Contention One: The LinkDiscourse of human security lays the terrain for western military interventions across the globe, authorizing force in the maintenance of bare life.de Larrinaga & Doucet 8 [Miguel, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Ottawa, & Marc G., Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Mary’s University, Security Dialogue 39(5), “Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security,” p. 530-533]We have already explored via Agamben’s work how rendering life bare can be seen as the originary activity of sovereign power. What can be brought to light here, in relation to our discussion of human security above, is that the life lived by the subjects of the human security discourse can be seen as life lived as ‘bare’ inasmuch as this discourse is not meant to qualify political life. As explored previously, life through the lens of human security is understood primarily in terms of providing for the basic sustenance of day-to-day life. Brought into the post-9/11 context, what this enables is an opening towards mapping global order in a way that apportions this bare life in relation to zones of exceptionality amenable to the logic of an exercise of sovereign power. This is reflected in the way development objectives and humanitarian goals now tend to submit more directly to the dictates of the management of global order. Instead of targeting populations that are most insecure as measured by the human security discourse and viewing the provision of security to those populations as an end in itself, the targeting is now overridden by the hard security concerns of homelands and ends understood increasingly in terms of the aims of the ‘global war on terror’.14 While the human security discourse could always be critically interpreted as prioritizing its responses to populations that are threatened in relation to servicing the maintenance of the global liberal order (Chandler, 2004), the shift here can be understood as one where this servicing reveals a more intimate connection between sovereign power, biopolitics and the

maintenance of post-9/11 order. This connection comes in the way in which the human security discourse prepares conceptually a form of life that is at hand for the mounting of proactive interventions of pre-emption

and prevention .¶ We can see elements of this shift in the most recent institutional developments of the human security discourse within

the UN. To be certain, the post-9/11 moment can be taken as a movement away from a further codification of grounds for humanitarian intervention that would have as its objective the health and welfare of populations as an end in itself. As Alex Bellamy (2006: 165) chronicles, the language of the World Summit Outcome Document as it relates to the model of humanitarian intervention outlined in the 2001 ICISS report was watered down in favour of reinforcing not only the principle that the burden of protecting populations fell chiefly on individual states, but also the idea that the threshold for interventions on humanitarian grounds should be high. Thus, there was a clear shift in the document away from what was meant to be shared responsibility between the international community and the host state through a re-emphasis of the responsibility of the latter. At the same time, the document also moved towards safeguarding the Security Council’s political discretion to choose when and whether it would intervene rather than endorsing binding criteria that would compel the Council to act in cases of clear humanitarian emergencies, as prescribed in the ICISS report (Bellamy, 2006: 166–167). While these changes can be seen as weakening the case for binding the Council to intervene on humanitarian grounds, they can also be read as broadening the scope for interventions on discretionary grounds. They do this by further codifying the range of justifications for intervention that emerged from Security Council resolutions during the 1990s while simultaneously reaffirming the Council’s ability to choose which cases merit its attention. Perhaps most importantly, the outcome document retains the understanding of sovereignty as responsibility outlined in the ICISS report, reinforcing the notion that it is the host state that has the primary responsibility to protect. The test of responsibility here remains couched in terms of the biopolitical functions of the state insofar as what is measured is the latter’s ability or inability to provide for the health and welfare of the populations within its care. As recounted by Bellamy (2006: 164–167), the negotiations leading to the final draft of the outcome document came as a result of pressure from representatives of states that wanted either a free hand to determine whether and when to intervene (the USA) or to retain the traditional supremacy of sovereignty in

terms of political and legal autonomy (Russia and China). Although this can be taken as a deferral to the norms of territorial inviolability, there is a continued adherence to an understanding of sovereignty that is qualified in line with the state’s biopolitical functions, in that ‘each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (United Nations, 2005b: para. 138). Combined with the endorsement of the Security Council’s political

discretion on intervention, these most recent institutional developments could also be read as a codification of sovereignty in biopolitical terms, and thus as reinforcing the linkages between sovereign power and biopower.¶ The second area of complementarity can be seen as relating to the manner in which Agamben articulates the relationship between

bare life and the exercise of sovereign power as one that operates through the state of exception. What we argue here is that human security is instrumental in sovereign power’s ability to delineate the circumstances in which such a state of

exception can be proclaimed . What the discourse of human security does, whether broad or narrow, is to

help define the exceptional circumstances that require the international community’s intervention , whether on behalf of humanitarian imperatives as initially conceived or in the service of maintaining global order as made evident more recently. It does so by initially constructing the terms that inform the exceptional circumstances that define the range of threats to human life. In turn, it contributes to the labour of defining and authorizing when the suspension of conventional international law of nations can occur. The question that surfaces at this juncture is what authorizes the suspension of the law in the name of human security when the discourse of human security has yet to find its codification as international law? In other words, what allows human security to stand before the law? Returning to Agamben, human security can be understood here as participating in the institution of a form of sovereign power insofar as it simultaneously operates within and outside the law. It points towards a zone of indistinction in relation to its efforts to codify the authorization of a form of international intervention that becomes apparent in the fact that this authorization has yet to receive the status of international law while, at the same time, it must invoke the force that law normally assumes. The human security discourse thus finds itself in an aporia in relation to international law, which it must suspend while simultaneously invoking its force.¶ On this point, Agamben’s reading of the relationship between sovereign power and biopower clearly brings back an element of analysis that is intentionally left aside in Foucault’s biopoliticization of sovereign power highlighted through his reading of racism noted earlier. Agamben allows us to reintroduce the connection between the institution of the juridico-political order and biopower, which much of Foucault’s work on modern forms of power ‘under the rubric of a multiplicity of force relations’ sought to sever (Neal, 2004: 375). Having said that, Agamben’s reading is not entirely satisfactory either, which leads us to the final element of the assemblage between sovereign power and biopower brought to light by the human security discourse.¶ Following Connolly’s critique noted earlier, Agamben appears to maintain a view of the logic and paradox of sovereign power as coherent and ultimately centred on the sovereignty of the state. The cartography of the form of sovereign power that articulates itself through the human

security discourse would seem to complicate this view. Human security can be read as informing the institution of a form of sovereign power that ultimately has as its plane of exercise the globe. This element of globality emerges most clearly in the manner in which the human security discourse articulates threats. Constituting threats specifically in terms of threats to human life means that the human security discourse, through a categorization and accounting of such threats, must constitute them with a view of (in)security that is global. In conceptual terms, viewing human life as a grounds upon which the (in)security dilemma is played out makes the life of the human species the referent of security (Dillon, 2007). To be sure, the human security discourse in practice identifies these threats as emanating from specific locales insofar as its interventions target delimited non-Western populations, and thus the Western state clearly continues to play a central role in mounting the recent series of international interventions. However, too much emphasis on the state misses how such interventions have come to depend upon ‘strategic complexes’ of global governance that bring together ‘state and non-state

actors, public and private organizations, military and civilian organisations’ (Duffield, 2001: 45). In helping to constitute key elements of the state of exception, the human security discourse prepares the conceptual ground upon which such complexes are bound up with instituting a form of global sovereign power unmoored from the formal juridico-political sovereignty of any one state or coalition of states. Within the post-9/11 moment, then, human security can be seen as having laid the conceptual terrain for a form of human subjectivity

amenable to the exercise of global sovereign rule . Rather than seeing a disjuncture between pre- and

post-9/11, human security proposes a form of life that is intimately connected to the assemblages of

biopower and sovereign power that mark this rule .

Calls for the state to assure “human security” provide the rationale for military intervention – “human security” re-installs traditional discourses of state security.de Larrinaga & Doucet 8 [Miguel, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Ottawa, & Marc G., Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Mary’s University, Security Dialogue 39(5), “Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security,” p. 525-527]The formal origins of the concept of human security are to be found in the worldview of an international organization that was

concerned with post Cold War humanitarian issues, and only subsequently became enmeshed in the discourse of national foreign policy concerns and academic debates on security. Generally attributed to the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report and

some of the concurrent writings of Mahbub ul-Haq, the initial impulse was to shift the referent from the state to the ‘legitimate concerns of ordinary people who s[eek] security in their daily lives’ (UNDP, 1994: 22). In other words, the objective was to bring security down to the level of human life by seeking to develop strategies in the provision of both ‘safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression’ and ‘protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life – whether in homes and jobs or in

communities’ (UNDP, 1994: 23). In so doing, security was to be decoupled from the particular national interest of states and tied to the ‘universal concern[s]’ (UNDP, 1994: 22) of all people. In articulating itself universally, human security was therefore initially meant to be built upon the bedrock of universal human rights. This move would be accompanied by efforts to identify a comprehensive list of threats that the ‘all encompassing’ (UNDP, 1994: 24) concept of human security would respond to – that is, economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (UNDP, 1994: 24–25). Clear connections were made between severe impediments to human development and pervasive and chronic threats to the fulfilment of

human potential. Such a broad formulation sought to transcend the state, insofar as it brought into question its role as a provider of security relative to other actors – for example, international organizations, NGOs and non-military

government agencies – while simultaneously identifying the state itself as a potential source of insecurity. This elision of the state also served to make the quotidian the object of security. Whereas security tended to be understood in terms of defining historical moments centred around the survival and integrity of the state, we now see emerging an understanding of (in)security that ‘arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event’ (UNDP, 1994: 22). In this way, human security certainly participated in the broader redefinition of security begun in the 1970s and 1980s; however, it also set off on new terrain, in that shifting its referent to the individual introduces as threats a host of contingencies that emerge from daily life. This initial deployment of the concept in the mid-1990s was subsequently accompanied by other efforts to theorize human security in ways that would be more amenable to the

multilateral and middle-power approaches found in the foreign policy concerns of certain states. Examples like the Responsibility To Protect generally moved away from the broader development concerns of the Human Development Report

towards a more narrow focus on introducing a new set of international norms on intervention that would guide and restrict the conduct of the state and the international community in ‘extreme and exceptional cases’ (ICISS, 2001: 31). Here, the threats are concomitantly narrowed down to ‘violent threats to individuals’

(Human Security Center, 2005: viii), such as ‘mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease’ (United Nations, 2004: 65). Emphasis shifts from an understanding of threats that stem from a broad set of quotidian political, social, economic and environmental contingencies, to what are deemed to be ‘avoidable catastrophe[s]’ (United Nations, 2004: 65).

Within this context, there is a partial but significant return to the state, in that it is through the nexus of the state that the provision of both security and insecurity, by state and non-state actors, is predominantly understood. The traditional apparatus of the state as concerns its monopoly over the (il)legitimate use of violence also makes its return in the form of military intervention as a response of last resort to the extreme violation of rights that are held as inviolable. This then enables the shift towards tying security to the notion of the state’s ability or inability to fulfil its responsibility to protect the human beings within its care.9 In this sense, the referent and threats continue to be articulated in non-territorial forms, as within the broader notion of human security, but the responses are framed within the nexus of the state and therefore call forth a statist conception of security . This return to the state is made all the more evident in the manner in which the narrower concept of human security centres around (re)defining norms surrounding the legitimacy of the international community’s right to intervention. Such an effort attempts to inaugurate and codify a new law around a set of norms that simultaneously requires the suspension of certain foundational elements of international law in ‘cases of violence which so genuinely “shock the conscience of mankind”, or which present such a clear and present danger to international security, that they require coercive military intervention’ (ICISS, 2001: 31) on the part of the international community. It is the concept of human security that serves to define and identify the extreme and exceptional circumstances that it itself requires in the subsequent formulation of its responses. In so doing, the human security discourse participates in setting the conditions for both the suspension of the law and the authorization of its refounding in the form of new norms of intervention. As we will explore below, this marks a key dimension of the operation of the concept of sovereign power elaborated earlier.

IMPACTS

Security politics is the root cause of war and environmental destruction – criticism is a prerequisite to reducing global violence.Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Theory & Event, 10:2, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” Muse]My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am

arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions

about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come , against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87¶ ¶ What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have

sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most

destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism , repression , coercive diplomacy,

covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being .

Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die . Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.¶ ¶ The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On

my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force.¶ ¶ But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly 89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility

and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more.¶ ¶ When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis

suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing

alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought , by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90¶ ¶ This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge

human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?

Security politics destroys value to life, reducing humans to units of calculation.Dillon 96 [Michael, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, p. 26]Everything, for example, has now become possible. But what human being seems most impelled to do with the power of its actions is to turn itself into a species; not merely an animal species, nor even a species of currency or consumption (which amount

to the same thing), but a mere species of calculation. For only by reducing itself to an index of calculation does it seem capable of constructing that political arithmetic by which it can secure the security globalised Western thought insists upon, and which a world made increasingly unpredictable by the very way human being acts into it now seems to require. Yet, the very rage for calculability which securing security incites is precisely also what reduces human freedom, inducing either despair or the surrender of what is human to the de-humanising calculative logic of what seems to be necessary to secure security . I think, then, that

Hannah Arendt was right when she saw late modern humankind caught in a dangerous world-destroying cleft between a belief that everything is possible and a willingness to surrender itself to so-called laws of necessity (calculability itself) which would make everything possible. That it was, in short, characterised by a combination of reckless omnipotence and reckless despair. But I also think that things have gone one stage

further—the surrender to the necessity of realising everything that is possible—and that this found its paradigmatic expression, for example, in the deterrent security policies of the Cold War; where everything up to and including self-immolation not only became possible but actually necessary in the interests of (inter)national security. This logic persists in the metaphysical core of modern politics—the axioms of inter-State security relations, popularised, for example, through strategic discourse— even if the details have changed.

Crafting political strategies geared toward promoting security makes violence inevitable – criticism is a prerequisite to sustainable peace.Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Theory & Event, 10:2, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” Muse]This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful

structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces

with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is.¶ ¶ I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of

'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth' 18 in its most sweeping and powerful form.¶ ¶ I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual

structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone

(and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being.¶ ¶ This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21¶ ¶ What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex

relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political

being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action.¶ ¶ The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order.

However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning . The nation and its identity

are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential

predicate of its perpetuation . In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an

ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as

a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22¶ ¶ The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made.¶ ¶ The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the

political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political.

NO PERM

Including the Aff wards off critique.Burke 7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and Professor of International Relations at University of New South Wales, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, p. 3-4]These frameworks are interrogated at the level both of their theoretical conceptualisation and their practice: in their influence and implementation in specific policy contexts and conflicts in East and Central Asia, the Middle East and the 'war on terror', where their meaning and impact take on greater clarity. This approach is based on a conviction that the meaning of powerful political concepts cannot be abstract or easily universalised: they all have histories, often complex and conflictual; their forms and meanings change over time; and they are developed, refined and deployed in concrete struggles over power, wealth and societal form. While this should not preclude normative debate over how political or ethical concepts should be defined and used, and thus be beneficial or destructive to humanity, it embodies a caution that the meaning of concepts can never be stabilised or unproblematic in practice. Their normative potential must always be considered in relation to their utilisation in systems of political, social and economic power and their consequent worldly effects. Hence this book embodies a caution by Michel Foucault, who warned us about the 'politics of truth ... the battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays', and it is inspired by his call to

'detach the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time'.1 It is clear that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still culturally dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. However, the reasons for pursuing a critical analysis relate not only to the most destructive or controversial approaches , such as the war in Iraq, but also to their available (and generally preferable) alternatives. There is a necessity to question not merely extremist versions such as the Bush doctrine, Indonesian militarism or Israeli expansionism, but also their mainstream critiques - whether they take the form of liberal policy approaches in international relations (IR), just war theory, US realism,

optimistic accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of sensitivity to cultural difference, or centrist Israeli security discourses based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians. The surface appearance of lively (and often significant) debate masks a deeper agreement about major concepts, forms of political identity and the imperative to secure them. Debates about when and how it may be effective and legitimate to use military force in tandem with other policy options, for example, mask a more fundamental discursive consensus about the meaning of security, the effectiveness of strategic power, the nature of progress, the value of freedom or the promises of national and cultural identity. As a result, political and intellectual debate about insecurity, violent conflict and global injustice can become hostage to a claustrophobic structure of political and ethical possibility that systematically wards off critique .

ALT

Reject the Aff’s security discourse – abandoning the attempt to eradicate insecurity is a prerequisite to meaningful political engagement.Neocleous 8 [Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, Critique of Security, p. 185-186]The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether – to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought

and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain ‘this is an insecure world’ and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security.¶ This impasse exists because security has now become so all- encompassing that it marginalises all else , most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end – as the political end – constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people

might come to believe that another world is possible – that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this;

worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told – never could be told – what

might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more ‘sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives.¶ Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that’s left

behind? But I’m inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up re-affirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but t o fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That’s the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of

what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths.¶ For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security’ (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty) is to blind

ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary

politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political issues , debilitating in the sense that ‘security’ helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of

politics centred on a different conception of the good . We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as

solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition , and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being human; it requires accepting that ‘securitizing’ an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.143