick. It can also be at the heart of both exclusionary liberalism—what Mills likes to call "Her- renvolk liberalism"—and the egalitarianism of genuine

radicals. What is this protean Liberalism? It involves a commitment to universal equality, to individualism. But since these key terms—individualism, equality, universality—remain indeterminate in Liberalism as a theory, the sharp disagreements between radicals and liberals are, indeed, as Mills claims not

disagreements about theory. The theory is so abstract and, frankly, vague that there is little to disagree about

(unless, as a Fascist, one rejects equality altogether). And so long as we stick to airy generalities we can all agree that equality is very desirable. It is only when we begin to talk about what that means, that we will find radicals and liberals at each other's

throats. If they accept Mills's distinction between Liberalism—indeterminate declarations about the great value of equality—and liberalism—the repugnant practice of praising equality while

82

oppressing people who are not white men—radicals can do one of two things: they can follow Mills's recommendation

and stick to Liberalism as theory and thus stick to extremely abstract declarations about equality, making very sure that they never explain what they mean by equality. (We might call this "Commencement Address Liberalism.") That might make them more acceptable to actually existing liberals but only at the

price of giving up the fight for justice and equality as radicals understand it. Or they can confront their political enemies, e.g.,

contractarian liberals ("Herrenvolk liberals") and then they will have to draw sharp lines between themselves and the individualist, impoverished understanding of inequality that dominant liberalism uses to disguise the glaring injustices of our society. Then the cat is out of the bag: the commonalities between liberals and radicals are very tenuous. You cannot mouth the liberals' platitudes and fight against sexist, racist, and other group oppressions and hope that liberals will still agree with you. Once you talk about race and class they will discover what you are hiding under your liberal sheep's clothing. Mills supports his plea to radicals to employ the language of liberalism by claiming that, for instance, liberal denial of group oppression is not

something their theory forces them to do but that it is "contingent." But it is not clear to me what that means. Liberals have denied, overlooked, looked away from group subjugation for 400 years at least, since the accusation of class oppression was first

raised by the Diggers and Levellers in seventeenth-century England. That's simply what liberals do; they make the clearly false empirical claim that prince and pauper, cleaner and billionaire owner are fundamentally the same except that one is more successful than the other due to greater effort. Calling that "contingent" makes it no less predictable. There is no reason to think that liberals will not do that for a long time to come. Calling the denial of group oppression "contingent" suggests that liberals do not have to act as if we were all separate individuals endowed with more or less the same opportunities. Well, no, of course they don't have to do it but they have been doing it for

centuries to the point where today they have managed to make "class struggle" a dirty word. Do we have any reason to think that they are going to stop distorting reality in the near future? Talking vaguely about equality will not make them change. If there is any hope of overcoming liberalism, it can only be through sharp confrontations of liberal distortions of the

facts about equality and inequality in capitalist society. This is more or less what Charles's paper says, when read as an answer to the question: "what can we do to persuade liberals to take us radicals seriously?" But in the background, there is the esoteric message which answers a very different question: "What does it mean to be a radical today? What should we be thinking about and what should we be doing?" Here the question is not about how to change liberals. The question is about us, ourselves, and

what it means to be a radical today. Charles's answer to that question goes more or less as follows: Radicals and liberals share some extremely abstract principles, such as a commitment to freedom and equality. Many Liberals tend to interpret those commitments in ways that are demonstrably inadequate.

Modern biopolitics guarantees an abstract racism that necessitates sovereign intervention—there’s no such thing as perfect liberalismHoffmann 7 [Kasper Hoffmann, professor of International Development Studies at Roskilde University, May, Militarised Bodies and Spirits of Resistance, http://diggy.ruc.dk:8080/handle/1800/2766]

In modern forms of government, concepts of the norm and normal have played a kind mediating role in the formulation and execution of

normative projects (Canguilhem 2005 [1966]; Ewald 1990). It is through the systematic accumulation of knowledge about certain social problems and deviations that we come to know the normal and the norm that stabilise and indicate it in social contexts (Ewald 1990: 140). By aligning delinquent or abnormal subjectivities (through, for instance, techniques of pedagogy, health, economic development, human development, spirituality etc.) to the norm, the normal order, can be restored allowing normative goals to be considered “for the good” : “[T]he good is figured in terms of adequacy – the good product is adequate to the purpose it was meant to serve. Within the normative system, values are not defined a priori, but instead through an endless process of comparison and normalization ” (Ewald 1990: 152). Rose has made the point that the “very notion of normality has emerged out of a concern with types of conduct, thought, expression deemed troublesome or dangerous” (Rose 1996: 26), so that normality can only be understood in relation to the

abnormal. Therefore, even if the norm has allowed modern biopower to transform negative restraints of power into more positive controls or normalisation, it is still producing dangerous subjectivities.

83

Within liberal forms of government, at least, there is a long history of people who, for one reason or another, are deemed not to possess or to display the attributes (e.g. autonomy, responsibility) required of the juridical and political subjects of rights and who are therefore subjected to all sorts of disciplinary, bio-political and even sovereign interventions. (Dean 1999: 134) The list of those so subjected would include at various times those furnished with the status of the indigent, the degenerate, the feeble-minded, the native, the savage, the homosexual, the delinquent,

the dangerous etc. Modern so-called “liberal” practices of government therefore also entail ‘illiberal’ aspects (see Hindess 2001; Dean 1999 Chapter 7). Liberalism always contains the possibility of non-liberal interventions in the lives of those who do not possess the attributes required to be a “citizen”. However, bio-politics is not

confined to liberal forms of rule: liberalism just makes the articulation in a specific way. Other types of rule, such as authoritarian or totalitarian forms, also depend on the elements of a bio-politics that is concerned with the detailed administration of life. Rather than denying that non-liberal practices are indeed an integral part of all forms of liberal democratic government, we could see the will to establish the authority of liberal democracy – this will to power – as an element of sovereignty in the heart

of the “democracy”. In modern processes of government, the focus is on the fostering and promotion of life, though in certain circumstances this fundamental “security” of the population is experienced as threatened. In such circumstances the community calls upon its fundamental right to exist as such and thus evokes its right to deny the right to life of those who are seen as a threat to the life of that same population. This allows us to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of bio-politics (Dean

1999: 139). In Foucault’s account, bio-politics, as concrete political method of security, does not put an end to the practice of war; it provides it with renewed scope. This new scope allows the actual neutralization, or even

elimination of life at the level of entire populations, or micro populations. It intensifies the killing, whether by “ethnic cleansing” that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughter of classes and groups in the name of the utopia to be achieved. Governance is now exercised at the level of life and of the population, and wars will be waged at that level on behalf of the “security” of each and all. This brings us to the heart of Foucault’s challenging thesis about bio-politics, namely that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers […] it is because power is located at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” (Foucault 1976: 180, my translation). Thus, there seems to be a kind of inescapable connection between the power to foster life and the power to disqualify life which is characteristic of bio-power. The emergence of a bio-political racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which the demand for a homogenous social space articulated by the norm appears to turn into a life necessity. Through the establishment of the norm,

abnormality is inscribed upon individual “other” bodies, casting certain deviations as both internal dangers to the body politic and as inheritable legacies that threatens the well-being of race: On behalf of the existence of everyone entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed…at stake is the biological existence of a population. (Foucault 1976: 180,

my translation, emphasis) Bio-politics presides over the processes of birth, death, production and illness. It acts on the human species. Within this bio-political practice the sovereign right to kill appears in a new form; as an “excess” of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it, and in its most radical form it is a means of introducing a fundamental distinction between those who must live and those who must die. It fragments the biological field and establishes a break within the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as “good”, fit and superior (Stoler 1995: 84). It therefore establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life. It posits that, the more you kill and let die, the more you will live. Thus, in modern biopolitical practice, war does more than reinforce one’s own kind by eliminating a racial adversary: it “regenerates” one’s own race (Stoler 1995: 56). It is essential to note that racism as a bio-political practice does not draw on a particular theory of race – it does not need to. Instead racism

84

designates a much more general practice which introduces a rift in the biological continuum that is the human species between those who are worthy of citizenship and those who are not. Internal threats to the health and wellbeing of a social body come from those who were deemed to lack an ethics of “how to live” and thus the ability to govern themselves. It is worth remembering that the Nazi concentration camps housed not only Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Bolsheviks and other inassimilable elements. To sum up, Foucault understands racism as a sort of permanent feature of biopower and not as the paroxysmal convulsion of a decaying moral order (Stoler, 1995: 64). Foucault’s argument is that racism is not only confined within those obviously racist forms of authoritarian government such as the German Nationalist Socialist state, but that it is intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalising governmental rationalities and their bio-political technologies. By showing how racism possesses a polyvalent

mobility, he shows that racism is not merely an ideological discourse of exceptionally cruel regimes, but a fundamental feature of modern processes of government.

85

AT Impact DefenseMaintaining liberalism’s legitimacy cements violent grand strategy and disdain for democracyMorrissey 11 [John, Lecturer in Political and Cultural Geography, National University of Ireland, Galway, has held visiting research fellowships at University College Cork, City University of New York, Virginia Tech and the University of Cambridge, Geopolitics, 16.2, “Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror”, DOI DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2010.538872]

A bigger question, of course, is what the US military practices of lawfare and juridical securitization say about our contemporary moment. Are they essentially ‘exceptional’ in character, prompted by the so-called exceptional character of global

terrorism today? Are they therefore enacted in ‘spaces of exceptions’ or are they, in fact, simply contemporary examples of Foucault’s ‘spaces

of security’ that are neither exceptional nor indeed a departure from, or perversion of, liberal democracy? As Mark Neocleous so aptly puts it, has the “liberal project of ‘liberty”’ not always been, in fact, a “project of security”?116 This ‘project of security’ has long invoked a powerful political dispositif of ‘executive powers’, typically registered as ‘emergency powers’, but, as Neocleous makes clear, of the permanent kind.117 For Neocleous, the pursuit of ‘security’ – and more specifically ‘capitalist security’ – marked the very emergence of liberal democracies, and continues to frame our contemporary world. In the West at least, that world may be endlessly registered as a liberal democracy defined by the ‘rule of law’, but, as Neocleous reminds us,

the assumption that the law, decoupled from politics, acts as the ultimate safeguard of democracy is simply false – a key point affirmed by considering the US military’s extensive waging of liberal lawfare. As David Kennedy observes, the military lawyer who “carries the briefcase of rules and restrictions” has long been replaced by the lawyer who “participate[s] in discussions of strategy and tactics”.118

The US military’s liberal lawfare reveals how the rule of law is simply another securitization tactic in liberalism’s ‘pursuit

of security’; a pursuit that paradoxically eliminates fundamental rights and freedoms in the ‘name of security’.119 This is a ‘liberalism’ defined by what Michael Dillon and Julian Reid see as a commitment to waging ‘biopolitical war’ for the securitization of life – ‘killing to make live’.120

And for Mark Neocleous, (neo)liberalism’s fetishisation of ‘security’ – as both a discourse and a technique of government – has resulted in a world defined by anti-democratic technologies of power.121 In the case of the US military’s forward deployment on the frontiers of the war on terror – and its juridical tactics to secure biopolitical power thereat – this has been made possible by constant reference to a neoliberal ‘project of security’ registered in a language of ‘endless emergency’ to ‘secure’ the geopolitical and geoeconomic goals of US foreign policy.122 The US military’s continuous and indeed growing military footprint in the Middle East and elsewhere can be read as a ‘permanent emergency’,123 the new ‘normal’ in which geopolitical military interventionism and its concomitant biopolitical technologies of power are necessitated by the perennial political economic ‘need’ to securitize volatility and threat.

CONCLUSION: ENABLING BIOPOLITICAL POWER IN THE AGE OF SECURITIZATION

Law and force flow into one another. We make war in the shadow of law, and law in the shadow of force.

— David Kennedy, Of War and Law 124

Can a focus on lawfare and biopolitics help us to critique our contemporary moment’s proliferation of

practices of securitization – practices that appear to be primarily concerned with coding, quantifying, governing and anticipating life itself? In the context of the

US military’s war on terror, I have argued above that it can. If, as David Kennedy points out, the “emergence of a global economic and commercial order has amplified the role of background legal regulations as the strategic terrain for transnational activities of all sorts”, this also includes, of course, ‘warfare’; and for some time, the US military has recognised the “opportunities for creative strategy” made possible by proactively

waging lawfare beyond the battlefield.125 As Walter Benjamin observed nearly a century ago, at the very heart of military violence is a “lawmaking character”.126 And it is this ‘lawmaking character’ that is integral to the biopolitical technologies of power that secure US geopolitics in

our contemporary moment. US lawfare focuses “the attention of the world on this or that excess” whilst

simultaneously arming “the most heinous human suffering in legal privilege”, redefining horrific violence as “collateral damage, self-defense, proportionality, or necessity”.127 It involves a mobilisation of the law that is precisely channelled towards “evasion”, securing classified Status of Forces Agreements and “offering at once the experience of safe ethical distance and careful pragmatic assessment, while parcelling out responsibility, attributing it, denying it – even sometimes embracing it – as a tactic of statecraft and war”.128

Since the inception of the war on terror, the US military has waged incessant lawfare to legally securitize, regulate and empower its ‘operational capacities’ in its multiples ‘spaces of security’ across the globe – whether that be at a US base in the Kyrgyz Republic or in combat in Iraq. I have

sought to highlight here these tactics by demonstrating how the execution of US geopolitics relies upon a proactive legal-

86

biopolitical securitization of US troops at the frontiers of the American ‘leasehold empire’. For the US military, legal-biopolitical apparatuses of security enable its geopolitical and geoeconomic projects of security on the ground; they plan for and legally condition the ‘milieux’ of military commanders; and in so doing they render operational the pivotal spaces of overseas intervention of contemporary US national security conceived in terms of ‘global governmentality’.129 In the US global war on terror, it is lawfare that facilitates what Foucault calls the “biopolitics of security” – when life itself becomes the “object of security”.130 For the US military, this involves the eliminating of threats to ‘life’, the creating of operational capabilities to ‘make live’ and the anticipating and management of life’s uncertain ‘future’.

Some of the most key contributions across the social sciences and humanities in recent years have divulged how discourses of ‘security’, ‘precarity’ and ‘risk’ function centrally in the governing dispositifs of our contemporary world.131 In a society of (in)security, such discourses have a profound power to invoke danger as “requiring extraordinary action”.132 In the ongoing war on terror, registers of emergency play pivotal roles in the justification of military securitization strategies, where ‘risk’, it seems, has become permanently binded to ‘securitization’. As Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster

point out, the “perspective of risk management” seductively effects practices of military securitization to be seen as necessary, legitimate and indeed therapeutic.133 US tactics of liberal lawfare in the long war – the conditioning of the battlefield, the sanctioning of the privilege of violence, the regulating of the conduct of troops, the interpreting, negating and utilizing 24 of international law, and the securing of SOFAs – are vital security dispositifs of a broader ‘risk- securitization’ strategy involving the deployment of liberal technologies of biopower to “manage dangerous irruptions in the future”.134 It may well be fought beyond the battlefield in “a war of the

pentagon rather than a war of the spear”,135 but it is lawfare that ultimately enables the ‘toxic combination’ of US geopolitics and biopolitics defining the current age of securitization.

The impact is extinctionSzentes 8 [Tamas, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest. “Globalisation and prospects of the world society,”

4/22/08, http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav.pdf]

It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in

the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources

badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical

terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or

religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and

fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a commonplace now that peace is not

merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global

interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological

balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others,

but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual

87

question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural and

political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the

political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that

great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and

system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has

extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common

solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”,

as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological

camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the

coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment.

88

Aff Answers to Biopower K

89

Alt

90

Alt BadThere is no alternative to the law/legal system---neg alternative brings more inequality and abuseAuerbach 83 [Jerold S., Professor of History at Wellesley, “Justice Without Law?”, 1983, p. 144-146]

As cynicism about the legal system increases, so does enthusiasm for alternative dispute-settlement

institutions. The search for alternatives accelerates, as Richard Abel has suggested, "when some fairly powerful interest is threatened by an increase in the number or magnitude of

legal rights.*'6 Alternatives are designed to provide a safety valve, to siphon discontent from courts. With the danger of political confrontation reduced, the ruling power of legal institutions is

preserved, and the stability of the social system reinforced. Not incidentally, alternatives prevent the use of courts for redistributive purposes in the interest of equality, by consigning the rights of disadvantaged citizens to institutions with minimal power to enforce or protect them . It is, therefore, necessary to beware of the seductive

appeal of alternative institutions. They may deflect energy from political organization by groups of people with common grievances; or discourage effective litigation strategies that could provide

substantial benefits. They may, in the end, create a two-track justice system that dispenses informal "justice" to poor people with "small" claims and "minor" disputes, who cannot afford

legal services, and who are denied access to courts. (Bar associations do not recommend that corporate law firms divert their clients to mediation, or that business deductions for legal expenses—

a gigantic government subsidy for litigation—be eliminated.) Justice according to law will be reserved for the affluent, hardly a novel

development in American history but one that needs little encouragement from the spread of alternative dispute-settlement institutions. It is social context and political choice that determine whether courts, or alternative institutions, can render justice more or less accessible—and to whom. Both can be discretionary, arbitrary, domineering—and unjust. Law can symbolize justice, or conceal repression. It can reduce exploitation, or facilitate it. It can prohibit the abuse of power, or disguise abuse in procedural forms. It can promote equality, or sustain inequality.

Despite the resiliency and power of law, it seems unable to eradicate the tension between legality and justice: even in a society of (legal) equals, some still remain more equal than others. But diversion from the legal system is likely to accentuate that

inequality. Without legal power the imbalance between aggrieved individuals and corporations, or government agencies, cannot be redressed . In American society , as Laura Nader has observed, "disputing without the force of law ...

[is| doomed to fail."7 Instructive examples document the deleterious effect of coerced informality (even if others

demonstrate the creative possibilities of indigenous experimentation). Freed slaves after the Civil War and factory workers at the turn of the century, like inner-city poor people now, have all been assigned places in informal proceedings that offer substantially weaker safeguards than law can provide. Legal institutions may not provide equal

justice under law, but in a society ruled by law it is their responsibility. It is chimerical to believe that mediation or arbitration can now accomplish what law seems powerless to achieve . The American deification of individual rights requires an accessible legal system for their protection. Understandably, diminished faith in its capacities will encourage the yearning for alternatives. But the rhetoric of "community" and "justice" should not be permitted to conceal the deterioration of community life and the unraveling of substantive notions of justice that has accompanied its demise. There is every reason why the values that historically are associated with informal justice should remain compelling: especially the preference for trust, harmony, and reciprocity within a communal setting. These are not,

however, the values that American society encourages or sustains; in their absence there is no effective alternative to legal institutions. The quest for community may indeed be "timeless and universal."8 In this century, however, the communitarian search for justice without law has deteriorated beyond

recognition into a stunted off-shoot of the legal system. The historical progression is clear: from community justice without formal legal institutions to the rule of law, all too often without

justice. But injustice without law is an even worse possibility, which misguided enthusiasm for alternative dispute settlement now seems likely to encourage. Our legal culture too accurately expresses the individualistic and materialistic values that

most Americans deeply cherish to inspire optimism about the imminent restoration of communitarian purpose. For law to be less conspicuous Americans would have to moderate their expansive freedom to compete, to acquire, and to possess, while simultaneously elevating shared responsibilities above individual rights. That is an unlikely prospect unless Americans become, in effect, un-American . Until then, the pursuit of justice without law does incalculable harm to the prospect of equal justice.

91

2AC Alt FailsThe alt fails because it kills all political resistance and is wrong about being able to reform legal institutions

Huysmans 8 (Jef, Chair in Security Studies, director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities, Governance (CCIG) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, “The Jargon of Exception – On Schmitt, Agamben and the Absence of Political Society”, International Political Sociology (2008) 2, p. 179)

Deploying the jargon of exception and especially Agamben’s conception of the exception-being-the-rule for reconfiguring conceptions of politics in a biopolitical age comes at a serious cost, though. It inserts both a diagnosis of our time and a conceptual apparatus for rethinking politics that has no place for the category that has been central to the modern democratic tradition: the political significance of people as a multiplicity of social relations that condition politics and that are constituted by the mediations of various objectified forms and processes (for example, scientific knowledge, technologies, property relations, legal institutions…). Even if one would argue that Agamben’s framing of the current political conditions are valuable for understanding important changes that have taken place in the twentieth century and that are continuing in the

twenty first, they also are to a considerable extent depoliticizing. Agamben’s work tends to guide the analysis to

unmediated, factual life. For example, some draw on Agamben to highlight the importance of bodily strategies of resistance. One of the key examples is individual refugees protesting against their detention by sewing up lips and eyes. They exemplify how individualized naked life resists by deploying their bodily, biological condition against sovereign

biopolitical powers (for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004:15–17). I follow Adorno and others, however, that such a conception of bodily, naked life is not political. It ignores how this life only exists and takes on political form through various socioeconomic, technological, scientific, legal, and other mediations. For example, the images of the sewed-up eyelids and lips of the individualized and biologized refugees have no political significance without being mediated by public media, intense mobilizations on refugee and asylum questions, contestations of human rights in the courts, etc. It is these mediations that are the object and structuring devices of political struggle. Reading the politics of exception as the central lens onto modern conceptions of politics, as both Agamben and Schmitt do, erases from the concept of politics a rich and

constitutive history of sociopolitical struggles, traditions of thought linked to this history, and key sites and temporalities of politics as well as the central processes through which individualized bodily resistances gain their sociopolitical significance.

Alt fails – abstract movements won’t produce political results besides violence – embrace the hard work of pragmatic reform Condit 15 [Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change,” Feb 4, 2015, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015]

Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that

it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil . The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap

92

into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily

imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult , requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been

sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the

former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of

leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-

epistemological character of language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible.

The rejection of all liberalism strips political judgments that are necessary for progressive reform Smith 8 [Nick, University of New Hampshire Department of Philosophy, Questions for a Reluctant Jurisprudence of Alterity,

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~nicks/pdf/Levinas%20and%20Law%20Questions%20for%20a%20Reluctant%20Jurisprudence.pdf]

These are sobering questions for me. I find the challenges that Levinas and Adorno pose to modernity and the history of philosophy quite powerful, yet their resistance to practical philosophy is deeply frustrating. Surely not all philosophers must satisfy our desire to put philosophy to use, but Levinas and Adorno seem to have relinquished their ability to judge legal and political activity. This seems far from an apolitical, pre-

political, or meta-political position. I cannot help but think that no politics is bad politics—politics stripped of evaluative thought. This worries Fraser as well because such a position is tantamount to surrendering any possibility of distinguishing emancipatory and oppressive identity claims , benign and pernicious differences. Thus, deconstructive antiessentialists evade political questions of the day: Which identity claims are rooted in the defense of social relations of inequality and domination? And which are rooted in a challenge to such relations? Which identity claims carry the potential to expand actually existing democracy? And which, in contrast, work against democratization? Which differences, finally, should a democratic society seek to foster, and which, on the contrary, should it aim to abolish?48 Although “we are not now in a position

to envision a full-scale successor to socialism,” Fraser encourages us to “try nevertheless to conceive provisional alternatives to the present order that could supply a basis for a progressive politics .”49 There may be no

leftist utopia, and all campaigns claiming otherwise should be treated with deep suspicion. We will not overcome identity thinking in grand political reformations , but we can fight it in the minutiae of each conflict, policy, and practice. Laws do identify and categorize, but they do not all do so with equal violence and disregard for particularity. Levinas and Adorno, however, deny us any means of drawing comfortable distinctions between the justifiable and unjustifiable. Given the current state of law and politics, the prospects of achieving reform through non-identity thinking seem quite grim.

Even if we could—against Levinas and Adorno’s spirit—activate a coherent program of reform around theories of

alterity , I doubt they could match the powers promoting their antithesis. Prevailing instrumental institutions gain momentum and crush or integrate theories of alterity , and the strategy of abstaining from political life in order to preserve the protest against instrumentality seems more desperate than ever. Our objective should not merely be to use thought to

remember the nonidentical, but rather to safeguard the thought of the non-identical while acting to release it from blind domination. Without both a practical orientation toward transforming material conditions and a tolerance for the organizational categories necessary to implement such reform, deconstruction and critical theory seem severed from their radical traditions. Pretending that these critiques provide a form of resistance when they live harmlessly in their academic niche only reinforces the status quo . As Adorno and Marx recognized, reason struggles to navigate a course that gives it effect in the concrete world without sacrificing it to the instrumentalities of that world. I like to think that law is

an ally in this project, but I now wonder if there is any practical upshot for a jurisprudence of alterity. Any attempt to discover legal praxis in Levinas and Adorno will traverse such heights that the reformer, if not forced to turn back, will

93

ultimately find herself in air so theoretically rarified that one might doubt if any community could survive at its altitude. From this perspective, a jurisprudence of alterity seems most relevant as a regulative ideal for all legal activity. Yet for those of us inclined to seek guidance for law in Levinas or Adorno because we are moved by the threats of authoritarianism and consumerism, we find

ourselves on strangely familiar ground as we stand on this summit. Though separated by miles of conceptual elevation, we arrive at the familiar practical values recognized by the traditions we seek to overcome: dignity, respect, difference, non-violence, dialogue, participation, etc. Did we find these practical principles at the height of Levinas and Adorno’s

works, or did we bring them with us interpretive biases? It seems odd, for instance, to rely on a radical critique of Western metaphysics to support rather pedestrian arguments against racial profiling, capital punishment, violations of human rights, or the recent wars in Iraq. We can make such arguments with much less controversial premises, and hence I am suspicious of myself. Am I, as Adorno accused Lukács, “guilty of smuggl[ing] back the most pitiful clichés of the conformism to which the critique had once been directed?”50 Can law ever be more than such a cliché?

94

1AR Alt FailsThe alt results in endless factionalism and policing within movementsKarlberg 3 [Michael, Assistant Professor of Communication at Western Washington University, PEACE & CHANGE, v28, n3, July, p.

339-41]

Granted, social activists do "win" occasional “battles” in these adversarial arenas, but the root causes of their concerns largely remain unaddressed and the larger "wars" arguably are not going well. Consider the case of environmental activism. Countless environmental protests, lobbies, and lawsuits mounted in recent generations throughout

the Western world. Many small victories have been won. Yet environmental degradation continues to accelerate at a rate that far outpaces the highly circumscribed advances made in these limited battles the most committed environmentalists

acknowledge things are not going well. In addition, adversarial strategies of social change embody assumptions that have internal c onsequences for social movements, such as internal factionalization . For instance, virtually all of the social projects of the "left” throughout the 20th century have suffered from recurrent internal factionalization. The opening decades of the century were marked by political infighting among vanguard communist revolutionaries. The middle decades of the century were marked by theoretical disputes among leftist intellectuals. The century's closing decades have been marked by the fracturing of the a new left** under the

centrifugal pressures of identity politics. Underlying this pattern of infighting and factionalization is the tendency to interpret differences—of class, race, gender, perspective, or strategy—as sources of antagonism and conflict. In this regard, the political "left" and "right" both define themselves in terms at a common adversary—the "other"—defined by political differences . Not surprisingly, advocates of both the left and right frequently invoke the need for internal unity in order to prevail over their adversaries on the other side of the alleged political spectrum.

However, because the terms left and right axe both artificial and reified categories that do not reflect the complexity of

actual social relations, values, or beliefs, there is no way to achieve lasting unity within either camp because there are no actual

boundaries between them. In reality, social relations, values, and beliefs are infinitely complex and variable . Yet once an adversarial posture is adopted by assuming that differences are sources at conflict, initial distinctions between the left and the right inevitably are followed by subsequent distinctions within the left and the right. Once this centrifugal process is set in motion, it is difficult, if not

impossible, to restrain. For all of these reasons, adversarial strategies have reached a point of diminishing returns even if such strategies were necessary and viable in the past when human populations were less socially and ecologically interdependent those conditions no longer exist. Our reproductive and technological success as a species has led to conditions of unprecedented interdependence , and no group on the planet is isolated any longer. Under these new conditions, new strategies not only are possible but are essential. Humanity has become a single interdependent social body. In order to meet the complex social and environmental challenges now facng us, we must learn to coordinate our collective actions. Yet a body cannot coordinate its actions as long as its "left" and is "right," or its "north" and its "south," or its "east" and its "west" are locked in adversarial relationships.

95

PermPermutation do both—we can work within a dominant system and still resist

Michel Foucault, biopower dude, 1980, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, pg. 154

FOUCAULT We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.

Permutation – do the plan and interrogate the 1ac’s epistemological failures – those failures are inevitable and can be interrogated endlessly – but if implementing the aff can still be a good idea some failures, voting for the perm enables transformative potential Nunes 12 [Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies, João Nunes, Security Dialogue 2012 43: 345, Politics

and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK, p. sage publications]

In the works of these authors, one can identify a tendency to see security as inherently connected to exclusion, totalization and even violence. The idea of a ‘logic’ of security is now widely present in the critical security studies literature. Claudia Aradau (2008: 72), for example, writes of an ‘exclusionary logic of security’ underpinning and legitimizing ‘forms of domination’. Rens van Munster (2007: 239) assumes a ‘logic of security’, predicated upon a ‘political organization on the exclusionary basis of fear’. Laura Shepherd (2008: 70) also identifies a liberal and highly problematic ‘organizational logic’ in security. Although there would probably

be disagreement over the degree to which this logic is inescapable, it is symptomatic of an overwhelmingly pessimistic

outlook that a great number of critical scholars are now making the case for moving away from security. The normative preference for desecuritization has been picked up in attempts to contest, resist and ‘unmake’ security (Aradau, 2004; Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 2007). For these contributions, security cannot be reconstructed and political transformation can only be brought about when security and its logic are removed

from the equation (Aradau, 2008; Van Munster, 2009; Peoples, 2011). This tendency in the literature is problematic for the critique

of security in at least three ways. First , it constitutes a blind spot in the effort of politicization . The assumption of an exclusionary, totalizing or violent logic of security can be seen as an essentialization and a moment of closure. To be faithful to itself, the politicization of security would need to recognize that there is nothing natural or necessary about security – and that security as a paradigm of thought or a register of meaning is also a construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance

through practice. The exclusionary and violent meanings that have been attached to security are themselves the

result of social and historical processes, and can thus be changed . Second, the institution of this apolitical realm runs counter to the purposes of critique by foreclosing an engagement with the different ways in which security may be constructed. As Matt McDonald (2012) has argued, because security means different things for different people , one must always understand it in context . Assuming from the start that security implies the narrowing of choice and the empowerment of an elite forecloses the acknowledgment of security claims that may seek to achieve exactly the opposite: alternative possibilities

in an already narrow debate and the contestation of elite power.5 In connection to this, the claims to insecurity put

forward by individuals and groups run the risk of being neglected if the desire to be more secure is identified with a compulsion towards totalization, and if aspirations to a life with a degree of predictability are identified with violence. Finally, this tendency blunts critical security studies as a resource for practical politics.

By overlooking the possibility of reconsidering security from within – opting instead for its replacement with other ideals – the critical field weakens its capacity to confront head-on the exceptionalist connotations that security has acquired in policymaking circles . Critical scholars run the risk of playing into this agenda when they tie security to exclusionary and violent practices, thereby failing to question security actors as they take those views for granted and act as if they were inevitable. Overall, security is just too important – both as a concept and as a political instrument – to be simply abandoned by critical scholars. As McDonald (2012: 163) has put it, If security is politically powerful, is the foundation of political legitimacy for a range of actors, and involves the articulation of

96

our core values and the means of their protection, we cannot afford to allow dominant discourses of security to be confused with the essence of

security itself. In sum, the trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations . The politicization of security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security ideas and practices; however, it has

paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the meaning of security itself. By foreclosing the possibility of alternative notions of security, this imbalanced politicization weakens the analytical capacity of critical security studies , undermines its ability to function as a political resource and runs the risk of being politically counterproductive. Seeking to address these limitations, the next section revisits emancipatory understandings of security.

And, engaging liberalism is essential to breaking down biopower, it promotes a form of rationality that limits state power Lacombe 96 [Danny, Criminology Simon Fraser U, “Reforming Foucault: A Critique of the Social Control Thesis” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 47, No. 2 Jstor]

The nature of the relation between the individual and the political order concerned Foucault in his studies of 'bio-power' and 'bio-politics'. In this work, he implicitly negates his earlier claims that rights in the West were unequivocally linked to the sovereign (1980b, 1988, 199 1). Foucault introduced the notion of 'bio-power' in his work on sexuality to designate the proliferation of a technology of power-knowledge primarily

concerned with life. Bio-power was a mechanism that took charge of life by 'investing the body, health , modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence' (Foucault 1980b: 14344, emphasis added). The notion of bio-power is useful for our understanding of the phenomenon of resistance because while it represents a totalizing or universal mechanism - one that interpellates the subject as a member of a population - it also contains the seed for a counter-power or a counter-politics because that mechanism individualizes the subject of a population . It is this aspect of bio-power, its simultaneous totalizing and individual-izing tendencies, that is of importance in understanding the strategies by which individual subjects can claim the right to self-determination. Foucault explains that against this [bio-]power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being . Since the last century, the great struggles that have challenged the general system of power were not guided by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. (. . .) [Wlhat was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plentitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerningrights. The 'right' tolife, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' (. . .) was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980b: 144-5) If life, understood here as

'man's concrete essence', is affirmed through rights claims, then, like Foucault we can no longer conceive law as necessarily linked to the sovereign. It must be linked to a different political rationality , one I believe, in which human rights are at the centre. While Foucault never specifically addressed the question of human rights, his lectures on 'bio-politics' (at the College de France between 1978 and 1979) suggest that struggles for life and for self-determination are to be understood in the context of liberalism. In his lectures, he explores the relation between bio-power -the mechanisms taking charge of life -and the emergence of bio-politics, by which he means the way in which a rationalization was attempted, dating from the eighteenth century, for the problems posed to governmental practice by the phenomena specific to an ensemble of living beings: health, hygiene, birthrate, longevity, races . . .(198 1 :353) Foucault's statement is significant

because it suggests that we cannot dissociate the problems posed by the question of population (bio-power)

from the political rationality within which they emerged, liberalism . Far from conceiving it as a political theory or

a representation of society, Foucault understands liberalism as an 'art of government', that is, as a particular practice, activity and

rationality used to administer, shape, and direct the conduct of people (1981 :358). As a rationality of government - a 'governmentality' -liberalism, towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, breaks from reason of state (la raison d'e'tat) which since the sixteenth century had sought to 'justify the growing exercise of government' (Foucault 198 1 :354). What distinguishes liberalism from reason of

state as an art of government is that for liberalism 'there is always too much government' (Foucault 1981: 354-5). In fact, far from being organized around the principle of a strong state, liberalism upholds the principle of maximal economy with minimal government

(Foucault 1981: 354). The question of liberalism , that of 'too much governing,' regulates itself , according to Foucault, 'by means of a continuing reflection' (1 98 1: 354). The idea of reflexivity here is significant because it refers to a mechanism of self-critique, and self-limitation, inherent in liberalism . Foucault claims that Liberalism (. . .) constitutes - and this is the reason both for its polymorphous character and for its recurrences - an instrument for the criticism of reality. Liberalism criticizes an earlier functioning government from which one tries to escape; it examines an actual practice of government that one attempts to reform and to rationalize by a fundamental analysis; it criticizes a

97

practice of government to which one is opposed and whose abuses one wishes to curb. As a result of this, one can discover liberalism under different but simultaneous forms, both as a schema for the regulation of governmental practice and as a theme for sometimes radical opposition to

such practice. (Foucault 198 1 : 356) What allows liberalism to oppose state powe r , then, is not the principle of sovereignty or the idea of a natural right external to the state; rather it is a rationality , a governmentality of life that takes

on 'the character of a challenge' (Foucault 1981 :353). People resist the conditions under which they live, they make claims for or against the state, because they have been submitted to government. In other

words, the political technologies that seek to render us governable as a population (bio-power and bio-politics)

simultaneously make possible the critique of these same technologies.'

98

ImpactDemocracy checks biopower impact

Edward Ross Dickinson 4, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, Central European History, Vol. 37 No. 1, p. 34-36

And it is, of course, embedded in a broader discursive complex (institutions, professions, fields of social, medical, and psychological expertise) that pursues these

same aims in often even more effective and inescapable ways.89 In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable.¶ Both are instances of the “disciplinary society” and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states,

including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies.¶ In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce “health,” such a system can —and

historically does— create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends

through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a “logic” or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90¶ Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition

of “liberty,” just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering . ¶ This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not

“opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The

concept “power” should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as

Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create “multiple modernities,” modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91

Their terminal impact is so reductive that’s it’s useless for political analysis---ignores context and history Chandler 9 [David, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of

Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War', Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 243]

For many critical post-structuralist theorists, the ‘global war on terror’ reveals the essence of liberal modernity and fully reveals the limits of its universalist ontology of peace and progress , where the reality of Kant’s

‘perpetual peace’ is revealed to be perpetual war (Reid, 2006: 18). Perhaps the most radical abstract framing of global war is that of Giorgio Agamben. In his seminal work Homo Sacer, he reframed Foucault’s understanding of biopower in terms of the totalizing control over bare life, arguing that the ‘exemplary places of modern biopolitics [were] the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian

99

states of the twentieth century’ (Agamben, 1998: 4; see also Chandler, 2009a). Agamben’s view of liberal power is that of the concentration camp writ globally, where we are all merely objects of power, ‘we are all virtually homines sacri’ (Agamben, 1998: 115). In focusing on biopower as a

means of critiquing universalist policy discourses of global security, critical theorists of global war from diverse fields such as security studies (Jabri, 2007), development (Duffield, 2007) or critical legal theory (Douzinas, 2007) are in danger of reducing their critique of war to abstract statements instrumentalizing war as a technique of global power. These are abstract critiques because the political stakes are never in question: instrumentality and the desire for regulation and control are assumed from the outset. In effect, the critical aspect is merely in the reproduction of the framework of Foucault – that liberal discourses can be deconstructed as an exercise of regulatory power. Without deconstructing the dominant framings of global security threats, critical theorists are in danger of reproducing Foucault’s framework of biopower as an ahistorical abstraction. Foucault (2007: 1) himself stated that his analysis of biopower was ‘not in any way a general theory of what power is. It is not a part or even the start of such a theory’, merely the study of the effects of liberal governance practices, which posit as their goal the interests of society – the population – rather than government. In his recent attempt at a ground-clearing critique of Foucauldian international relations theorizing, Jan Selby (2007) poses the question of the problem of the translation of Foucault from a domestic to an international context. He argues that recasting the international sphere in terms of global liberal regimes of regulation is an accidental product of this move. This fails to appreciate the fact that many critical theorists appear to be drawn to Foucault precisely because drawing on his work enables them to critique the international order in these terms. Ironically, this ‘Foucauldian’ critique of ‘global wars’ has little to do with Foucault’s understanding or concerns, which revolved around extending Marx’s critique of the ‘freedoms’ of liberal modernity. In effect, the post-Foucauldians have a different goal: they desire to understand and to critique war and military intervention as a product of the regulatory coercive nature of liberalism. This project owes much to the work of Agamben and his focus on the regulation of ‘bare life’, where the concentration camp, the totalitarian state and (by extension) Guantánamo Bay are held to constitute a moral and political indictment of liberalism

(Agamben, 1998: 4). In these critical frameworks, global war is understood as the exercise of global aspirations for control, no longer mediated by the interstate competition that was central to traditional ‘realist’ framings of international

relations. This less-mediated framework understands the interests and instrumental techniques of power in global terms. As power becomes understood in globalized terms, it becomes increasingly abstracted from any analysis of contemporary social relations: viewed in terms of neoliberal governance, liberal power or biopolitical domination . In this context, global war becomes little more than a metaphor for the operation of power. This war is a global one because, without clearly demarcated political subjects, the unmediated operation of regulatory power is held to construct a world that becomes, literally, one large concentration camp (Agamben, 1998: 171) where instrumental techniques of power can be exercised regardless of frameworks of rights or international

law (Agamben, 2005: 87). For Julian Reid (2006: 124), the ‘global war on terror’ can be understood as an inevitable response to any forms of life that exist outside – and are therefore threatening to – liberal modernity, revealing liberal modernity itself to be ultimately a ‘terrorising project’ arraigned against the vitality of life itself. For Jabri, and other Foucauldian critics, the liberal peace can only mean ‘unending war’ to pacify, discipline and reconstruct the liberal subject:

No impact outside of vague buzzwords that can be mystically asserted in any context – assign it zero political value or predictive powerMwajeh 5 [Z Al-Mwajeh, Indiana University of Pennsylvania The School of Graduate Studies and Research Department of English, “CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERN ETHICS OF ALTERITY VERSUS EMBODIED (MUSLIM) OTHERS”, August 2005, https://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/23/Ziad%20Al-Mwajeh.pdf?sequence=1]

However, I also think that key postmodernism tenets of radical alterity, incommensurability and undecidability cannot be easily thematized in writing, nor can they be realized in praxis. They are aporiatic. The only way to explicate their meanings and possibilities is through using modernist vocabulary they initially oppose and deconstruct . Sometimes, thematizing these aporiatic concepts, one lapses into cryptic and even incantational figurative language , a practice that exposes the practical limitation and limited accessibility of such cherished concepts (or non-concepts). As a result, their translation into, or coextension with, lived realities become basically hypothetical, too. Consequently, the abstract and idealized postmodern concepts verge on, and intersect with, mystic, (sometimes Biblical) allusions and traditions, a situation that problematizes their political value and descriptive power in the realm of action. For example, in Levinasian thought, knowing the other is incompatible with preserving its alterity. All representational endeavors reduce, or fail to capture, what they supposedly represent not only due to imperfect linguistic mediums, but also due to the fact that representation itself is a logocentric institution. It represents the other or the object from the perspective of the Same, usually a priori reducing its uniqueness or sublimity to the known, quantifiable and predictable. To curb such

100

modernist reductive practices, Levinas’s alterity escapes all modernist categories as it is an Other not in a relational or quantifiable way. Rather, it is an Other in the sense of eliding comprehension and representation. Such Other resembles Levinas’s (Biblical) conception of God as absolute Alterity where our epistemological categories or mind cannot contain or represent

Him. More important, the ethics of alterity usually soars above urgent concrete issues that involve politically and economically charged self-other transactions. Levinas’s other is ‘disembodied,’ not in Dr.

Laing’s sense (e.g. The Divided Self). Rather, Levinas’s alterity cannot be substantiated. Defining or embodying the other violates its alterity and sublimity. Hence, any grand appeal such ethics may initially spark becomes questionable when juxtaposed to our existing realities and the factors that regulate self/other different modes of relations. 6 Statement of the Problem, Limitations of the Study and Methods In this study, I attempt to dislodge postmodern ethics from its speculative and elitist tendencies through turning to self-other ethical relations in various literary, discursive and political situations. I focus on bridging the gaps between theory and practice in order to expose the rifts and blind spots in postmodern ethics of alterity. I think that the demands that ‘alterity’ as a generalized abstract term exert differ from those raised by placed and temporalized others. For example, there is an urgent need to know how well Levinas’s concept of ‘absolute alterity’ or Derrida’s concept of ‘undecidability’ fares in political situations. In other words, to argue for prioritizing alterity as a new ethical turn is not the same as to motivate and effect such prioritization. While I agree that Levinas’s “infinite obligation to the other” sounds uplifting, realizing/effecting such a formula is a different story. Theoretically speaking, alterity is embraceable, but in lived realities, others fall on a spectrum of difference (sometimes opposition) from self according to various criteria. Actually, there is a general tendency to posit self and others in terms of difference and opposition, when in fact these are relative and operational terms. Polarizing self and other risks ossifying them into rigid negatively defining entities at the expense of their interdependence and mutual constitution. The terms other and self do not only designate metaphysical figures or linguistic relations, they also describe ontological realities. The metaphor of the ‘embrace’ may in it turn conceal a whole repertoire of idealism, philanthropy, and

logocentrism/humanism. Worse, sometimes Levinasian ethics seems so good to be true or realizable, at least if taken literally. For the demand to meet the other on a neutral ground, pre-ontologically, looks more like an aesthetic ideal/condition that cannot be achieved as we always meet the other in context with our conceptions, motivations and values. Blaming Western Metaphysics, or ontology, for the imbalanced self-other relations somehow brackets subject’s role and agency in the self-other various equations. 7 Moreover,

we may indulge alterity ethics in closed and limited contexts that favor our train of thought and take that for a sufficient

action. We may embrace the other or theorize about embracing and preserving alterity as ethics per se, but we may still live according to dialectical ‘alterity-blind’ institutions and practices . In such cases, we are

either, consciously or subconsciously, acknowledging and maintaining theory/practice divisions, or we know that acting ethically toward the other entails more than theorizing about what form the most ethical relation should take. Acting ethically demands sharing power and taking risks. More problematically, the theoretical formulas may not function in the first place as the roots of ‘unethical’ self-other relations cannot be automatically corrected by theoretically replacing modernist self-centered by alterity-centered ethics. Furthermore, most of the writings about postmodernism—engage strenuous debates and often deploy elitist jargon, a practice that limits their

accessibility and descriptive value. Very often philosophical and theoretical elitist debates alienate larger audiences and may even thrive at the expense of addressing concrete self-other transactions. To a certain degree, these debates are inflated and divorced from the stakes involved in political self-other lived transactions. Once one crosses the threshold of speculating about self-other relations into considering them in light of indispensable concrete constituencies of race, gender, nationality, power grid, and other variables, cherished postmodern key terms—such as undecidability, alterity, and non-judgmentalism—become anomalous. Hard lived realities demand resolutions and involve recalcitrant stakes . To solely dwell on the linguistic/discursive as the origin of self/other imbalance is to overlook the complex and intricate relations among discourses and actions. To put it differently, there has to be some mutual trafficking between metaphysics and lived realities, but one cannot be reduced to the other in any straight predictable manner. Nor are their relations reducible to cause-effect ones where Western Metaphysics’ privileging the subject and reducing the other/object is the causer, while racism, sexism, and colonial exploitation are the effects. This does not deny that there exists a ‘cause-effect’ relation between thought

and lived realities, however. Alterity-centered postmodernism shows how modernist epistemology has failed to establish self-other relations as basically ethical by relegating the other to the status of a hierarchically inferior object or difference. But the downside to such critique is the transformation of the modernist individual/self into postmodernist subject. The postmodernist subject may not be more than a node or a surface/cite

101

constructed by linguistic, economic and media systems. Thus, the ethical turn toward alterity loses its halo when one considers the diminutive role played by human agency and intentionality . Emphasizing

the negative side of constructivism—being constructed by external or upper systems—postmodernism glosses over the subjects’ other various roles in sustaining and continuing, sometimes disrupting, dominant epistemological, economic and political systems. In other words, modernist subjects are primarily products of metaphysically pre-ordained itineraries sidestepping other senses such as being a subject by initiating and performing actions by choice. If subject primarily means subjected to, the ethics, responsibility and obligations, all become paradoxical. Furthermore, Levinas’s dictum to pre-ontologically encounter alterity makes sense; he thinks

that the ethical should, or actually does, precede the ontological. But practically, such divisions may be divisions of convenience rather than of actuality as if the political and ethical belonged to different modes of living. I think that we do not need to submit to modernist disciplinary divisions of convenience nor do we need to separate the ethical from the political or from the ontological. I believe that ethics is not a formula or a prescription we choose to apply or we choose to leave behind.

Ethics is intrinsic to action. Levinas’s move, however, has to be contextualized. It is his desire to remove self other relations from under modernist epistemological reductions and pragmatic/utilitarian arrangements that he wants to go back to a pure self-other encounter—before self-other dialectics. He wants to encounter the other before reductive logic moves in. Yet

such a move ends in an impasse. Leaping back into the pre-ontological stems from Levinas’s ontological or epistemological consciousness. The irony is that one just cannot exit the ontological and still use its structures and vocabularies. Still, Levinas’s ethical dictum exposes the working of unconscious ethnocentrism or conscious bias in our self-other relations, systems and existence, unless we always foreground alterity. Consequently, alterity ethics is both a meta-ethical argument, or for some it constitutes a ‘moral principle,’ or a basic revelation about our human conditions: We are always in relation to—indebted to—the other. We may choose to elide such a realization, but we cannot change it.

Biopolitical control is no longer a threat---crisis of the sovereign state has caused violence to be abandonedShort 5 [Jonathan, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought, York University, “Life and Law: Agamben and Foucault on Governmentality and Sovereignty,” Journal for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1]

Adding to the dangerousness of this logic of control, however, is that while there is a crisis of undecidability in the domain of life, it corresponds to a similar crisis at

the level of law and the national state. It should be noted here that despite the new forms of biopolitical control in operation today, Rose believes that bio-politics has become generally less dangerous in recent times than even in the early part of the last century. At that time, bio- politics was linked to the project of the expanding national state in his opinion. In disciplinary-pastoral society, bio-politics involved a process of social selection of those characteristics thought useful to the nationalist project. Hence, according to Rose, "once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation" (2001: 3). Disciplinary-pastoral bio- politics sets itself the task of eliminating "differences coded as defects", and in pursuit of this goal the most horrible programs of eugenics, forced sterilization, and outright

extermination, were enacted (ibid.: 3). If Rose is more optimistic about bio-politics in 'advanced liberal' societies, it is because this notion of 'national fitness', in terms of bio- political competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous decline thanks in large part to a crisis of the perceived unity of the national state as a viable political project (ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again, "the idea of 'society' as a single, if heterogeneous, domain with a national culture, a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and the powers of a national political government" no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the

governmentalization of the state here, Rose claims that the territorial state , the primary institution of enclosure, has become subject to fragmentation along a number of lines. National culture has given way to cultural pluralism; national identity has been overshadowed by a diverse cluster of identifications, many of them transcending the national territory on which they take place, while the same pluralization has affected the once singular conception of community (ibid.: 5). Under these conditions, Rose

argues, the bio-political programmes of the molar enclosure known as the nation-state have fallen into disrepute and have been all but abandoned .

102

Biopower Good

103

Saves livesEven if biopower can be destructive, it is on balance necessary to save lives—NOTE: we reject the gendered language in this evidenceOjakangus in 05 (Mika, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies , “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power” http://www.foucault-

studies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)

In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form o power which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of biopower can be seen lying precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would derive from the demand of justice. In bio-political societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: “One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.”112 However, given that the “right to kill” is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the biopolitical societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely bio-political. Perhaps, there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present - day European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It is the very “right to kill” that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question because of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of bio-political thinking and practice. For all these reasons, Agamben’s thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental bio - political paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.113 The bio - political paradigm of the West is not the concentration camp, but, rather, the present - day welfare society and, instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the bio - political society can be seen, for example, in the middle - class Swedish social democrat. Although this figure is an object – and a product – of the huge bio-political machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest “crime” against the machinery. (In bio-political societies, death is not only “something to be hidden away,” but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most “shameful thing of all”.114) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In

fact, the bio - political machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual

capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily – even when, in biological terms, he “should have been dead long ago”.115 This

is because bio - power is not bloody power over bare life for its own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the condition of all life – individual as well as collective – that is the measure of the success of bio - power.

104

Limits State powerBiopower promotes a form of rationality that limits state power—this turns their impacts Lacombe in 96 (Danny, Criminology Simon Fraser U, “Reforming Foucault: A Critique of the Social Control Thesis” The

British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 47, No. 2 Jstor)

The nature of the relation between the individual and the political order concerned Foucault in his studies of 'bio-power' and 'bio-politics'. In this work, he implicitly negates his earlier claims that rights in the West were unequivocally linked to the sovereign (1980b, 1988, 199 1). Foucault introduced the notion of 'bio-power' in his work on sexuality to designate the proliferation of a technology of power-knowledge primarily concerned with life. Bio-power was a mechanism that took charge of life by 'investing the body, health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence' (Foucault 1980b: 14344, emphasis added). The notion of bio-power is useful for our understanding of the phenomenon of resistance because while it represents a totalizing or universal mechanism -one that interpellates the subject as a member of a population - it also contains the seed for a counter-power or a counter-politics because that mechanism individualizes the subject of a population . It is this aspect of bio-power, its simultaneous totalizing and individual-izing tendencies, that is of importance in understanding the strategies by which individual subjects can claim the right to self-determination. Foucault explains that against this [bio-]power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being . Since the last century, the great struggles that have challenged the general system of power were not guided by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. (. . .) [Wlhat was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plentitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerningrights. The 'right' tolife, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' (. . .) was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980b: 144-5) If life, understood here as 'man's concrete essence', is affirmed through rights claims, then, like Foucault we can no longer conceive law as necessarily linked to the sovereign. It must be linked to a different political rationality, one I believe, in which human rights are at the centre. While Foucault never specifically addressed the question of human rights, his lectures on 'bio-politics' (at the College de France between 1978 and 1979) suggest that struggles for life and for self-determination are to be understood in the context of liberalism. In his lectures, he explores the relation between bio-power -the mechanisms taking charge of life -and the emergence of bio-politics, by which he means the way in which a rationalization was attempted, dating from the eighteenth century, for the problems posed to governmental practice by the phenomena specific to an ensemble of living beings: health, hygiene, birthrate, longevity, races . . .(198 1 :353) Foucault's statement is significant because it suggests that we cannot dissociate the problems posed by the question of population (bio-power) from the political rationality within which they emerged, liberalism. Far from

conceiving it as a political theory or a representation of society, Foucault understands liberalism as an 'art of government', that is,

as a particular practice, activity and rationality used to administer, shape, and direct the conduct of people (1981 :358). As a rationality of government - a 'governmentality' -liberalism, towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, breaks from reason of

state (la raison d'e'tat) which since the sixteenth century had sought to 'justify the growing exercise of government' (Foucault 198 1 :354). What distinguishes liberalism from reason of state as an art of government is that for liberalism 'there is always too much government' (Foucault 1981: 354-5). In fact, far from being organized around the principle of a strong state, liberalism upholds the principle of maximal economy with minimal government (Foucault 1981: 354). The question of liberalism, that of 'too much governing,' regulates itself, according to Foucault, 'by means of a continuing reflection' (1 98 1: 354). The idea of reflexivity here is significant because it refers to a mechanism of self-critique, and self-limitation, inherent in liberalism . Foucault claims that Liberalism (. . .) constitutes - and this is the reason both for its polymorphous character and for its recurrences -

an instrument for the criticism of reality. Liberalism criticizes an earlier functioning government from which one tries to escape; it examines an actual practice of government that one attempts to reform and to rationalize by a fundamental analysis; it criticizes a practice of government to which one is opposed and whose abuses one wishes to curb. As a result of this, one can discover liberalism under different but simultaneous forms, both as a schema for the regulation of governmental practice and as a theme for sometimes radical opposition to such practice. (Foucault 198 1 : 356) What allows liberalism to oppose state power, then, is not the principle of sovereignty or the idea of a natural right external to the state; rather it is a rationality, a governmentality of life that takes on 'the character of a challenge' (Foucault 1981 :353). People resist the conditions under which they live, they make claims for or against the state, because they have been submitted to government. In other words, the political technologies that seek to render us governable as a population (bio-power and bio-politics) simultaneously make possible the critique of these same technologies.'

105

RightsBiopower in a DEMOCRATIC government is vital to rights, tolerance, and inclusion—this takes out their all of their impactsDickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some

Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)

In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution and substantively by the welfare system, were the central element of the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no

one in this period advocated expanding social provision out of the goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of social engineering. The mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing basic social rights— the substantive or positive freedom of all citizens — was the best way to turn people into power, prosperity, and profit. In that sense, the democratic welfare state was— and is — democratic not despite of its pursuit of biopower, but because of it. The contrast with the Nazi state is clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a system of social and population policy founded on the concept of individual duties, on the ubiquitous and total power of the state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by organizations that could implant that power at every level of their lives — in political and associational life, in the family, in the workplace, and in leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create an institutional framework that would give individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully into the national society, economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal to do with every citizen what it willed. And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be constructing a system of knowledge and institutions that would manage social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by eradicating — by finding a “final solution” to — social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea that “stubborn” cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health could easily be redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the difference between a strategy of social management built on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a semantic one; such differences had very profound political implications, and established quite different constraints. The rights-based strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.

106

General GoodBiopower is neither inherently good, nor bad. Our specific context is more important than their sweeping generalization. Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some

Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)

This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not “opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept “power” should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create “multiple modernities,” modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91

Biopower is not genocidal when it is deployed by a government which also respects rights. Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some

Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)

At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this “micropolitical” dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy —in

Germany left liberals and Social Democrats —have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen — including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive “iron cage” of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true.

107

Inevitable

Biopower is inevitableDreyfus 1996 (Hubert L., Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault”,

http://www.johnkeane.net/pdf_docs/teaching_sources/foucault/foucault_being_and_power.pdf)

Like Heidegger, Foucault speaks of this non-violent way of guiding action as governance:

Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. ... To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. One might say, paraphrasing Heidegger, that power is that on the basis of which human beings already understand each other. As Foucault puts it: In the idea of governmentality, I am aiming at the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other. Since Foucault is not interested in how things show up but exclusively in people, "Power", which is normally used to describe the way governments govern people's actions, seems an appropriate, if perhaps misleading, name for what controls the way people understand themselves and others. It should be clear that some type of power in this ontological sense, like some particular understanding of

being, is essential to any society. According to Foucault, "A society without power relations can only be an abstraction."

Biopower is inevitableWright, 2008 (Nathan, Fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy, “Camp as Paradigm: Bio-Politics and State Racism in

Foucault and Agamben”, http://ccjournal.cgu.edu/past_issues/nathan_wright.html)

Perhaps the one failure of Foucault’s that, unresolved, rings as most ominous is his failure to further examine the problem of bio-political state racism that he first raises in his lecture series, Society Must Be Defended. At the end of the last lecture, Foucault suggests that bio-power is here to stay as a fixture of modernity. Perhaps given its focus on the preservation of the population of the nation it which it is practiced, bio-power itself is something that Foucault accepts as here to stay. Yet his analysis of bio-politics and bio-power leads inevitably to state-sanctioned racism, be the government democratic, socialist, or fascist. As a result, he ends the lecture series with the question, “How can one both make a bio-power function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem.” It was a problem to which he never returned. However, in the space opened by Foucault’s failure to solve the problem of state racism and to “elaborate a unitary theory of power” (Agamben 1998, 5) steps Agamben in an attempt to complete an analysis of Foucauldian bio-politics and to, while not solve the problem of state racism, at least give direction for further inquiry and hope of a politics that escapes the problem of this racism.

108

Cede the PoliticalThe right fills in

Orly Lobel 7, University of San Diego Assistant Professor of Law, The Paradox of Extralegal Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics,” 120 HARV. L. REV. 937, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf

Both the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to broaden our inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding transformative politics — that is, attempts to

produce meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and political action. This vision rejects a shared theory

of social reform, rejects formal programmatic agendas, and embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices. Thus, it is described in such terms as a plan of no plan,211 “a project of projects,”212 “anti-theory theory,”213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 “practice over theory,”216 and chaos and openness over order and formality.

As a result, the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights movement has disappeared.217 There is no unifying discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns that

this move away from grand narratives is self-defeating precisely because only certain parts of the political spectrum have accepted this new stance: “[T]he opposition is not playing that game . . . . [E]veryone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .”218 Intertwined with the resignation from law and policy, the new bromide of “neither left nor right” has become axiomatic only for some.219 The contemporary critical legal consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are interested, for example, in a more competitive

securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of “conservative public interest lawyer[ing].”220 Although “public interest law” was originally associated exclusively with liberal projects, in the past three

decades conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of traditional legal strategies to promote their causes.221 This growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some thinkers have even suggested that there may be “something

inherent in the left’s conception of social change — focused as it is on participation and empowerment — that

produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.

109

Law goodFoucault's conception of power within the law is outdated---law now protects subjects from state coercionSmith 2k [Carole, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at Univ of Manchester, “The sovereign state v Foucault: law and

disciplinary power”, The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, p. 291-2]

Foucault's analysis has much to offer in terms of his creative and radical thinking about the nature of power, the relationship between power and knowledge, the role of disciplinary power as it works to regulate the subject from without and to constrain the subject from within, and forms of modern government. The rise of liberal democracy, the thrust of welfare policy, government by administrative regulation and the enormous influence of expert knowledge and therapeutic intervention (Giddens. 1991; Rose. 1990; Miller and Rose. 1994) have all had

an impact on law and operations of the juridical field. I would argue, however, that Foucault's characterisation of law , in the context of the modern liberal state, does not reflect our everyday experience of the means through which power and government are exercised. Similarly, the role played by expert knowledge and discursive

power relations in Foucault's conceptualisation of modernity, such that law is fated to justify its operations by 'perpetual reference

to something other than itself* and to 'be redefined by knowledge' (Foucault, 1991: 22), does not accord with the world of mundane practice. In their sympathetic critique of his work. Hunt and Wickham (1998) point to the way in which Foucault's treatment of sovereignty and law must necessarily lead him to neglect two related possibilities . First, that law may effectively re-define forms of disciplinary power in its own terms and second, that law and legal rights may act to protect the subject from the coercive influence of such power . Reported judgments on

sterilisation and caesarean interventions, without consent, show how law can achieve both of these reversals of power . They also demonstrate law's ability to turn the 'normalizing gaze *, as the production of expert knowledge, back upon the normative behaviour of experts themselves .

110

AT hegDecline ensures lash out – precludes resolution to collective action problemsBeckley 12 [“The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Persists and China’s Rise Is Limited”, Assistant Professor of Political

Science at Tufts University and a U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security fellow at Dartmouth's Dickey, p. online]

One danger is that declinism could prompt trade conflicts and immigration restrictions. The results of this study suggest that the United States benefits immensely from the free flow of goods, services, and people around the globe; this is what allows American corporations to specialize in high-‐value activities, exploit innovations created elsewhere, and lure the brightest minds to the United States, all while reducing the price of goods for U.S. consumers. Characterizing China’s export expansion as a loss for the United States is not just bad economics; it blazes a trail for jingoistic and protectionist policies. It would be tragically ironic if Americans reacted to false prophecies of decline by cutting

themselves off from a potentially vital source of American power. Another danger is that declinism may impair foreign policy decision-‐making. If top government officials come to believe that China is overtaking the United States, they are likely to react in one of

two ways, both of which are potentially disastrous. The first is that policymakers may imagine the United States faces a closing

“window of opportunity” and should take action “while it still enjoys preponderance and not wait until the diffusion of power has already

made international politics more competitive and unpredictable.”315 This belief may spur positive action, but it also invites parochial thinking, reckless behavior, and preventive war.316 As Robert 315 Charles A. Kupchan, “Hollow Hegemony or Stable Multipolarity?” in G. John Ikenberry, ed., America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 68. 316 Jack S. Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motive for War,” World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 1 (October 1987), pp. 82-‐107. Chapter 6 196 Gilpin and others have shown, “hegemonic struggles have most frequently been triggered by fears of ultimate decline and the

perceived erosion of power.”317 By fanning such fears, declinists may inadvertently promote the type of violent overreaction that they seek to prevent. The other potential reaction is retrenchment – the divestment of all foreign policy obligations save

those linked to vital interests, defined in a narrow and national manner. Advocates of retrenchment assume, or hope, that the world will sort itself out on its own; that whatever replaces American hegemony, whether it be a return to balance-‐of-‐power politics or a transition to a post- ‐ power paradise , will naturally maintain international order

and prosperity. But order and prosperity are unnatural. They can never be presumed. When achieved, they are the result of determined action by powerful actors and, in particular, by the most powerful actor, which is, and will be for some time, the United States.

Arms buildups, insecure sea- ‐ lanes, and closed markets are only the most obvious risks of U.S. retrenchment . Less obvious are transnational problems, such as global warming, water scarcity , and disease, which may fester without a leader to rally collective action . Hegemony, of course, carries its own risks and costs. In particular, America’s global military presence might tempt policymakers to use force when they should 317 Gilpin, War and Change, p. 239. See, also, Dale Copeland, Origins of Major War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Charles Doran and Wes Parsons, “War and the Cycle of Relative Power,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 4, (December 1980), pp. 947-‐965. Chapter 6 197 choose diplomacy or inaction. If the United States abuses its power, however, it is not because it is too engaged with the world, but because its

engagement lacks strategic vision. The solution is better strategy, not retrenchment. The first step toward sound strategy is to recognize that the status quo for the United States is pretty good: it does not face a hegemonic rival and the trends favor continued American dominance. The overarching goal of U.S. policy should be to preserve this state of affairs. Declinists claim the United States should “adopt a neomercantilist international economic policy” and “disengage from current alliance commitments in East Asia and Europe.”318 But the fact that the United States rose relative to China while propping up the world economy and maintaining a hegemonic presence abroad casts doubt on the wisdom of such calls for radical policy change.

Data on levels of violence and economic integration aren’t predictive of future threats. Current stability only exists because of American hegemony – and that requires constant maintenance against future disorderHoffman 13 [Frank, Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Strategic Research, at the National Defense University, “PLATO WAS DEAD WRONG: EMBRACING OUR BETTER ANGELS?” 8/20]

Steven Pinker, author of a chaotic book titled The Better Angels of Our Nature, contends that mankind is evolving in a permanent and linear

way. He argues that war (between states) will fade away like other barbaric practices such as slavery (except it has

111

not vanished – not even close), public executions, and lynching. Pinker is not alone: Bruno Tertrais boldly asserted last year in The

Washington Quarterly, “we are nearing a point of history where it will be possible to say that war as we know it , long thought to be an

inevitable part of the human condition, has disappeared .” Think about the impact of such a hubristic statement that tosses a few millennia of history and Plato’s most famous quip into the trash. This kind of thinking brings to mind Pitt’s speech before Parliament early in 1792, during a debate on the budget: We must not count with certainty on a continuance of our present prosperity during such an interval; but, unquestionably, there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment. Of course, within a year, the Continent plunged into war and revolution lasting, with one short interval, until 1815. Tertrais concurs with Pinker and believes that organized conflict “is on the verge of becoming a historical relic.” This recalls the claims of Norman Angell and Ivan Bloch a century ago, comments that were dashed by the tragedy of World War I. Tertrais claims that they may yet have the last laugh. More likely, Mr. Tertrais will join a long list of infamously bad prognosticators. Troubled Analysis This hopelessly optimistic contention has been seized upon by advocates of reduced U.S. defense spending in

today’s ongoing political contest. For example, Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen have written in Foreign Affairs that the notion that our post–Cold War world “is a treacherous place, full of great uncertainty and grave risks,” has too strong a hold on our

public’s understanding of our security and “is simply wrong.” They aver that our country “faces no plausible existential threats , no great-power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon.” There are three problems with this analysis: It is flat wrong. It misconceives the foundations of contemporary stability . And it perpetuates an idealistic view of the linear and inevitable progress of mankind. While life expectancies and access to Starbucks and the internet are high, there are many forms of risk. There are lethal threats. Many of these, such as terrorism, may not be existential, but the United States should not limit defense or security to only those threats that can

eliminate us. Moreover, the United States does have a great power rival, at a regional level in Asia. China exhibits a belligerence, condescension to its neighbors , and scorn for international opinion that recalls German behavior in the decades prior to World War I. Zenko and Cohen’s framework is also warped by its scale. Near-term competition need not be global to threaten our interests or mandate a substantial reduction in our defenses. The second

omission is the rampant “presentism” in their interpretation of the state of the world. Pinker’s acolytes think only of the recent past, and fail to account for what the last two generations did to make the world the more stable place it is today. They ignore the fact that American power is required to sustain an international system we’ve invested so much to create during the Cold War and since. By removing that applied hegemonic force, they would open the playing field to other, less benign forces at the state and sub-state level. They may also inadvertently reduce other constructive and preventative resources that help dampen violence. Finally, Pinker’s “New Peace” thesis that is embraced by Tertrais, Zenko and Cohen argues that mankind and history are

on an ineluctable path. In doing so, they ignore longer-term perspectives and potential future trends. The databases they use to buttress their arguments show that wide fluctuations are normal in the cycle of human conflict.

Zenko and Cohen prefer too narrow a sample so that they can draw their preferred conclusions. They argue that the world has never been safer. Not true. We’ve been at this level of violence twice in history, and it has spiked frequently. We need to ask why, not deliberately distort the history to win policy points . The principal basis for positive and optimistic assessments about war and human strife comes from databases like those generated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute . These indicate that for the past 20 years the number of conflicts has declined substantially. These research organizations show that the number of ongoing conflicts has dropped forty percent from 53 to 31 between 1992 and 2010. The statistics also suggest that wars are shorter and less lethal, measuring direct combat deaths and other human casualties. All these databases show that major interstate warfare is a rare occurrence, but with great fluctuations and dramatic consequences. The data is not generally contested, but the meaning of these trends is. The observed reduction in both the frequency and violence of human conflict today confers the appearance of a benign world, one in which states would logically reduce their investments in

security. However, this is a simplistic view of threats and risk. The conflict data is simply a thermometer of the atmospheric temperature today. It makes no pretense about prediciting the future . These databases are useful

but not more than a record of past levels. Is that the basis for future security planning? It is undoubtedly true that that the aggregate number of conflicts from 1991 to the 2010 has declined pretty steadily. But one should not infer that the risk of war tomorrow is reduced or that this trend can continue indefinitely. At least the prudent strategic planner or even an amateur historian would not make that prediction. The small print on the bottom of a stock prospectus is more honest: past performance is not proof of future performance. A cursory review of the last two centuries provides a larger sample to consider. We are at the same level of aggregate numbers of conflicts that the world faced in 1880 and 1920. It would be interesting to know what conditions helped secure the peace during those eras. It would also be interesting to know why both these remarkable periods were immediately followed by eras of dramatic violence. It’s scary that policy commentators are uninterested in those questions, as if they perceive history and trends as being capable

112

of moving in only one direction. What this long-term analysis indicates is that interstate war is generally a low probability event, and there is great variance in intrastate or societal conflict. Such a longer-term view accepts where we are today, but recognizes that history is not reversible. Understanding this history is important, not because it provides a ready answer, but because it helps frame the right questions. Are these cycles avoidable or unlikely to reoccur? Will those circumstances be more or less likely to come about after 2015 than now? Can we reduce the likelihood of disruption, discontent and disorder that history suggests are naturally reoccurring? Are there signposts or other trends we should consider before we turn our swords into ploughshares and keyboards? Signposts of a Darker Future Signposts in the character of conflict suggest

that challenges are not imminent but they are expanding. Nuclear weapons and other technologies are proliferating, and threats either mutating or growing . Transnational threats, religious extremism, narco-terrorism, cyber espionage and crime, nuclear proliferation, and failed states could all present greater cycles of violence and mayhem (not existential, just disruptive). Geography and history are not prescriptive, but they caution us to think about the emergence of great powers. While there is no “near term” competition for global hegemon, we certainly have an emergent power rivalry in the Asia-Pacific theater. China’s economic clout, growing military modernization, and autocratic political authority pose challenges to our interests and our treaty partners’ interests that warrant consideration. The overall scope of its military spending and modernization is not inconsistent with its economic clout, but we should be more concerned about its outlandish claims in the South China Sea and its attendant aggressive behavior. There is little doubt that the Middle Kingdom is striving to employ its growing power at greater range and with increased ambitions. This is a region where we have core interests at stake, and numerous treaty obligations which my academic friends tend to gloss over. We must also

consider the nascent nuclear programs o f the Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea. They cannot pose threats to our

homeland at present but they appear to be closer to being able to harm close allies and seriously injure U.S. interests with catastrophic impact. In addition to the frequency of conflict, the intensity and lethality of conflict can also swing

the other way. Given the diffusion of lethal means to super-empowered networks and the availability of possibly toxic bio- or chemical-based weapons, one should pause before suggesting that large-scale violence is no longer part of the human condition. It may not be massed armor formations, but it could be mass violence. Consider the potential for groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, like the al-Nusra group, to gain access to sarin stocks in Syria. These possibilities distinguish the mere frequency of conflict in the present tense from its consequences or costs in the future. We cannot base our defense on the

number of conflicts alone. We seek to shape the world to prevent wars or mitigate their impact. Preventing wars via deterrence is still a critical element of our strategy. We cannot just be reactive: we need to anticipate risks and consequences. As General Dempsey noted in Joint Force Quarterly, “…less violence does not necessarily mean less danger, particularly if both the probability and consequences of aggression are on the rise.” It is true that these are not immediate threats at the existential level, but they do pose clear and present dangers to U.S. allies and interests in key regions of the world. This is not a distorted or dystopian perspective hopelessly infected by

bureaucratic self- interest or unreasonable anxiety. We simply do not live in a world that is , in Chris Fettweis’ terms, “a remarkably safe and secure place.” For these reasons, despite contrary assertions about past trends, the overall risk of interstate war is increasing due to numerous factors . Shifts in power, demographic declines, emergent regional powers, and technological diffusion portend more problems rather than less . What Mearsheimer

called the tragedy of great power politics has not gone away. Rising powers, failed states, and the political aspirations of many Arab populations will ensure that our security remains challenged. The greatest threat won’t be our debt. Our principal problem will derive from the real or perceived decline in U.S. interest and capacity to work with others to preserve the present stable global order. The National

Intelligence Council noted in its most recent long-range assessment that “A declining U.S. ability or willingness to serve as a global security provider would be a key factor contributing to instability .” Conclusion We live in a better world right now, one which America’s influence has helped shape. Continuing the conditions that have been positive trends likely will not be achieved merely by massive cuts in defense spending or retreating from the world stage. I am on record for smart and substantial defense cuts, but not for retreat or willful ignorance. The combination of China’s assertiveness, the dawning of revolutions in cognitive, bioscience, and nanotechnology, and the socio-political eruptions of the Arab world, might make a prudent strategist question any

assumptions about a world in which peace is assumed rather than accepted as the aberration it has always been. These are not reflexive screeds of “frenetic scaremongering”; merely simple assessments of a plausible future and one we can shape with the right strategy. We have had a habit of magical thinking and misunderstanding the world for far too long. That was a luxury we could afford in an area of booming resources and more chastened rival states. But that era is over. We too often want to sweep aside the unfamiliar or the undesirable as low probability challenges, a practice fraught with risk. Making that error again would be a huge mistake and do more to ensure the return of history in short order. We should be prudent and not overlook strategic history, politics, nationalism, our competitors in Asia, and the issues posed by Russia’s decline. Nor should we overlook the potential for miscalculation from misguided policy makers in Iran and North Korea. Finally, we cannot ignore our allies in critical areas of the world, including Japan and Israel.

113

AT liberalism badGroup their kritiks of liberal humanism—you should embrace a radical liberalism—liberal ideals are not monolithic, but instead leave room for inclusionary and radical projectsMills 12 [2012, Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, “Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons

Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why They’re All Wrong)”, Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 15 number 2 (2012): 305–323]

**modified for ableist language

Here is a characterization of liberalism from a very respectable source, the British political theorist, John Gray: Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception , distinctively modern in character, of man and society.... It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity ; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all people** the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements. It is this conception of man and society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity. 2 What generate the different varieties of liberalism are different concepts of individualism, different claims about how egalitarianism should be construed or realized, more or less inclusionary readings of universalism (Gray’s

characterization sanitizes liberalism’s actual sexist and racist history), different views of what count as desirable improvements, conflicting normative balancings of liberal values (freedom, equality) and competing theoretical prognoses about how best they can be realized in the light of (contested) socio-historical facts. The huge potential

for disagreement about all of these explains how a common liberal core can produce such a wide range of variants. Moreover, we need to take into account not merely the spectrum of actual liberalisms but also hypothetical liberalisms that could be generated through novel framings of some or all of the above. So one would

need to differentiate dominant versions of liberalism from oppositional versions, and actual from possible variants. Once the breadth of the range of liberalisms is appreciated—dominant and subordinate, actual and potential—the obvious question

then raised is: Even if actual dominant liberalisms have been conservative in various ways (corporate, patriarchal, racist) why does this rule out the development of emancipatory, radical liberalisms ? One kind of answer is the following (call this the internalist answer): Because there is an immanent conceptual/normative logic to liberalism as a

political ideology that precludes any emancipatory development of it. Another kind of answer is the following (call this the externalist answer): It doesn’t. The historic domination of conservative exclusionary liberalisms is the result of group interests, group power, and successful group political projects. Apparent internal conceptual/normative barriers to an emancipatory liberalism can be successfully negotiated by drawing on the conceptual/normative resources of liberalism itself, in conjunction with a revisionist socio-historical picture of modernity . Most self-described radicals would endorse—indeed, reflexively, as an obvious truth—the first answer. But as indicated from the

beginning, I think the second answer is actually the correct one. The obstacles to developing a “radical liberalism” are , in my opinion, primarily externalist in nature : material group interests, and the way they have shaped hegemonic varieties of liberalism. So I think we need to try to justify a radical agenda with the normative resources of liberalism rather than writing off liberalism . Since liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the United States, and is now globally hegemonic, such a project would have th e great ideological advantage of appealing to values and principles that most people already endorse . All projects of egalitarian social transformation are going to face a combination of material, political, and ideological obstacles, but this strategy would at least reduce somewhat the dimensions of the last. One would be trying to win mass support for policies that—and the challenge will, of course, be to demonstrate this—are

114

justifiable by majoritarian norms, once reconceived and put in conjunction with facts not always familiar to the majority. Material barriers (vested group interests) and political barriers (organizational difficulties) will of course remain. But they will constitute a general obstacle for all egalitarian political programs, and as such cannot be claimed to be peculiar problems for an emancipatory liberalism.

115

AT reform failsReformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than pushing it awayDelgado 9 [Richard, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D. from the

University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590 ]

2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform . Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.

Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court

victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or

using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to

abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at

hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them . A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not . In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence . Indeed, some

incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer , not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.

116

AT structural violenceWar turns structural violenceFolk 78 [Jerry, Professor of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, “Peace Educations – Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated

Approach,” Peace & Change, volume V, number 1, Spring, p. 58]

Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work of researchers and educators coming to the field from the

perspective of negative peace too easily forget that the prevention of a nuclear confrontation of global dimensions is the

prerequisite for all other peace research , education, and action . Unless such a confrontation can be avoided there will

be no world left in which to build positive peace. Moreover, the blanket condemnation of all such negative peace oriented research, education or action as a reactionary attempt to support and reinforce the status quo is doctrinaire. Conflict theory and resolution, disarmament studies, studies of the international system and of international organizations, and integration studies are in themselves neutral. They do not intrinsically support either the status quo or revolutionary efforts to change or overthrow it. Rather they offer a body of knowledge which

can be used for either purpose or for some purpose in between. It is much more logical for those who understand peace as positive

peace to integrate this knowledge into their own framework and to utilize it in achieving their own purposes. A balanced peace studies program should therefore offer the student exposure to the questions and concerns which occupy those who view the field essentially from the point of view of negative peace.

The alt lacks a mechanism for resolving global violence -- the impact is global war Moore 4 [Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential appointee, & Honorary Editor of the American Journal of International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton Moore, pages 41-2]

If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an absence of effective

deterrence, what is the role of   the  many traditional " causes" of war ? Past, and many contemporary, theorie s of war

have focused on the role of specific disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty or social injustice, competition for resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, and perceptions of "honor," or many other such factors. Such factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or in serving as a means for generating fear and manipulating public opinion. The

reality, however, is that while some of these may have more potential to contribute to war than others,  there may well

be   an infinite set of motivating factors , or human wants, motivating aggression. It is not the   independent existence of such motivating factors for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high risk decisions   leading to war   that is   the key to more effectively controlling war . And the same may   also be   true of   democide . The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic conflict," as though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and

orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan Tutsis as well as its Hutu opponents.I1 Certainly   if we were able to press a button   and   end   poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice, and endless disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic governments must remain committed to policies that will produce a better world by all measures of human progress . The broader achievement of democracy and the rule of law will itself assist in this progress.   No one , however, has yet been able to demonstrate the kind of   robust correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of war   as is reflected in the "democratic peace." Further, given the   difficulties in overcoming many of these social problems, an approach to war   exclusively dependent on their solution   may be to   doom us to war for generations to come.

117

AT terror kCriticisms of terror studies writ large are reductionist and dangerous – no evidence to substantiate their claims and no viable alternativeJones and Smith 9 [David, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia, and M.L.R., King's College, University of London,

London, UK, We're All Terrorists Now: Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 32, Issue 4 April 2009 , pages 292 – 302, Taylor and Francis]

The journal, in other words, is not intended, as one might assume, to evaluate critically those state or non-state actors that might have recourse to terrorism as a strategy. Instead, the journal's ambition is to deconstruct what it views as the ambiguity of the word “terror,” its manipulation by ostensibly liberal democratic state actors, and the complicity of “orthodox” terrorism studies in this authoritarian enterprise. Exposing the deficiencies in any field of study is, of course, a legitimate scholarly exercise, but what the symposium introducing the new volume announces questions both the research agenda and academic integrity of journals like Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and those who contribute to them. Do these claims, one might wonder, have any substance?

Significantly, the original proposal circulated by the publisher Routledge and one of the editors, Richard Jackson , suggested some uncertainty concerning the preferred title of the

journal. Critical Studies on Terrorism appeared last on a list where the first choice was Review of Terror Studies. Evidently, the concision of a review fails to capture the critical perspective the journal promotes. Criticism, then, is central to the new journal's philosophy and the adjective connotes a distinct ideological and, as shall be seen, far from pluralist and inclusive purpose. So, one might ask, what exactly does a critical approach to terrorism involve?

What it Means to be Critical

The editors and contributors explore what it means to be “critical” in detail, repetition, and opacity, along with an excessive fondness for italics, in the editorial symposium that introduces the first issue, and in a number of subsequent articles. The editors inform us that the study of terrorism is “a growth industry,” observing with a mixture of envy and disapproval that “literally thousands of new books and articles on terrorism are published every year” (pp. l-2). In adding to this literature the editors premise the need for yet another journal on their resistance to what currently constitutes scholarship in the field of terrorism study and its allegedly uncritical acceptance of the Western democratic state's security perspective.

Indeed, to be critical requires a radical reversal of what the journal assumes to be the typical perception of terrorism and the methodology of terrorism research. To focus on the strategies

practiced by non-state actors that feature under the conventional denotation “terror” is, for the critical theorist, misplaced. As the symposium explains, “acts of clandestine non-state terrorism are committed by a tiny number of individuals and result in between a few hundred and a few thousand casualties   per year over the entire world ” (original italics) (p. 1). The United States's and its allies' preoccupation with terrorism is, therefore, out of proportion to its effects.1 At the same time, the more pervasive and repressive terror practiced by the state has been “silenced from public and … academic discourse” (p. 1).

The complicity of terrorism studies with the increasingly authoritarian demands of Western, liberal state and media practice, together with the moral and political blindness of established terrorism analysts to this relationship forms the journal's overriding assumption and one that its core contributors repeat ad nauseam. Thus, Michael Stohl, in his contribution “Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism” (pp. 5-16), not only discovers ten “myths” informing the understanding of terrorism, but also finds that these myths reflect a “state centric security focus,” where analysts rarely consider “the violence perpetrated by the state” (p. 5). He complains that the press have become too close to government over the matter. Somewhat contradictorily Stohl subsequently asserts that media reporting is “central to terrorism and counter-terrorism as political action,” that media reportage provides the oxygen of terrorism, and that politicians consider journalists to be “the terrorist's best friend” (p. 7).

Stohl further compounds this incoherence, claiming that “the media are far more likely to focus on the destructive actions, rather than on … grievances or the social conditions that breed [terrorism]—to present episodic rather than thematic stories” (p. 7). He argues that terror attacks between 1968 and 1980 were scarcely reported in the United States, and that reporters do not delve deeply into the sources of conflict (p. 8). All of this is quite contentious, with no direct evidence produced to support such statements. The “media” is after all a very broad term, and to assume that it is monolithic is to replace criticism with conspiracy theory. Moreover, even if it were true that the media always serves as a government propaganda agency, then by Stohl's own logic, terrorism as a method of political communication is clearly futile as no rational actor would engage in a campaign doomed to be endlessly misreported.

Nevertheless, the notion that an inherent pro-state bias vitiates terrorism studies pervades the critical position. Anthony Burke, in “The End of Terrorism Studies” (pp. 37-49), asserts that established analysts like Bruce Hoffman “specifically exclude states as possible perpetrators” of

terror. Consequently, the emergence of “critical terrorism studies” “may signal the end of a particular kind of traditionally state-focused and directed 'problem-solving' terrorism studies—at least in terms of its ability to assume that its categories and commitments are immune from challenge and correspond to a stable picture of reality” (p. 42).

Elsewhere, Adrian Guelke, in “Great Whites, Paedophiles and Terrorists: The Need for Critical Thinking in a New Era of Terror” (pp. 17-25), considers British government-induced media “scare-mongering” to have legitimated an “authoritarian approach” to the purported new era of terror (pp. 22-23). Meanwhile, Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, in “The Terrorist Subject: Terrorist Studies and the Absent Subjectivity” (pp. 27-36), find the War on Terror constitutes “the single,” all embracing paradigm of analysis where the critical voice is “not allowed to ask: what is the reality itself?” (original italics) (pp. 28-29). The construction of this condition, they further reveal, if somewhat abstrusely, reflects an abstract “desire” that demands terror as “an ever-present threat” (p. 31). In order to sustain this fabrication: “Terrorism experts and commentators” function as “realist policemen”; and not very smart ones at that, who while “gazing at the

evidence” are “unable to read the paradoxical logic of the desire that fuels it, whereby lack turns toexcess” (original italics) (p. 32). Finally, Ken Booth, in “The Human Faces of Terror:

Reflections in a Cracked Looking Glass” (pp. 65-79), reiterates Richard Jackson's contention that state terrorism “is a much more serious problem than non-state terrorism” (p. 76).

Yet, one searches in vain in these articles for evidence to support the ubiquitous assertion of state bias : assuming this bias in conventional terrorism analysis as a fact seemingly does not require a corresponding concern with evidence of

this fact, merely its continual reiteration by conceptual fiat. A critical perspective dispenses not only with terrorism

studies but also with the norms of accepted scholarship. Asserting what needs to be demonstrated commits, of course, the elementary logical fallacy petitio principii. But

critical theory apparently emancipates (to use its favorite verb) its practitioners from the confines of logic, reason, and the usual standards of academic inquiry.

118

Alleging a constitutive weakness in established scholarship without the necessity of providing proof to support it, therefore, appears to define the critical posture. The unproved “state

centricity” of terrorism studies serves as a platform for further unsubstantiated accusations about the state of the discipline. Jackson and his fellow editors, along with later claims by Zulaika and Douglass, and Booth, again assert that “orthodox” analysts rarely bother “to interview or engage with those involved in 'terrorist' activity” (p. 2) or spend any time “on the ground in the areas most affected by conflict” (p. 74). Given that Booth and Jackson spend most of their time on the ground in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, not a notably terror rich environment if we discount the operations of Meibion Glyndwr who would as a matter of principle avoid pob sais like Jackson and Booth, this seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. It also overlooks the fact that Studies in Conflict and Terrorism first advertised the problem of “talking to terrorists” in 2001 and has gone to great lengths to rectify this lacuna, if it is one, regularly publishing articles by analysts with first-hand experience of groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah.

A consequence of avoiding primary research, it is further alleged, leads conventional analysts uncritically to apply psychological and problem-solving approaches to their object of study. This propensity, Booth maintains, occasions another unrecognized weakness in traditional terrorism research, namely, an inability to engage with “the particular dynamics of the political world” (p. 70). Analogously, Stohl claims that “the US and English [sic] media” exhibit a tendency to psychologize terrorist acts, which reduces “structural and political problems” into issues of individual pathology (p. 7). Preoccupied with this problem-solving, psychopathologizing methodology, terrorism analysts have lost the capacity to reflect on both their practice and their research ethics.

By contrast, the critical approach is not only self-reflective, but also and, for good measure, self-reflexive. In fact, the editors and a number of the journal's contributors use these terms interchangeably, treating a reflection and a reflex as synonyms (p. 2). A cursory encounter with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary would reveal that they are not. Despite this linguistically challenged misidentification, “reflexivity” is made to do a lot of work in the critical idiom. Reflexivity, the editors inform us, requires a capacity “to challenge dominant knowledge and understandings, is sensitive to the politics of labelling … is transparent about its own values and political standpoints, adheres to a set of responsible research ethics, and is committed to a broadly defined notion of emancipation” (p. 2). This covers a range of not very obviously related but critically approved virtues. Let us examine what reflexivity involves as Stohl, Guelke, Zulaika and Douglass, Burke, and Booth explore, somewhat repetitively, its implications.

Reflexive or Defective?

Firstly, to challenge dominant knowledge and understanding and retain sensitivity to labels leads inevitably to a fixation with language, discourse, the ambiguity of the noun, terror, and its political use and abuse. Terrorism, Booth enlightens the reader unremarkably, is “a

politically loaded term” (p. 72). Meanwhile, Zulaika and Douglass consider terror “the dominant tropic [sic] space in contemporary political and journalistic discourse” (p. 30). Faced with the “serious challenge” (Booth p. 72) and pejorative connotation that the noun conveys, critical terrorologists turn to deconstruction and bring the full force of postmodern obscurantism to bear on its use. Thus the editors proclaim that terrorism is “one of the most powerful signifiers in contemporary discourse.” There is, moreover, a “yawning gap between the 'terrorism' signifier and the actual acts signified” (p. 1). “[V]irtually all of this activity,” the editors pronounce ex cathedra, “refers to the response to acts of political violence not the violence itself” (original italics) (p. 1). Here again they offer no evidence for this curious assertion and assume, it would seem, all conventional terrorism studies address issues of homeland security.

In keeping with this critical orthodoxy that he has done much to define, Anthony Burke also asserts the “instability (and thoroughly politicized nature) of the unifying master-terms of our field: 'terror' and 'terrorism'” (p. 38). To address this he contends that a critical stance requires us to “keep this radical instability and inherent politicization of the concept of terrorism at the forefront of its analysis.” Indeed, “without a conscious reflexivity about the most basic definition of the object, our discourse will not be critical at all” (p. 38). More particularly, drawing on a jargon-infused amalgam of Michel Foucault's identification of a relationship between power and knowledge, the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School's critique of democratic false consciousness, mixed with the existentialism of the Third Reich's favorite philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Burke “questions the question.” This intellectual potpourri apparently enables the critical theorist to “question the ontological status of a 'problem' before any attempt to map out, study or resolve it” (p. 38).

Interestingly, Burke, Booth, and the symposistahood deny that there might be objective data about violence or that a properly focused strategic study of terrorism would not include any prescriptive goodness or rightness of action. While a strategic theorist or a skeptical social scientist might claim to consider only the complex relational situation that involves as well as the actions, the attitude of human beings to them, the critical theorist's radical questioning of language denies this possibility.

The critical approach to language and its deconstruction of an otherwise useful, if imperfect, political vocabulary has been

the source of much confusion and inconsequentiality in the practice of the social sciences . It dates from the relativist pall that French

radical post structural philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, cast over the social and historical sciences in order to demonstrate that social and

political knowledge depended on and underpinned power relations that permeated the landscape of the social and reinforced the liberal democratic state. This radical assault on the

possibility of either neutral fact or value ultimately functions unfalsifiably , and as a substitute for philosophy, social science, and a

real theory of language .

The problem with the critical approach is that, as the Australian philosopher John Anderson demonstrated, to achieve a genuine study one must either investigate the facts that are talked about or the fact that they are talked about in a certain way. More precisely, as J.L. Mackie explains, “if we concentrate on the uses of language we fall between these two stools, and we are in danger of

taking our discoveries about manners of speaking as answers to questions about what is there.”2 Indeed, in so far as an account of the use of language spills over into ontology it is liable to be a confused mixture of what should be two distinct investigations: the study of the facts about which the language is used, and the study of the linguistic phenomena themselves.

It is precisely, however, this confused mixture of fact and discourse that critical thinking seeks to impose on the study of terrorism and infuses the practice of critical theory more generally. From this confused seed no coherent method grows.

What is To Be Done?

This ontological confusion notwithstanding, Ken Booth sees critical theory not only exposing the dubious links between power and knowledge in established terrorism studies, but also offering an ideological agenda that transforms the face of global politics. “[C]ritical knowledge,” Booth declares, “involves understandings of the social world that attempt to stand outside prevailing structures, processes, ideologies and orthodoxies while recognizing that all conceptualizations within the ambit of sociality derive from particular social/historical conditions” (original italics) (p. 78). Helpfully, Booth, assuming the manner of an Old Testament prophet, provides his critical disciples with “big-picture navigation aids” (original italics) (p. 66) to achieve this higher knowledge. Booth promulgates fifteen commandments (as Clemenceau remarked of Woodrow Wilson's nineteen

points, in a somewhat different context, “God Almighty only gave us ten”). When not stating the staggeringly obvious, the Ken Commandments are hopelessly contradictory. Critical theorists thus should “avoid exceptionalizing the study of terrorism,”3 “recognize that states can be agents of terrorism,” and “keep the long term in sight.” Unexceptional advice to be sure and long recognized by more traditional students of terrorism. The critical student, if not fully conversant with critical doublethink, however, might find the fact that she or he lives within “Powerful theories” that are “constitutive of political, social, and economic life” (6th Commandment, p. 71), sits uneasily with Booth's concluding injunction to “stand outside” prevailing ideologies (p. 78).

119

Their root cause arguments are a logical fallacy and their intervention arguments are backwards – prefer the 1ac’s scholarship to their agendaJones and Smith, 9 - * University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia AND ** King's College, University of London,

London, UK (David and M.L.R.,“We're All Terrorists Now: Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 32, Issue 4 April 2009 , pages 292 – 302, Taylor and Francis)

At the core of this critical, ethicist, relativism therefore lies a syllogism that holds all violence is terror: Western states use violence, therefore, Western states are terrorist. Further, the greater terrorist uses the greater violence:

Western governments exercise the greater violence. Therefore, it is the liberal democracies rather than Al Qaeda that are the greater terrorists. In its desire to empathize with the transformative ends, if not the means of terrorism generally and Islamist terror in particular, critical

theory reveals itself as a form of Marxist unmasking. Thus, for Booth “terror has multiple forms” (original italics) and the real terror is economic, the product it would seem of “global capitalism” (p. 75). Only the engagee intellectual academic finding in deconstructive criticism the philosophical weapons that reveal the illiberal neo-conservative purpose informing the conventional study of terrorism and the democratic state's prosecution of counterterrorism can identify the real terror lurking behind the “manipulation of the politics of fear” (p. 75). Moreover,

the resolution of this condition of escalating violence requires not any strategic solution that creates security as the basis for development whether in London or Kabul. Instead, Booth, Burke, and the editors contend that the only solution to “the world-historical crisis that is facing human society globally” (p. 76) is universal human “emancipation.” This, according to Burke, is “the normative end” that critical theory pursues. Following Jurgen Habermas, the godfather of critical theory, terrorism is really a form of distorted communication. The solution to this problem of failed communication resides not only in the improvement of living conditions, and “the political taming of unbounded capitalism,” but also in “the telos of mutual understanding.” Only through this telos with its “strong normative bias towards non violence” (p. 43) can a universal condition of peace and justice transform the

globe. In other words, the only ethical solution to terrorism is conversation: sitting around an un-coerced table presided over by Kofi Annan, along with Ken Booth, Osama bin Laden, President Obama, and some European Union pacifist sandalista, a transcendental communicative reason will emerge to promulgate norms of transformative justice. As Burke enunciates, the panacea of un-coerced communication

would establish “a secularism that might create an enduring architecture of basic shared values” (p. 46). In the end, un-coerced norm projection is not concerned with the

world as it is, but how it ought to be. This not only compounds the logical errors that permeate critical theory, it advances an ultimately utopian agenda under the guise of soi-disant cosmopolitanism where one somewhat vaguely

recognizes the “human interconnection and mutual vulnerability to nature, the cosmos and each other” (p. 47) and no doubt bursts into spontaneous chanting of Kumbaya . In analogous visionary terms, Booth defines real security as emancipation in a way that denies any definitional rigor to either

term. The struggle against terrorism is, then, a struggle for emancipation from the oppression of political violence everywhere. Consequently, in this Manichean struggle for global emancipation

against the real terror of Western democracy, Booth further maintains that universities have a crucial role to play. This also is something of a concern for those who do not share the critical vision, as university international relations departments are not now, it would seem, in business to pursue dispassionate analysis but instead are to serve as cheerleaders for this critically inspired vision. Overall, the journal's fallacious commitment to emancipation

undermines any ostensible claim to pluralism and diversity. Over determined by this transformative approach to world politics, it necessarily denies

the possibility of a realist or prudential appreciation of politics and the promotion not of universal solutions but pragmatic ones that accept the best that may be achieved in the circumstances . Ultimately, to present the world how it ought to be rather than as it is conceals a deep intolerance notable in the contempt with which many of the contributors to the journal appear to hold Western politicians

and the Western media.6 It is the exploitation of this oughtistic style of thinking that leads the critic into a Humpty Dumpty world where words mean exactly what the critical theorist “chooses them to mean—neither more nor less.” However, in order to justify their disciplinary niche they have to insist on the failure of established modes of terrorism study. Having identified a source of government grants and academic perquisites, critical studies in fact does not deal with the notion of terrorism as such, but instead the manner in which the Western liberal democratic state has supposedly manipulated the use of violence by non-state actors in

order to “other” minority communities and create a politics of fear. Critical Studies and Strategic Theory—A Missed Opportunity Of course, the doubtful contribution of critical theory by no means implies that all is well with what one might call conventional terrorism studies. The subject area has in the past produced superficial assessments that have done little to contribute to an informed understanding of conflict. This is a point readily conceded by John Horgan and Michael Boyle who put “A Case Against 'Critical Terrorism Studies'” (pp. 51-74). Although they do not seek to challenge the agenda, assumptions, and contradictions inherent in the critical approach, their contribution to the new journal distinguishes itself by actually having a well-organized and

well-supported argument. The authors' willingness to acknowledge deficiencies in some terrorism research shows that critical self-reflection is already present in existing terrorism studies. It is ironic, in fact, that the most clearly reflective, original, and critical contribution in the first edition should come from established

terrorism researchers who critique the critical position. Interestingly, the specter haunting both conventional and critical terrorism studies is that both assume that terrorism is an existential phenomenon, and thus has causes and solutions. Burke makes this explicit: “The inauguration of this journal,” he declares, “indeed suggests broad agreement that there is a phenomenon called terrorism” (p. 39). Yet this is not the only way of looking at terrorism. For a strategic theorist the notion of terrorism does not exist as an independent phenomenon. It is an abstract noun. More precisely, it is merely a tactic—the creation of fear for political ends—that can be employed by any social actor, be it state or non-state, in any context, without any necessary moral value being

involved. Ironically, then, strategic theory offers a far more “critical perspective on terrorism” than do the perspectives advanced in this journal. Guelke, for example, propounds a curiously orthodox standpoint when he asserts: “to describe an act as one of terrorism, without the qualification of quotation marks to indicate the author's distance from

such a judgement, is to condemn it as absolutely illegitimate” (p. 19). If you are a strategic theorist this is an invalid claim. Terrorism is simply a method to achieve an end. Any moral judgment on the act is entirely separate. To fuse the two is a category mistake. In strategic theory, which Guelke ignores, terrorism does not, ipso facto, denote “absolutely illegitimate violence.” Intriguingly, Stohl, Booth, and Burke also imply that a strategic understanding forms part of their critical viewpoint. Booth, for instance, argues in one of his commandments that terrorism should be seen as a conscious human choice. Few strategic theorists would disagree. Similarly, Burke feels that there does “appear to be a consensus” that terrorism is a “form of instrumental political violence” (p. 38). The problem for the contributors to this volume is that they cannot emancipate themselves from the very orthodox assumption that the word terrorism is pejorative. That may be the popular understanding of the term, but inherently terrorism conveys no necessary connotation of moral condemnation. “Is terrorism a form of warfare,

insurgency, struggle, resistance, coercion, atrocity, or great political crime,” Burke asks rhetorically. But once more he misses the point. All violence is instrumental. Grading it according to whether it is insurgency, resistance, or atrocity is irrelevant. Any strategic actor may practice forms of warfare. For this reason Burke's

120

further claim that existing definitions of terrorism have “specifically excluded states as possible perpetrators and privilege them as targets,” is wholly inaccurate (p. 38). Strategic theory has never excluded state-directed terrorism as an object of study, and neither for that matter, as Horgan and Boyle point out, have more conventional studies of terrorism. Yet, Burke offers—as a critical revelation—that “the strategic intent behind the US bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, Israel's bombing of Lebanon, or the sanctions against Iraq is also terrorist.” He continues: “My point is not to remind us that states practise terror, but to show how mainstream strategic doctrines are terrorist in these terms and undermine any prospect of achieving the normative consensus if such terrorism is to be reduced and eventually eliminated” (original italics) (p. 41). This is not merely confused, it displays remarkable nescience on the part of one engaged in teaching the next generation of graduates from the Australian Defence Force Academy. Strategic theory conventionally recognizes that actions on the part of state or non-state actors that aim to create fear (such as the allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II or the nuclear deterrent posture of Mutually Assured Destruction) can be terroristic in nature.7 The problem for critical analysts like Burke is that they impute their own moral valuations to the term terror. Strategic theorists do not. Moreover, the statement that this

undermines any prospect that terrorism can be eliminated is illogical: you can never eliminate an abstract noun. Consequently, those interested in a truly “critical” approach to the subject should perhaps turn to strategic theory for some relief from the strictures that have traditionally governed the study of terrorism, not to self-proclaimed critical theorist s who only replicate the flawed

understandings of those whom they criticize. Horgan and Boyle conclude their thoughtful article by claiming that critical terrorism studies has more in common

with traditional terrorism research than critical theorists would possibly like to admit. These reviewers agree: they are two sides of the same coin. Conclusion In the looking glass world of critical terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast, critical theory's ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive gaze reveals that we are all terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors who have recourse to violence for whatever motive. Despite their intolerable othering by media and governments, terrorists are really no different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state. Terrorists therefore

deserve empathy and they must be discursively engaged. At the core of this understanding sits a radical pacifism and an idealism that requires not the status quo

but communication and “human emancipation.” Until this radical post- national utopia arrives both force and the discourse of evil must be abandoned and instead therapy and un-coerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama Boston Legal Judge Brown perennially

referred to the vague, irrelevant , jargon-ridden statements of lawyers as “jibber jabber . ” The Aberystwyth-based school of critical internationalist utopianism that increasingly dominates the study of international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order incoherence that may be termed Aber jabber. The pages of the journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism are its natural home .

121

AT threat inflationThreat inflation would get our authors fired Ravenal 9 [Earl C., distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies @ Cato, is professor emeritus of the Georgetown University

School of Foreign Service. He is an expert on NATO, defense strategy, and the defense budget. He is the author of Designing Defense for a New World Order. What's Empire Got to Do with It? The Derivation of America's Foreign Policy.” Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society 21.1 (2009) 21-75]

The underlying notion of “the security bureaucracies . . . looking for new enemies” is a threadbare concept that has somehow taken hold across the political spectrum, from the radical left (viz. Michael Klare [1981], who refers to a “threat bank”), to the liberal center (viz. Robert H. Johnson [1997], who dismisses most alleged “threats” as “improbable dangers”), to libertarians (viz. Ted Galen Carpenter [1992], Vice

President for Foreign and Defense Policy of the Cato Institute, who wrote a book entitled A Search for Enemies). What is missing from most analysts’

claims of “threat inflation,” however, is a convincing theory of why , say, the American government significantly(not

merely in excusable rhetoric) might magnify and even invent threats (and, more seriously, act on such inflated threat estimates). In a few places, Eland (2004, 185) suggests that such behavior might stem from military or national security bureaucrats’ attempts to enhance their personal status and organizational budgets, or even from the influence and dominance of “the military-industrial complex”; viz.: “Maintaining the empire and retaliating for the blowback from that empire keeps what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex fat and happy.” Or, in the same section: In the nation’s capital, vested interests, such as the law enforcement bureaucracies . . . routinely take advantage of “crises”to satisfy parochial desires. Similarly, many corporations use crises to get pet projects— a.k.a. pork—funded by the government. And national security crises, because of people’s fears, are especially ripe opportunities to grab largesse. (Ibid., 182) Thus,

“bureaucratic-politics” theory, which once made several reputa- tions (such as those of Richard Neustadt, Morton Halperin, and Graham Allison) in defense-

intellectual circles, and spawned an entire sub-industry within the field of international relations,5 is put into the service of dismissing putative security threats as imaginary. So, too, can a surprisingly cognate theory, “public choice,”6 which can be considered the right-wing analog of the “bureaucratic-politics” model, and is a preferred interpretation of governmental decision- making among libertarian observers. As Eland (2004, 203) summarizes: Public-choice theory argues [that] the government itself can develop sepa- rate interests from its citizens. The government reflects the interests of powerful pressure groups and the interests of the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats in them. Although this problem occurs in both foreign and domestic policy, it may be more severe in foreign policy because citizens pay less attention to policies that affect them less directly. There is, in this statement of public-choice theory, a certain ambiguity, and a certain degree of contradiction: Bureaucrats are supposedly, at the same time, subservient to societal interest groups and autonomous from society in general. This journal has pioneered the argument that state autonomy is a likely consequence of the public’s ignorance of most areas of state activity (e.g., Somin 1998; DeCanio 2000a, 2000b, 2006, 2007; Ravenal 2000a). But state autonomy does not necessarily mean that bureaucrats substitute their own interests for those of what could be called the “national society” that they ostensibly serve. I have argued (Ravenal 2000a) that, precisely because of the public-ignorance and elite-expertise factors, and especially because the opportunities—at least for bureaucrats (a few notable post-government lobbyist cases nonwithstanding)—for lucrative self-dealing are stringently fewer in the defense and diplomatic areas of government than they are in some of the contract-dispensing and more under-the-radar-screen agencies of government, the “public-choice” imputation of self-dealing, rather than working toward the national interest (which, however may not be synonymous with the interests, perceived or expressed, of citizens!) is less likely to hold. In short, state autonomy is likely to mean, in the derivation of foreign policy, that “state elites” are using rational judgment, in insulation from self-promoting interest groups—about what strategies, forces, and weapons are required for national defense. Ironically, “public choice”—not even a species of economics, but rather a kind of political interpretation—is not even about “public” choice, since, like the bureaucratic-politics model, it repudiates the very notion that bureaucrats make truly “public” choices; rather, they are held, axiomatically, to exhibit “rent-seeking” behavior, wherein they abuse their public positions in order to amass private gains, or at least to build personal empires within their ostensibly official niches. Such sub- rational models actually explain very little of what they purport to observe. Of course, there is some truth in them, regarding the “behavior” of some people, at some times, in some circumstances, under some conditions of incentive and motivation. But the factors that they posit operate mostly as constraints on the otherwise rational optimization of objectives that, if for no other reason than the playing out of official roles, transcends merely personal or parochial imperatives. My treatment of “role” differs from that of the bureaucratic-politics theorists, whose model of the derivation of foreign policy depends heavily, and acknowledgedly, on a narrow and specific identification of the role- playing of organizationally situated individuals in a partly conflictual “pulling and hauling” process that “results in” some policy outcome. Even here, bureaucratic-politics theorists Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow (1999, 311) allow that “some players are not able to articulate [sic] the governmental politics game because their conception of their job does not legitimate such activity.” This is a crucial admission, and one that points— empirically—to the need for a

broader and generic treatment of role. Roles (all theorists state) give rise to “expectations” of performance. My point is that virtually every governmental role, and especially national-security roles, and particularly the roles of the uniformed mili- tary, embody expectations of devotion to the “national interest”;

rational- ity in the derivation of policy at every functional level; and objectivity in the treatment of parameters, especially external parameters such as “threats” and the power and capabilities of other nations. Sub-rational models (such as “public choice”) fail to take into account even a partial dedication to the “national” interest (or even the possibility that the national interest may be honestly misconceived in more paro- chial terms). In contrast, an official’s role connects the individual to the (state-level) process, and moderates the (perhaps otherwise) self-seeking impulses of the

individual. Role-derived behavior tends to be formalized and codified; relatively transparent and at least peer-reviewed , so as to be consistent with expectations; surviving the particular individual and trans- mitted to successors and ancillaries; measured against a standard and thus corrigible; defined in terms of the performed function and therefore derived from the state function; and uncorrrupt, because personal cheating and even egregious aggrandizement are conspicuously discouraged. My own direct observation suggests that defense decision-makers attempt

to “frame” the structure of the problems that they try to solve on the basis of the most accurate intelligence . They make it their

business to know where the threats come from. Thus, threats are not “socially constructed ” (even though, of course, some values are). A major reason for the rationality, and the objectivity, of the process is that much security planning is done, not in vaguely undefined circum- stances that offer scope for idiosyncratic, subjective behavior, but rather in structured and reviewed organizational frameworks. Non-rationalities (which are bad for understanding and

prediction) tend to get filtered out. People are fired for presenting skewed analysis and for making bad predictions. This is because something important is riding on the causal analysis and the contingent prediction. For these reasons, “public choice” does not have the

122

“feel” of reality to many critics who have participated in the structure of defense decision-making. In that structure, obvious, and even not-so-

obvious,“rent-seeking” would not only be shameful; it would present a severe risk of career termination . And, as mentioned, the

defense bureaucracy is hardly a productive place for truly talented rent-seekers to operatecompared to opportunities for personal profit in the commercial world. A bureaucrat’s very self-placement in these reaches of government testi- fies either to a sincere commitment to the national interest or to a lack of sufficient imagination to exploit opportunities for personal profit.

Threats are underestimated – the alt’s complacency is dangerous Mazurak 12 [“The lies of Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen”, Zbigniew defense analyst with 6 years of experience in the field,

specializing in the defense budget, nuclear weapons strategy, and missile defense. B.A. and M.A. degrees in history. PhD candidate, author of the In Defense of US Defense Spending authored over 50 defense-issues-related articles, http://zbigniewmazurak.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/the-lies-of-micah-zenko-and-michael-cohen/]

Below is a list of the articles and posts I have written to date on outside websites:

In two related articles, extreme leftists Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen have falsely claimed that the US is “Super

Secure”; that the world is “remarkably secure”; that the threats to the US are being “vastly exaggerated”; that “an overly

militarized foreign policy has not made the US safer”; and that “Washington needs a policy that reflects that.” Moreover, they falsely claim that “US officials and national security experts chronically exaggerate foreign threats.” All of their claims are utter garbage . Let’s start with their fallacious claims about threats being exaggerated. The truth is that American officials,

commentators, and individual citizens have a habit of routinely UNDERESTIMATING foreign threats. They were underestimated in the late 1940s, as the Russians were believed to be too backward and primitive to be able to

field a jet fighter, and as a result, American pilots were being slaughtered en masse in the early stages of the Korean War by the MiG-15. The US had nothing to fight with against it until F-86s were delivered in numbers. The US continued to underestimate the Russians’ capabilities, and as a result, the US was surprised by the Russians’ advantage in space capabilities, demonstrated by the launch of the

first satellite, first animal in space, and first man in space. The US underestimated Soviet capabilities in the 1970s, and as a result, the Soviet Union achieved an overall military advantage over the West by the end of the decade. From 1974 to 1985, it was producing 3.5 times more weapons of every category than the US was. In the 1980s, Ronald

Reagan unveiled the vast disparity between the USSR and the US. America’s vast underestimation of Soviet capabilities was proven after 1991 when, in 1992, American inspectors discovered that the former USSR had left Russia with an arsenal of 40,000 nuclear warheads – twice as many as the CIA had estimated. Currently, the US is , and has been for years, vastly underestimating the capabilities of its enemies, including China, Russia, and Iran. In fact, the DOD has downplayed Russia’s bomber exercises and intrusions into US airspace and has denied that a Russian Akula class submarine has been prowling the Gulf of Mexico, and has routinely and vastly underestimating Chinese military capabilities for many years – solely to appease China and obtain invitations for

visits to Beijing, and to mollify the “benign China” school of thought. This year’s DOD report on China’s

military capabilities doesn’t just vastly underestimate them, it leaves entire big issues and entire parts of China’s military buildup unmentioned completely. It says nothing of China’s great underground network of tunnels and bunkers for nuclear warheads and

BMs, China’s BMD system development, or China’s supplying of ballistic missile TELs to North Korea. The fact is that the US, including US officials and national security experts, routinely UNDERESTIMATE the threats America is facing. As for the accusation that the US has an “overly militarized foreign policy”, that is also manifestly untrue. The Obama Administration’s foreign policy has been very civilian and pacifist, and the US has never had a “militarized” foreign policy. The Obama Admin has been appeasing Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela since its first day in office, tolerating their provocations, armament, and aggressions. It has adopted a hands-off approach to these countries. It has been using diplomacy and only diplomacy to mollify them, in pathetic, naive attempts to appease them. It has never seriously considered, let alone threatened, the use of

force towards Iran or North Korea. Zenko’s and Cohen’s claims that the world is “super secure” from America’s standpoint is probably the most ridiculous and laughable of all, because it was made at a time when the world is, as JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey has pointed out, the most dangerous in his lifetime, and indeed the most

123

dangerous since World War II. China is arming at an alarming rate, increasing its military budget by double digits every year for the last 22 years, acquiring large quantities of weapons that can keep the US military out of entire combat theaters, and behaving ever more aggressively towards other Pacific Rim countries. Russia is rearming with huge weapon orders, numerous missile tests, bomber exercises, intrusions into US airspace, and numerous nuclear weapon usage threats. Iran is speeding towards a nuclear weapon. North Korea already has a dozen of them, and has received ICBMs whose TELs (if not the missiles themselves) were produced in China. Venezuela is arming itself with advanced Russian conventional weapons while allowing Iran to build an IRBM base on its soil. And yet, these two anti-defense hacks claim that the world is “super secure” from the US standpoint. Their two articles are utterly ridiculous, and the Council on Foreign Relations has utterly discredited itself by publishing their screeds in its Foreign Affairs bimonthly. In FA’s pages, Paul D. Miller has ably countered Zenko’s and Cohen’s claims. But he has not stated the fact that the overseas threats he’s listed, and other threats to US interests, are dangers to America just as much as they threaten America’s allies. Miller’s argument is essentially that these regimes, as well as terrorist groups, threaten America’s allies and thus the US. Unmentioned is the fact that these regimes and terrorist groups pose a threat to America itself first and foremost. Thus, Miller correctly accuses Zenko and Cohen of narrowing down the definition of a threat to something that threatens US citizens bodily, but he does not mention that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do threaten US citizens bodily – whether they be in the US or abroad – and, with the temporary exception of Iran, pose a grave threat to the US homeland. Iran will, too, once it acquires an ICBM, which US intel says

it will do by 2015. No, threats to America are not being “vastly exaggerated”. They are being vastly UNDERESTIMATED. And that will bring about disastrous results for the US, because intellectual disarmament always precedes actual disarmament.

124