42
Security KritikContentsSecurity
Kritik11NC42NC9Links10Economy11Environment12Generic14Hegemony17Humanitarianism18Terrorism20War22Warming23Impacts24Violence25Environment26Extinction30Root
Cause31Policy Paralysis32VTL33Alt34Alt Security Discussions35Alt
Solves Ecology36Alt Solves - Politics38Alt Sovles -
Education40Perm42Reps Debate45Reps Shape Reality46Reps First48Reps
matter49Realism51Realism Bad52Realism Is False54AT: Realism
Inevitable57K Tricks58Case is a Lie59Prediction Impossible62Prior
Question63Serial Policy Failure (Environment)64FW65FW K First66FW
Discourse Key68Epistemology First70A2 Section73Cede The
Political74Extinction First75Threats Real77Util78AFF79Always
VTL80Epistemology Defense81Epistemological Focus Bad82Empiricism
Good83Predictions Good84Realism Good85Impact Framing87Extinction
First88Impact Turns89A2: Ethics90Perm Key to Confront Threats91Perm
Includes Realism92Boggs93Alt
Turns94Discourse/representations96Impact D war97Impact D Structural
Violence98Environmental Threats Real99Biosecurity Solves100
1NCThe 1AC creates a never ending chain of threats, creating a
sense of inevitable securitization of internal relations. We must
attempt to reject forms of security rhetoricGrondin 04(David,
Assistant Professor, Member of the Faculty of Graduate and
Postdoctoral Studies Ph.D., Political Science (International
Relations and American Studies), Universit du Qubec Montral,
Montral, 2008. M.A., International Relations, University of
Toronto, Toronto, 2001. B.A., American History, Universit du Qubec
Montral, Montral, 2000. Rethinking the political from a
Poststructualist Stance
http://www.ieim.uqam.ca/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf)
//ACTNeorealist and neoclassical realism offer themselves up as a
narrative of the world institutional order. Critical approaches
must therefore seek to countermemorialize those whose lives and
voices have been variously silenced in the process of strategic
practices (Klein, 1994: 28). The problem, as revealed in the debate
between gatekeepers of the subfield of Strategic Studies (Walt,
1991), is that those analyses that contravene the dominant
discourse are deemed insignificant by virtue of their differing
ontological and epistemological foundations. Approaches that
deconstruct theoretical practices in order to disclose what is
hidden in the use of concepts such as national security have
something valuable to say. Their more reflexive and
critically-inclined view illustrates how terms used in realist
discourses, such as state, anarchy, world order, revolution in
military affairs, and security dilemmas, are produced by a specific
historical, geographical and socio-political context as well as
historical forces and social relations of power (Klein, 1994: 22).
Since realist analysts do not question their ontology and yet
purport to provide a neutral and objective analysis of a given
world order based on military power and interactions between the
most important political units, namely states, realist discourses
constitute a political act in defense of the state. Indeed, [] it
is important to recognize that to employ a textualizing approach to
social policy involving conflict and war is not to attempt to
reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of
language. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations
governing policy thinking. And it is important to recognize that
policy thinking is not unsituated (Shapiro, 1989a: 71). Policy
thinking is practical thinking since it imposes an analytic order
on the real world, a world that only exists in the analysts own
narratives. In this light, Barry Posens political role in
legitimizing American hegemonic power and national security conduct
seems obvious: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War
11U.S. command of the commons provides an impressive foundation for
selective engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy.
[] Command of the commons gives the United States a tremendous
capability to harm others. Marrying that capability to a
conservative policy of selective engagement helps make U.S.
military power appear less threatening and more tolerable. Command
of the commons creates additional collective goods for U.S. allies.
These collective goods help connect U.S. military power to
seemingly prosaic welfare concerns. U.S. military power underwrites
world trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial
remote sensing, which all depend on peace and order in the commons
(Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David
Campbell points out that [d]anger is not an objective condition. It
(sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it
may become a threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all
depends on how `ctures in the state and society that produces it.
Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has
the authority to write legitimate security discourses and conduct
the policies that legitimize them. The realist analysts and state
leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the
same individuals who hold the power to securitize threats by
inserting them in a discourse that frames national identity and
freezes it.9 Like many concepts, realism is essentially contested.
In a critical reinterpretation of realism, James Der Derian offers
a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism
represented in IR: he reveals many other versions of realism that
are never mentioned in International Relations texts (Der Derian,
1995: 367). I am aware that there are many realist discourses in
International Relations, but they all share a set of assumptions,
such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the
main actor in international relations, states pursue power defined
as a national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism is
one way of representing reality, not the reflection of reality.
While my aim here is not to rehearse Der Derians genealogy of
realism, I do want to spell out the problems with a positivist
theory of realism and a correspondence philosophy of language. Such
a philosophy accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral
description corresponds to reality. This is precisely the problem
of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American
realist theoretical discourses. And since for poststructuralists
language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as
constructed in these discourses is called for. 10 These scholars
cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and
then use realism as the best language to reflect a self-same
phenomenon (Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not
suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist
discourses in International Relations are not useful. Rather, I
want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism
serve political purposes, used as they are in many think tanks and
foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders.
This is the relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as
used in International Relations): it brings to light its
locatedness in a hermeneutic circle in which it is unwittingly
trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil
argues, [] the rejection of a correspondence theory of truth does
not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism
and/or to endless deconstruction in which anything goes but it
leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate
competing theoretical creations (Kratochwil, 2000 : 52). Given that
political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to
ideas formed independently of structures of signification that
sustain political action and thought, American realist discourses
belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions
cannot be taken as mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in
the production of discourses in which national leaders and security
speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce
a notion of national identity as synonymous with national security.
U.S. national security conduct should thus be understood through
the prism of the theoretical discourses of American political
leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist
discourses depict American political leaders acting in defense of
national security, and political leaders act in the name of
national security. In the end, what distinguishes realist
discourses is that they depict the United States as having behaved
like a national security state since World War II, while
legitimating the idea that the United States should continue to do
so. Political scientists and historians are engaged in making
(poesis), not merely recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17).
Precisely in this sense, rhetoric is not the description of
national security conduct; it constitutes it. It is difficult to
trace the exact origins of the concept of national security. It
seems however that its currency in policymaking circles corresponds
to the American experience of the Second World War and of the early
years of what came to be known as the Cold War. In this light, it
is fair to say that the meaning of the American national security
state is bound up with the Cold War context. If one is engaged in
deciphering the meaning of the Cold War prism for American leaders,
what matters is not uncovering the reality of the Cold War as such,
but how, it conferred meaning and led people to act upon it as
reality. The Cold War can thus be seen as a rhetorical
construction, in which its rhetorical dimensions gave meaning to
its material manifestations, such as the national security state
apparatus. This is not to say that the Cold War never existed per
se, nor does it make [it] any less real or less significant for
being rhetorical (Medhurst, 2000: 6). As Lynn Boyd Hinds and
Theodore Otto Windt, Jr. stress, political rhetoric creates
political reality, structures belief systems, and provides the
fundamental bases for decisions (Hinds and Windt, cited in
Medhurst, 2000: 6). In this sense, the Cold War ceases to be a
historical period which meaning can be written permanently and
becomes instead a struggle that is not context-specific and not
geared towards one specific enemy. It is an orientation towards
difference in which those acting on behalf of an assumed but never
fixed identity are tempted by the lure of otherness to interpret
all dangers as fundamental threats which require the mobilization
of a population (Campbell, 2000: 227). Indeed, if the meaning of
the Cold War is not context-specific, the concept of national
security cannot be disconnected from what is known as the Cold War,
since its very meaning(s) emerged within it (Rosenberg, 1993 :
277).11 If the American national security state is a given for
realist analysts, 12 it is important to ask whether we can conceive
the United States during the Cold War as anything other than a
national security state.13 To be clear, I am not suggesting that
there is any such essentialized entity as a national security
state. 14 When I refer to the American national security state, I
mean the representation of the American state in the early years of
the Cold War,the spirit of which is embodied in the National
Security Act of 1947 (Der Derian, 1992:76). The term national
security state designates both an institutionalization of a new
governmental architecture designed to prepare the United States
politically and militarily to face any foreign threat and the
ideology the discourse that gave rise to as well as symbolized it.
In other words, to understand the idea of a national security
state, one needs to grasp the discursive power of national security
in shaping the reality of the Cold War in both language and
institutions (Rosenberg, 1993 : 281). A national security state
feeds on threats as it channels all its efforts into meeting
current and future military or security threats. The creation of
the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
the National Security Council at the onset of the Cold War gave
impetus to a state mentality geared to permanent preparedness for
war. The construction of threats is thus essential to its
well-being, making intelligence agencies privileged tools in
accomplishing this task. As American historian of U.S. foreign
relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the
national security state during the Truman administration, the
national security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a
system of symbolic representation that defined Americas national
identity by reference to the un-American other, usually the Soviet
Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power (Hogan, 1998:
17). Such a binary system made it difficult for any domestic
dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have amounted to an act
of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18). 15 While Hogan distinguishes
advocates from critics of the American national security state, his
view takes for granted that there is a given and fixed American
political culture that differs from the new national security
ideology. It posits an American way, produced by its cultural,
political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that
differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial,
pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the
national security state, Hogan sees the national security state as
a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the
Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a
garrison state: Although government would grow larger, taxes would
go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none
of these and other transformations would add up to the crushing
regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The
outcome instead would be an American national security state that
was shaped as much by the countrys democratic political culture as
it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War
(Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this essentialist view of the
state identity of the United States. The United States does not
need to be a national security state. If it was and is still
constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is because these
discourses serve some political purpose. Moreover, in keeping with
my poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need
not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which to say is
to do, that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity
of language, culture becomes a relational site where identity
politics happens rather than being a substantive phenomenon. In
this sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign
policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the
conditions of possibility for social being, [] the way in which
culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in
whose name they speak (Campbell, 1998: 221). The Cold War national
security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive
of the American national security state. There was certainly a
conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War
military-intellectual complex, which were observers of, and active
participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They
contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic.
As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were
instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture
(Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was a complex
space where various representations and representatives of the
national security state compete to draw the boundaries and dominate
the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992:
41). The same Cold War security culture has been maintained by
political practice (on the part of realist analysts and political
leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once
again reproduces the idea of a national security state. This
(implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor
inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point, the
identification process of the state and the nation is always a
negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence, and
marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that
constitute and consolidate state identity is necessary: the writing
of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the
discourses that constitute it. The state and the discourses that
(re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a
fictitious national unity on society; it is from this fictive and
arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous discourses of
inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state
emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in which the
state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence a power
socially constructed, following Max Webers work on the ethic of
responsibility to construct a threatening Other differentiated from
the unified Self, the national society (the nation). 16 It is
through this very practice of normative statecraft, 17 which
produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes
into being. David Campbell adds that it is by constantly
articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very
conditions of existence are generated 18.
Securitization creates all possibility for violenceFriis
2000(Karaten, UN Sector at Norweigan Intitute of International
Affairs, Peace and Conflict Studies, From Liminars to Others:
Securitization Through Myths,
http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=2) //ACT The
problem with societal securitization is one of representation. It
is rarely clear in advance who it is that speaks for a community.
There is no system of representation as in a state. Since
literately anyone can stand up as representatives, there is room
for entrepreneurs. It is not surprising if we experience a struggle
between different representatives and also their different
representations of the society. What they do share, however, is a
conviction that they are best at providing (a new) order. If they
can do this convincingly, they gain legitimacy. What must be done
is to make the uncertain certain and make the unknown an object of
knowledge. To present a discernable Other is a way of doing this.
The Other is represented as an Other -- as an unified single actor
with a similar unquestionable set of core values (i.e. the capital
O). They are objectified, made into an object of knowledge, by
re-presentation of their identity and values. In other words, the
representation of the Other is depoliticized in the sense that its
inner qualities are treated as given and non-negotiable. In Jef
Huysmans (1998:241) words, there is both a need for a mediation of
chaos as well as of threat. A mediation of chaos is more basic than
a mediation of threat, as it implies making chaos into a meaningful
order by a convincing representation of the Self and its
surroundings. It is a mediation of ontological security, which
means ...a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity ... by
fixing social relations into a symbolic and institutional order
(Huysmans 1998:242). As he and others (like Hansen 1998:240) have
pointed out, the importance of a threat construction for political
identification, is often overstated. The mediation of chaos, of
being the provider of order in general, is just as important. This
may imply naming an Other but not necessarily as a threat. Such a
dichotomization implies a necessity to get rid of all the liminars
(what Huysmans calls strangers). This is because they ...connote a
challenge to categorizing practices through the impossibility of
being categorized, and does not threaten the community, ...but the
possibility of ordering itself (Huysmans 1998:241). They are a
challenge to the entrepreneur by their very existence. They confuse
the dichotomy of Self and Other and thereby the entrepreneurs
mediation of chaos. As mentioned, a liminar can for instance be
people of mixed ethnical ancestry but also representations of
competing world-pictures. As Eide (1998:76) notes: Over and over
again we see that the liberals within a group undergoing a
mobilisation process for group conflict are the first ones to go.
The liminars threaten the ontological order of the entrepreneur by
challenging his representation of Self and Other and his mediation
of chaos, which ultimately undermines the legitimacy of his policy.
The liminars may be securitized by some sort of disciplination,
from suppression of cultural symbols to ethnic cleansing and
expatriation. This is a threat to the ontological order of the
entrepreneur, stemming from inside and thus repoliticizing the
inside/outside dichotomy. Therefore the liminar must disappear. It
must be made into a Self, as several minority groups throughout the
world have experienced, or it must be forced out of the territory.
A liminar may also become an Other, as its connection to the Self
is cut and their former common culture is renounced and made
insignificant. In Anne Nortons (1988:55) words, The presence of
difference in the ambiguous other leads to its classification as
wholly unlike and identifies it unqualifiedly with the archetypal
other, denying the resemblance to the self. Then the liminar is no
longer an ontological danger (chaos), but what Huysmans (1998:242)
calls a mediation of daily security. This is not challenging the
order or the system as such but has become a visible, clear-cut
Other. In places like Bosnia, this naming and replacement of an
Other, has been regarded by the securitizing actors as the solution
to the ontological problem they have posed. Securitization was not
considered a political move, in the sense that there were any
choices. It was a necessity: Securitization was a solution based on
a depoliticized ontology.10 This way the world-picture of the
securitizing actor is not only a representation but also made into
reality. The mythical second-order language is made into
first-order language, and its innocent reality is forced upon the
world. To the entrepreneurs and other actors involved it has become
a natural necessity with a need to make order, even if it implies
making the world match the map. Maybe that is why war against
liminars are so often total; it attempts a total expatriation or a
total solution (like the Holocaust) and not only a victory on the
battlefield. If the enemy is not even considered a legitimate
Other, the door may be more open to a kind of violence that is way
beyond any war conventions, any jus in bello. This way,
securitizing is legitimized: The entrepreneur has succeeded both in
launching his world-view and in prescribing the necessary measures
taken against it. This is possible by using the myths, by speaking
on behalf of the natural and eternal, where truth is never
questioned.
The alternative is to reject the 1ACs security rhetoric
Only a critical analysis of IR can create better education and
policy makingBiswas 07(Shampa, International Relations Theorist,
Millennium Journal of International Studies Dec 1st 2007,
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/36/1/117.full.pdf+html) //ACTOne of
the profound effects of the war on terror initiated by the Bush
administration has been a significant constriction of a democratic
public sphere, which has included the active and aggressive
curtailment of intellectual and political dissent and a sharp
delineation of national boundaries along with concentration of
state power. The academy in this context has become a particularly
embattled site with some highly disturbing onslaughts on academic
freedom. At the most obvious level, this has involved fairly
well-calibrated neoconservative attacks on US higher education that
have invoked the mantra of liberal bias and demanded legislative
regulation and reform10, an onslaught supported by a well-funded
network of conservative think tanks, centres, institutes and
concerned citizen groups within and outside the higher education
establishment11 and with considerable reach among sitting
legislators, jurists and policy-makers as well as the media. But
what has in part made possible the encroachment of such nationalist
and statist agendas has been a larger history of the
corporatisation of the university and the accompanying
professionalisation that goes with it. Expressing concern with
academic acquiescence in the decline of public discourse in the
United States, Herbert Reid has examined the ways in which the
university is beginning to operate as another transnational
corporation12, and critiqued the consolidation of a culture of
professionalism where academic bureaucrats engage in bureaucratic
role-playing, minor academic turf battles mask the larger
managerial power play on campuses and the increasing influence of a
relatively autonomous administrative elite and the rise of insular
expert cultures have led to academics relinquishing their claims to
public space and authority.13 While it is no surprise that the US
academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of
neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas
that is the predicament of many contemporary institutions around
the world, there is much reason for concern and an urgent need to
rethink the role and place of intellectual labour in the democratic
process. This is especially true for scholars of the global writing
in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said has written
extensively on the place of the academy as one of the few and
increasingly precarious spaces for democratic deliberation and
argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured from the
seductions of power.14 Defending the US academy as one of the last
remaining utopian spaces, the one public space available to real
alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on
such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today15, and lauding
the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work of many
academic intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains
that the American University, with its munificence, utopian
sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged
(intellectuals)16. The most serious threat to the intellectual
vocation, he argues, is professionalism and mounts a pointed attack
on the proliferation of specializations and the cult of expertise
with their focus on relatively narrow areas of knowledge, technical
formalism, impersonal theories and methodologies, and most
worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by
power. 17 Said mentions in this context the funding of academic
programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the
Cold War18, an area in which there was considerable traffic of
political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative
politics scholars) with institutions of policy-making. Looking at
various influential US academics as organic intellectuals involved
in a dialectical relationship with foreign policy-makers and
examining the institutional relationships at and among numerous
think tanks and universities that create convergent perspectives
and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in
the Third World both during and after the Cold War made possible
and justified through various forms of intellectual articulation.19
This is not simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but
indeed a larger question of intellectual orientation. It is not
uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need to formulate their
scholarly conclusions in terms of its relevance for global
politics, where relevance is measured entirely in terms of policy
wisdom. Edward Saids searing indictment of US intellectuals
policy-experts and Middle East experts - in the context of the
first Gulf War20 is certainly even more resonant in the
contemporary context preceding and following the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and
conduct of this war has been considerably diminished by the
expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical
questions irreducible to formulaic for or against and costs and
benefits analysis can simply not be raised. In effect, what Said
argues for, and IR scholars need to pay particular heed to, is an
understanding of intellectual relevance that is larger and more
worthwhile, that is about the posing of critical, historical,
ethical and perhaps unanswerable questions rather than the offering
of recipes and solutions, that is about politics (rather than
techno-expertise) in the most fundamental and important senses of
the vocation.21 It is not surprising that the cult of expertise
that is increasingly driving the study of global politics has
occurred in conjunction with a larger depoliticisation of many
facets of global politics, which since the 1980s has accompanied a
more general prosperity-bred complacency about politics in the
Anglo-European world, particularly in the US. There are many
examples of this. It is evident, for instance, in the understanding
of globalisation as TINA market-driven rationality inevitable,
inexorable and ultimately, as Thomas Friedmans many writings boldly
proclaim, apolitical.22 If development was always the anti-politics
machine that James Ferguson so brilliantly adumbrated more than a
decade ago, it is now seen almost entirely as technocratic aid
and/or charitable humanitarianism delivered via professionalised
bureaucracies, whether they are IGOs or INGOs.23 From the more
expansive environmental and feminist-inspired understandings of
human security, understandings of global security are once again
increasingly being reduced to (military) strategy and global
democratisation to technical recipes for regime change and good
governance. There should be little surprise in such a context that
the war on terror has translated into a depoliticised response to a
dehistoricised understanding of the roots of terror. For IR
scholars, reclaiming politics is a task that will involve working
against the grain of expertise-oriented professionalism in a world
that increasingly understands its own workings in apolitical terms.
The space for a critical appraisal of the motivations and conduct
of this war has been considerably diminished by the
expertise-framed national debate wherein certain kinds of ethical
questions irreducible to formulaic for or against and costs and
benefits analysis can simply not be raised.2NCLinksEconomyEconomics
expands security threats to marketsthe desire to achieve economic
security authorizes wars to protect world systems of
capital.Lipschutz 98 (Ronnie D, Professor, Department of Politics
at UC Santa Cruz, "Negotiating the Boundaries of Difference and
Security at Millennium's End"
ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz18.html)Today, a similar set of
circumstances, brought on by economic globalization, seems to be
developing and imposing costs and risks on the very people it is
intended to benefit. In this context, talk of "economic security"
becomes, once again, a speech act that seeks to legitimate a policy
that promises very real insecurity for many. The market is a place
full of risks, and only those who are willing to take risks in the
market are likely to reap great benefits; given the logic of the
market, these same individuals also risk bankruptcy and personal
economic insecurity (an outcome only too evident in Orange County
California's declaration of bankruptcy and Mexico's economic
travails). Indeed, as Beverly Crawford's chapter seems to suggest,
in a world of economic globalism, in which states must collaborate
to foster global capitalism, and the processes of production,
consumption, and accumulation become decoupled from individual
states, it becomes more and more difficult to constitute an Other
that might be transformed into a threatening enemy, thereby
legitimating the differential degrees of personal and national
security awarded by the market. We have seen some feeble efforts,
based on notions of economic competitiveness and technological
innovation, and given illustration in Michael Crichton's xenophobic
and misogynistic Rising Sun, but these seem not to be very
persuasive. A few argue that we (the United States) must become
more like the Other (Japan) if we are to be made secure. 16 How
different this is from the world(s) of Morgenthau and Waltz!
Business and capital are only too aware of this paradox, whereas
the world of states and military power seems blissfully oblivious
to it. For capital, there are no enemies, only competitors; indeed,
the market, while competitive, is a realm of cooperation, not
conflict, as is often assumed. 17 Markets are rule-governed
institutions and, to get along, you must go along. In the
marketplace, nonexclusive identities are prized, not shunned, and
multiple identities are encouraged in the name of consumer taste
and "autonomy." This world is, as Kenichi Ohmae puts it, truly
"borderless." 18 Not only are there no borders between countries,
there are no borders between market and consumer, either. What can
security possibly mean in such a world? Not everyone is, of course,
a participant in the market; indeed, there are billions of people
and dozens of countries that are not. In spite of warnings about
instability as the "enemy," these people and "states" are neither
enemies nor threats to us in either an objective or intersubjective
sense. Rather, the places in which many of them are found are more
akin to realms constituted or consumed by chaos. The inhabitants of
these zone participate in neither statist politics nor global
markets as we understand them, not so much out of choice or desire
as out of the logic of economic globalization driven by capitalism
and the industrial coalition. But these zones of chaos are not just
places "outside" of space or time; paradoxically, perhaps, they are
sites of political experimentation, from which are emerging "world
systems" that, if successful, could ultimately undermine the
relative orderliness of the peaceful zones of the industrial
coalition.
EnvironmentEnvironmental conflict is linked to security
concernsDetraz 11[Nicole: International Relations, University of
Memphis "Threats or Vulnerabilities?" August 2011,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/global_environmental_politics/v011/11.3.detraz.html,
CL]The environmental conflict discourse links the environment and
environmental problems to traditional security concerns, including
a general concern for state security. Most authors who use an
environmental conflict discourse focus on the possibility that
groups within society will engage in violent conflict over natural
resources. These conflicts can be the product of scarcity13,
abundance14, or dependence15 on natural resources and are typically
understood to threaten the stability of the state. The primary
challenge is to identify those most immediately at risk of conflict
and design policy interventions to avoid conflict and ensure state
stability. This is largely understood to be the responsibility of
state institutions. Due to the sense of urgency embedded in this
discourse, policies are likely to be aimed at short-term adaptation
strategies as a means of avoiding violent conflict. The
environmental security discourse is concerned with the negative
impacts of environmental degradation for human beings. While
environmental conflict is largely state-centric and can still
directly be linked to military security, environmental security is
much more closely linked to notions of security at an individual
level, or human security.16 It is important to note, however, that
the concerns embedded in environmental security are more specific
than the general concept of human security, which can refer to
anything that negatively impacts the safety and survival of humans.
In this discourse, the threat is located in negative consequences
of environmental damage and those who are vulnerable are all human
beings.17 This concept of human vulnerability is widely used in
general discussions of global environmental change, and climate
change in particular.18 According to Gaillard, much of the
literature on vulnerability focuses on "the susceptibility to
suffer damage in a potentially dangerous event, either natural,
economic or political."19 In the context of these debates,
vulnerability stresses the condition of humans being susceptible to
individual and collective harm because of environmental change.
Environment destruction rhetoric uses Cold War thinking and
justifies violence and structural violenceFranke 04(Volker,
McDaniel College of Swag, The Meaning of Environmental Security:
Ecological Politics and Policy in the New Security Era Sage
Publications, 2004, p.155-157, pdf) //ACTThe title of Jon Barnetts
book The Meaning of Environmental Security suggests an effort to
tackle one of the issuesenvironmental degradationwhose importance
had been masked by Cold War-era concerns over nuclear war and the
spread of communism. But Barnetts book does much more than that. It
provides a piercing critique of the traditional security discourse
that convincingly shows how conventional (Cold War) thinking
obscures both the causes and consequences of environmental
degradation and its effects on human security. While environmental
security has traditionally focused on conflict over scarce
resources and its prevention at the state level, Barnett provides
readers with an alternative way to conceptualize security based on
environmental justice and peaceful methods for resolving social and
political inequities. Although Barnetts book is specifically about
environmental security, its greatest benefit lies in the fact that
its human-centered approach to conflict resolution can serve as a
useful frame for addressing the security needs of people in other
areas in the twenty-first century. Barnetts attempt to place lived
experiences of real people at the heart of his reformulated
conception of environmental security provides a constructive
extension of many purely theoretical attempts to reframe security
after the Cold War. Barnett provides a succinct outline of both
traditional and critical approaches to environmental security and
very effectively deconstructs how traditionalists have
misidentified the security needs of the twentyfirst century.
Environmental insecurity has traditionally been defined either in
terms of threats to national security that arise directly from
environmental degradation, or in terms of the human impacts on the
security of the environment itself (ecological security). Barnett
discusses each of these understandings in detail and points to
their respective shortcomings. Those shortcomings lead him to
advocate a third approach, namely to understand environmental
security in terms of the ways in which environmental degradation
threatens the security of people. For Barnett, environmental
degradation and insecurity are a product of the structural
inequalities inherent in the development/underdevelopment dynamic.
Environmental insecurity, or the vulnerability of people to the
effects of environmental degradation (p. 17), is caused either by
resource scarcities or by the overloading of planetary sinks (i.e.,
the accumulation of wastes emitted from dispersed sources combined
with the biospheres decreased capacity to absorb these wastes).
Defined this way, environmental insecurity becomes a social problem
that is magnified by globalization and modern consumption patterns.
Barnett explains that this overconsumption and lack of
redistribution produces a double insecurity whereby longstanding
vulnerabilities arising from underdevelopment and impoverishment
are compounded by an intensifying suite of risks associated with
environmental degradation (p. 20). Using many concrete examples,
Barnett convincingly illustrates that while environmental
insecurity is a problem of adaptation for the developed
industrialized West, in the underdeveloped parts of the world it is
a matter of life and death (p. 21). Following his description of
the security problems that await us in the twenty-first century,
Barnett discusses traditional conceptions of security as the
constitutive principle of the modern nation-state as found in
classical Realist theories of security. He summarizes a number of
the commonly voiced criticisms against this conception, from
conceptualizing security solely in terms of military power to the
poststructuralist critique that for all the emphasis placed on the
integrity of nation-state, there is a general absence of
theorization about the nation state itself (p. 29). Expectedly,
this analysis leads to a discussion of the securitization of others
(i.e., the identification of others who threaten the cohesion of
the nation-state, thereby legitimizing extreme measuressuch as the
use of force against outsiders, surveillance tactics, and control
of political activity within the statetaken to ensure national
survival). In this context, Barnett carefully examines the thesis
that environmental degradation will lead to violent conflict and
concludes that it commonly serves to justify existing institutions
and traditional methods of conflict resolution. The thesis, Barnett
argues, assumes that people in the South will resort to violence in
times of resource scarcity. Consequently, it legitimizes the
ethnocentric juxtaposition of the barbaric, primeval other against
the civilized self, thus justifying attempts by the North to
maintain order. One of the highlights of the book is certainly
chapter 6.
Generic
The 1AC creates a never ending chain of threats, creating a
sense of inevitable securitization of internal relations. We must
attempt to reject forms of security rhetoricGrondin 04(David,
Assistant Professor, Member of the Faculty of Graduate and
Postdoctoral Studies Ph.D., Political Science (International
Relations and American Studies), Universit du Qubec Montral,
Montral, 2008. M.A., International Relations, University of
Toronto, Toronto, 2001. B.A., American History, Universit du Qubec
Montral, Montral, 2000. Rethinking the political from a
Poststructualist Stance
http://www.ieim.uqam.ca/IMG/pdf/rewriting_national_security_state.pdf)
//ACTNeorealist and neoclassical realism offer themselves up as a
narrative of the world institutional order. Critical approaches
must therefore seek to countermemorialize those whose lives and
voices have been variously silenced in the process of strategic
practices (Klein, 1994: 28). The problem, as revealed in the debate
between gatekeepers of the subfield of Strategic Studies (Walt,
1991), is that those analyses that contravene the dominant
discourse are deemed insignificant by virtue of their differing
ontological and epistemological foundations. Approaches that
deconstruct theoretical practices in order to disclose what is
hidden in the use of concepts such as national security have
something valuable to say. Their more reflexive and
critically-inclined view illustrates how terms used in realist
discourses, such as state, anarchy, world order, revolution in
military affairs, and security dilemmas, are produced by a specific
historical, geographical and socio-political context as well as
historical forces and social relations of power (Klein, 1994: 22).
Since realist analysts do not question their ontology and yet
purport to provide a neutral and objective analysis of a given
world order based on military power and interactions between the
most important political units, namely states, realist discourses
constitute a political act in defense of the state. Indeed, [] it
is important to recognize that to employ a textualizing approach to
social policy involving conflict and war is not to attempt to
reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of
language. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations
governing policy thinking. And it is important to recognize that
policy thinking is not unsituated (Shapiro, 1989a: 71). Policy
thinking is practical thinking since it imposes an analytic order
on the real world, a world that only exists in the analysts own
narratives. In this light, Barry Posens political role in
legitimizing American hegemonic power and national security conduct
seems obvious: How and Why Realists (Re)Built the(ir) Cold War
11U.S. command of the commons provides an impressive foundation for
selective engagement. It is not adequate for a policy of primacy.
[] Command of the commons gives the United States a tremendous
capability to harm others. Marrying that capability to a
conservative policy of selective engagement helps make U.S.
military power appear less threatening and more tolerable. Command
of the commons creates additional collective goods for U.S. allies.
These collective goods help connect U.S. military power to
seemingly prosaic welfare concerns. U.S. military power underwrites
world trade, travel, global telecommunications, and commercial
remote sensing, which all depend on peace and order in the commons
(Posen, 2003: 44 and 46). Adopting a more critical stance, David
Campbell points out that [d]anger is not an objective condition. It
(sic) is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it
may become a threat. [] Nothing is a risk in itself; [...] it all
depends on how `ctures in the state and society that produces it.
Whoever has the power to define security is then the one who has
the authority to write legitimate security discourses and conduct
the policies that legitimize them. The realist analysts and state
leaders who invoke national security and act in its name are the
same individuals who hold the power to securitize threats by
inserting them in a discourse that frames national identity and
freezes it.9 Like many concepts, realism is essentially contested.
In a critical reinterpretation of realism, James Der Derian offers
a genealogy of realism that deconstructs the uniform realism
represented in IR: he reveals many other versions of realism that
are never mentioned in International Relations texts (Der Derian,
1995: 367). I am aware that there are many realist discourses in
International Relations, but they all share a set of assumptions,
such as the state is a rational unitary actor, the state is the
main actor in international relations, states pursue power defined
as a national interest, and so on. I want to show that realism is
one way of representing reality, not the reflection of reality.
While my aim here is not to rehearse Der Derians genealogy of
realism, I do want to spell out the problems with a positivist
theory of realism and a correspondence philosophy of language. Such
a philosophy accepts nominalism, wherein language as neutral
description corresponds to reality. This is precisely the problem
of epistemic realism and of the realism characteristic of American
realist theoretical discourses. And since for poststructuralists
language constitutes reality, a reinterpretation of realism as
constructed in these discourses is called for. 10 These scholars
cannot refer to the essentially contested nature of realism and
then use realism as the best language to reflect a self-same
phenomenon (Der Derian, 1995: 374). Let me be clear: I am not
suggesting that the many neorealist and neoclassical realist
discourses in International Relations are not useful. Rather, I
want to argue that these technicist and scientist forms of realism
serve political purposes, used as they are in many think tanks and
foreign policy bureaucracies to inform American political leaders.
This is the relevance of deconstructing the uniform realism (as
used in International Relations): it brings to light its
locatedness in a hermeneutic circle in which it is unwittingly
trapped (Der Derian, 1995: 371). And as Friedrich Kratochwil
argues, [] the rejection of a correspondence theory of truth does
not condemn us, as it is often maintained, to mere relativism
and/or to endless deconstruction in which anything goes but it
leaves us with criteria that allows us to distinguish and evaluate
competing theoretical creations (Kratochwil, 2000 : 52). Given that
political language is not a neutral medium that gives expression to
ideas formed independently of structures of signification that
sustain political action and thought, American realist discourses
belonging to the neorealist or neoclassical realist traditions
cannot be taken as mere descriptions of reality. We are trapped in
the production of discourses in which national leaders and security
speech acts emanating from realist discourses develop and reinforce
a notion of national identity as synonymous with national security.
U.S. national security conduct should thus be understood through
the prism of the theoretical discourses of American political
leaders and realist scholars that co-constitute it. Realist
discourses depict American political leaders acting in defense of
national security, and political leaders act in the name of
national security. In the end, what distinguishes realist
discourses is that they depict the United States as having behaved
like a national security state since World War II, while
legitimating the idea that the United States should continue to do
so. Political scientists and historians are engaged in making
(poesis), not merely recording or reporting (Medhurst, 2000: 17).
Precisely in this sense, rhetoric is not the description of
national security conduct; it constitutes it. It is difficult to
trace the exact origins of the concept of national security. It
seems however that its currency in policymaking circles corresponds
to the American experience of the Second World War and of the early
years of what came to be known as the Cold War. In this light, it
is fair to say that the meaning of the American national security
state is bound up with the Cold War context. If one is engaged in
deciphering the meaning of the Cold War prism for American leaders,
what matters is not uncovering the reality of the Cold War as such,
but how, it conferred meaning and led people to act upon it as
reality. The Cold War can thus be seen as a rhetorical
construction, in which its rhetorical dimensions gave meaning to
its material manifestations, such as the national security state
apparatus. This is not to say that the Cold War never existed per
se, nor does it make [it] any less real or less significant for
being rhetorical (Medhurst, 2000: 6). As Lynn Boyd Hinds and
Theodore Otto Windt, Jr. stress, political rhetoric creates
political reality, structures belief systems, and provides the
fundamental bases for decisions (Hinds and Windt, cited in
Medhurst, 2000: 6). In this sense, the Cold War ceases to be a
historical period which meaning can be written permanently and
becomes instead a struggle that is not context-specific and not
geared towards one specific enemy. It is an orientation towards
difference in which those acting on behalf of an assumed but never
fixed identity are tempted by the lure of otherness to interpret
all dangers as fundamental threats which require the mobilization
of a population (Campbell, 2000: 227). Indeed, if the meaning of
the Cold War is not context-specific, the concept of national
security cannot be disconnected from what is known as the Cold War,
since its very meaning(s) emerged within it (Rosenberg, 1993 :
277).11 If the American national security state is a given for
realist analysts, 12 it is important to ask whether we can conceive
the United States during the Cold War as anything other than a
national security state.13 To be clear, I am not suggesting that
there is any such essentialized entity as a national security
state. 14 When I refer to the American national security state, I
mean the representation of the American state in the early years of
the Cold War,the spirit of which is embodied in the National
Security Act of 1947 (Der Derian, 1992:76). The term national
security state designates both an institutionalization of a new
governmental architecture designed to prepare the United States
politically and militarily to face any foreign threat and the
ideology the discourse that gave rise to as well as symbolized it.
In other words, to understand the idea of a national security
state, one needs to grasp the discursive power of national security
in shaping the reality of the Cold War in both language and
institutions (Rosenberg, 1993 : 281). A national security state
feeds on threats as it channels all its efforts into meeting
current and future military or security threats. The creation of
the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
the National Security Council at the onset of the Cold War gave
impetus to a state mentality geared to permanent preparedness for
war. The construction of threats is thus essential to its
well-being, making intelligence agencies privileged tools in
accomplishing this task. As American historian of U.S. foreign
relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the
national security state during the Truman administration, the
national security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a
system of symbolic representation that defined Americas national
identity by reference to the un-American other, usually the Soviet
Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power (Hogan, 1998:
17). Such a binary system made it difficult for any domestic
dissent from U.S. policy to emerge it would have amounted to an act
of disloyalty (Hogan, 1998: 18). 15 While Hogan distinguishes
advocates from critics of the American national security state, his
view takes for granted that there is a given and fixed American
political culture that differs from the new national security
ideology. It posits an American way, produced by its cultural,
political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that
differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial,
pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the
national security state, Hogan sees the national security state as
a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the
Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a
garrison state: Although government would grow larger, taxes would
go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none
of these and other transformations would add up to the crushing
regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The
outcome instead would be an American national security state that
was shaped as much by the countrys democratic political culture as
it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War
(Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this essentialist view of the
state identity of the United States. The United States does not
need to be a national security state. If it was and is still
constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is because these
discourses serve some political purpose. Moreover, in keeping with
my poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need
not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which to say is
to do, that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity
of language, culture becomes a relational site where identity
politics happens rather than being a substantive phenomenon. In
this sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign
policy decision-making. Culture is a signifying part of the
conditions of possibility for social being, [] the way in which
culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in
whose name they speak (Campbell, 1998: 221). The Cold War national
security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive
of the American national security state. There was certainly a
conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War
military-intellectual complex, which were observers of, and active
participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They
contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled
predominant ideological strains within the American body politic.
As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were
instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture
(Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was a complex
space where various representations and representatives of the
national security state compete to draw the boundaries and dominate
the murkier margins of international relations (Der Derian, 1992:
41). The same Cold War security culture has been maintained by
political practice (on the part of realist analysts and political
leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once
again reproduces the idea of a national security state. This
(implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor
inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point, the
identification process of the state and the nation is always a
negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence, and
marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that
constitute and consolidate state identity is necessary: the writing
of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the
discourses that constitute it. The state and the discourses that
(re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a
fictitious national unity on society; it is from this fictive and
arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous discourses of
inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state
emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in which the
state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence a power
socially constructed, following Max Webers work on the ethic of
responsibility to construct a threatening Other differentiated from
the unified Self, the national society (the nation). 16 It is
through this very practice of normative statecraft, 17 which
produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes
into being. David Campbell adds that it is by constantly
articulating danger through foreign policy that the states very
conditions of existence are generated 18.
HegemonyPrimacy discourse ascribes fear to potential
challengersmilitarized responses and war are inevitable with
balance-of-power policies.Campbell 98 (David, Campbell, professor
International Politics at University of New Castle, "Writing
Security; United States Foreign Policy the Politics of Identity" p.
31-33)Most important just as the source of danger has never been
fixed, neither has the identity that it was said to threaten. The
contours of this identity have been the subject of constant
(re)writing; no rewriting in the sense of changing the meaning, but
rewriting in the sense of inscribing something so that which is
contingent and subject to flux is rendered more permanent. While
one might have expected few if any references to national values or
purposes in confidential prepared for the inner sanctum of national
security policy (after all, don't they know who they are or what
they represent?) the texts of foreign policy are replete with
statements about the fulfillment of the republic, the fundamental
purpose of the nation, God given rights, moral codes, the
principles of European civilization, the fear of cultural and
spiritual loss, and the responsibilities and duties thrust upon the
gleaming example of America. In this sense, the texts that guided
national security policy did more than simply offer strategic
analysis of the "reality" they confronted: they actively concerned
themselves with the scripting of a particular American identity.
Stamped "Top Secret" and read by only the select and power few, the
texts effaced the boundary between inside and outside with their
quasi-Puritan figurations. In employing this mode of
representation, the foreign policy texts of the postwar period
recalled the seventeenth-century literary genre of the jeremiad, or
political sermon, in which Puritan preachers combined searing
critiques with appeals for spiritual renewal. Later to establish
the interpretive framework for national identity, these
exhortations drew on a European tradition of preaching the
omnipresence of sin so as to instill the desire for order but they
added a distinctly affirmative moment: The American Puritan
jeremiad was the ritual of a culture on an errand - which is to
say, a culture based on a faith in process. Substituting teleology
for hierarchy, it discarded the Old War ideal of stasis for a New
World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of
anxiety that helped release the restless "progressivist" energies
required for the success of the venture. The European jeremiad
thrived on anxiety, of course. Like all "Traditionalist" forms of
ritual, it used fear and trembling to teach acceptance of fixed
social norms. But the American jeremiad went much further. It made
anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it
sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand after all, implied
a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was
never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide
the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Whereas the
Puritan jeremiads were preached b y religious figures in public,
the national security planners entreated in private the urgency of
the manifold dangers confronting the republic. But the refrains of
their political sermons have occupied a prominent place in postwar
political discourse. On two separate occasions (first in 1950, and
t hen in 196), private citizens with close ties to the foreign
policy bureaucracy established a "Committee on the Present Danger"
to alert a public they perceived as lacking resolve and will to
necessity of confronting the political and military threat of
communism and the Society Union. More recently, with Pentagon
planners concerned about the "guerillas, assassins, terrorists, and
subversives" said to be "nibbling away" at the United States,
proclamations that the fundamental values of the country are under
threat have been no less insistent. As Oliver North announced to
the U.S. Congress: "It is very important for the American people to
know that this is a dangerous world; that we live at risk and that
this nation is at risk in a dangerous world." And in a State
Department report, the 1990s were foreshadowed as an era in which
divergent political critiques nonetheless would seek equally to
overcome the "corruption" and "profligacy" induced by the "loss" of
"American purpose" in Vietnam the "moral renewal." To this end, the
rendering of Operation Desert Shield-turn-Storm as an overwhelming
exhibition of America's rediscovered mission stands as testament.
The cold war, then , was both a struggle that exceeded the military
threat of the Soviet Union and a struggle into which any number of
potential candidates, regardless of their strategic capacity, were
slotted as a threat. In this sense, the collapse, overcoming, or
surrender of one of the protagonists at this historical junction
does not mean "it" is over. The cold war's meaning will undoubtedly
change, but if we recall that the phrase cold war was coined by a
fourteenth century Spanish writer to represent the persistent
rivalry between Christians and Arabs, we come to recognize that the
sort of struggle the phrase demotes is a struggle over identity: a
struggle that is no context-specific and thus not rooted in the
existence of a particular kind of Soviet Union. Besides, the United
States-led war against Iraq should caution us to the fact that the
Western (and particularly American) interpretive dispositions that
predominated in the post-World War II international environment -
with their zero-sum analyses of international action, the sense of
endangerment ascribed to all the activities of the other, the fear
of internal challenge and subversion, the tendency to militarize
all response, and the willingness to draw the lines of
superiority/inferiority between us and them - were not specific to
one state or ideology. As a consequence, we need to rethink the
convention understanding of foreign policy, and the historicity of
the cold war in particular.
HumanitarianismHumanitarianism used by the aff has become
synonymous with military actions and must be questionedDillon &
Reid 2000(Michael, Julian, researches politics, security and war
& PhD in Politics, Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and
Complex Emergency Sage Publications, Jan 2000,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644986)//ATLiberal humanitarians
have, for example, become politicized, geopolitically ambitious,
and sometimes warlike in pursuit of lib- eral peace. They have also
found themselves in alliance with the institutions of international
political economy and governance as well as with branches of the
military. Increasingly, the policies and practices of "political
conditionally" are also suborning them. Deals and contracts have
inevitably to be struck with local political groupings in order
that aid might be delivered to the needful in areas of political
turbulence. Political conditionality is, however, more than this
local pragmatism. At a policy level, it refers to the ways in which
government and international-aid agencies are in- creasingly making
the delivery of aid conditional on the recipients meeting the good
governance criteria that global liberal politics specifies for
them. At a local level, it means calibrating the deliv- ery of aid
to effect the internal politics and maneuvering of war- ring groups
so that political settlements sought by international coalitions -
such as the one, for example, that currently manages Bosnia - might
be secured. In order both for policy-level practices and local
political arm twisting to work, governments and inter- national
organizations must secure the compliance of the large number of
nongovernmental organizations that populate the zones of "complex
emergency." These of course provide many sig- nificant conduits for
aid. The vast majority of them are, however, effectively the
subcontractors of governmental organizations and of international
agencies. Their prized independence is problem- atic, and their
classification as nongovernmental is sometimes equally so.
Effecting political conditionality requires their participation. To
the extent, however, that they comply - and their very capacity to
resource themselves and operate may be intimately de- pendent upon
their good standing with these governmental and international
agencies - their "impartiality" and humanitarian ideals are
compromised. In such circumstances, they run the deadly risk of
becoming identified as active participants in conflicts rather than
impartial ministers to the needy and afflicted that are created by
them. But many NGOs are not mere passive victims of this develop-
ment, as it were, squeezed by the demands of political condition-
ality. They themselves also actively promote political
conditionally inasmuch as they, too, pursue a liberal agenda of
promoting human rights, accountability, and the formations and
practices of civil society. In this, then, they are willing allies
of political condi- tionality rather than suborned humanitarians.
The distinction between the political and the humanitarian that has
created the space for humanitarian action is often thus conflated
by the actions and ambitions of NGOs as much as it is by the
good-governance policies and political conditionality pursued by
governments. Needless to add, the distinction between civil and
military that helps underwrite the category humanitarian is one
that has also been conflated by the theory and practice of modern
war. Much is made of the ways in which the insurgency and coun-
terinsurgency conflicts and ethnic violence of the developing world
do this. But the process began in the developed world - with the
introduction, for example, of total war, strategic bombing, the
deployment of weapons of mass destruction, and the adoption of
(nuclear) deterrent strategies. Some of these continue to deter-
mine the formulation of official defense and strategic policies
there. In sum, bipolarity once allowed subscription to the liberal
dis- tinctions of civil/military, humanitarian/political, and
governmental/nongovernmental to effect a "humanitarian" position
that eschewed the political realism of the ideological conflict of
the Cold War. Humanitarianism claimed then to be a space that was
itself a kind of zone of indistinction. That is to say, here relief
was on offer irrespective of religious, political, or other
distinctions. The advent of global liberal governance now
represents the official propagation, however, of such distinctions,
together with their al- lied governmental practices and
institutions. These have become one of the principle means by which
global power currently cir- culates and operates. In doing so,
global liberal governance quite literally threatens nongovernmental
and humanitarian agencies with recruitment into the very structures
and practices of power against which they previously defined
themselves. Where once they practiced and enjoyed the space
afforded by the claim that they were without power - specifically,
power politics - it is evident now that they are not. Major
nongovernmental humanitarian relief and development agencies are
often also structured more like and operate more like multinational
corporations than voluntary workers. Their spokesmen and women act
and sound like the se- nior international diplomats and
policymakers that they are. As hu- manitarian NGOs increasingly
devote themselves to the promotion of liberal governmental policies
- for example those of trans- parency and accountability - they,
too, have to meet penetrating questions about the legitimacy,
accountability, and transparency of their own practices. Doing
good, especially by insisting on follow- ing the Hippocratic
injunction to do no harm - the classic gov- ernmental maneuver of
effecting power by denying one's own po- liticality - is a fiction
now increasingly difficult to sustain in the context of global
liberal governance. TerrorismTerrorism discourse masks state
violence and represents the legitimation of the international
security crisis.Der Derian 1995 (James Der Derian, Director of the
Global Security Program and Research Professor of International
Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown
University, Arms, Hostages, and the Importance of Shredding in
Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture)Just as Nietzsche
alleged the precession of meaning to facts, North-the factotum of
terror and counter-terror-preceded the factoids of terrorism. To be
sure, there are some commonly accepted "facts" about international
terrorism. A selection of Rand corporation documents on
international terrorism reveals the following: over the last ten
years terrorists have seized over fifty embassies and consulates,
held the oil ministers of eleven states hostage; kidnapped hundreds
of diplomats, businessmen and journalists; made several hundred
million dollars in ransom money; assassinated Lord Mountbatten and
President Sadat and the former premier of Italy, attempted to
assassinate the president of France, the Pope, and Alexander Haig
(a near miss with a rocket launcher when he was supreme allied
commander of NATO). Terrorist incidents and their severity have
increased over the last ten years, but most terrorist actions
involve few or no casualties: they are symbolic acts of violence.
Compared to the ruthlessness and destructiveness of states, or even
to natural disasters, terrorism is a mere nuisance. Yet it is cause
for crises of state, media spasms on a seismic scale, and the
hyper-production of institutes, conferences, and books on
terrorism. Why is this? International terrorism does represent a
crisis, but not in terms of body-counts or a revolutionary threat
to the states-system. On a political level, the simulacrum of
terrorism, that is, the production of a hyperreal threat of
violence, anticipates a crisis of legitimation.9 What this means is
that international terrorism is not a symptom or a cause or an
effect of this systemic crisis: it has become a spectacular,
micro-cosmic simulation. International terrorism simulates a
legitimating crisis of the international order; conversely,
counter-terrorism is a counter-simulation, an attempt to engender a
new disciplinary order which can save the dominant legitimacy
principle of international relations.10O n a representational
level, the spectacle of terrorism displace-and distracts us
from-the signs of a pervading international disorder. As a result,
much of what is read and written of terrorism displays a
superficiality of reasoning and a corruption of language which
effects truths about terrorism without any sense of how these
truths are produced by, and help to sustain official discourses of
international relations. This was repeatedly evidenced by the
proceedings and documents of the Iran-contra hearings, in which our
reason of state was exposed as ideological expediency and redressed
as principled policy. If the reader of terrorism is to break out of
the dominant cultural economy, in which each of us acts as a
factotum of factoids, that is, a transmitter of official truths,
then some critical interpretive skills must be deployed. Along with
an empirical study of the salient sources of disorder around us, we
need a genealogy of our knowledge of international terrorism and
legitimacy, of how consumers in this cultural economy arrive at
some shared assumptions about the exchange-value of both. One goal,
then, of a cultural reading is to reach a better under-standing of
whether these assumptions or constructions of terrorism and
legitimation serve to preserve principles and practices beneficial
to the international order, or whether they forestall the knowledge
necessary to deal effectively with an increasing fragmentation, a
diffusion of power, and a sustained challenge to the sovereign
state's once-natural monopoly of force: in short, the
neo-medievalism alluded to earlier.
Threats cannot be calculated objectively or holistically threats
are based upon arbitrary calculations of danger. The risk of
terrorism is based upon false calculations its occurrence is
minimal. Campbell 92[David: Australian political scientist, written
four books, PhD from Australian National University, and has been a
professor at several universities. Writing Security University of
Minnesota Press Minneapolis p. 2]This understanding of the
necessarily interpretive basis of risk has important implications
for international relations. It does not deny that there are 'real'
dangers in the world: infectious diseases, accidents, and political
violence (among other factors) have consequences that can literally
be understood in terms of life and death. But not all risks are
equal, and not all risks are interpreted as dangers. Modern society
contains within it a veritable cornucopia of danger; indeed, there
is such an abundance of risk that it is impossible to objectively
know all that threatens us.3 Those events or factors which we
identify as dangerous therefore come to be ascribed as such only
through an interpretation of their various dimensions of
dangerousness. Moreover, that process of interpretation does not
depend upon the incidence of 'objective' factors for its veracity.
For example, HIV infection is considered by many to be America's
major public health issue, yet pneumonia and influenza, diabetes,
suicide, and chronic liver disease were all (in 1987) individually
responsible for many more deaths.4 Equally, an interpretation of
danger has licensed a 'war on (illegal) drugs' in the United States
despite the fact that both the consumption level of, and the number
of deaths which result from, licit drugs exceeds by a considerable
order of magnitude that associated with illicit drugs. And
'terrorism' is often cited as a major threat to national security
even though its occurrence within the United States is minimal
(seven incidents without fatalities in 1985 according to the FBI)
and its contribution to international carnage minor
WarThe affirmatives description of war as an ever-present threat
fosters a crisis-based politics that actively creates an unethical
relationship with militarism that creates error replication which
makes violence inevitable.Cuomo 96(CHRIS J. CUOMO is assistant
professor of philosophy and womens studies at the University of
Cincinnati. She teaches courses in ethics, feminist philosophy,
social and political philosophy, environmental ethics, and lesbian
and gay studies, fall 1996)Theory that does not investigate or even
notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address
the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on
women. on people living in occupied territories. on members of
military institutions. and on the environment. These effects are
relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military
practices and institutions help construct aendered and national
identity. and because the.- justify the destruction of natural
nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of
attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing
military violence in an extremely technologized world results in
theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant
presence of militarism, declared wars. and other closely related
social phenomena. such as nationalistic glorifications of
motherhood. media violence. and current ideological gravitations to
military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do
not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are
woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century
technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses.
For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create
alternative social and political options. crisis- based ethics and
politics are problematic because they distract attention from the
need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed. omnipresent systems
of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in
most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism
allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed
conflicts is peace. the polar opposite of war. It is particularly
easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege.
and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism. to
maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an
ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict. creates
forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in
crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the
"real" violence finally occurs. or when the stability of privilege
is directly threatened. and at that point it is difficult not to
respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political
priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might
actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the
General presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily
embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact
that horrific. state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all
over, all of the time. and that it is perpetrated by military
institutions and other militaristic agents of the state.
Warming
Global Warming is not currently a securitized threat; however
the 1AC speech act causes the securitization of warmingBuzan &
Waever 10(Barry, Ole, Regions and Powers: The Structure of
International Security Cambridge, p.465-466, April 2010,
http://blogriobranco.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/buzan.pdf)
//ACTGlobal warming It is an illusion (a nice sounding but
ultimately false slogan) that environmental problems generally are
global, that they show the limits of the nation-state because they
respect no frontiers. Most environmental problems are heavily
shaped by geography, and are often local (e.g., a polluted lake,
river, or piece of land) or at most regional (air pollution
drifting across borders but not across the globe). A few very
high-profile cases of securitised environmental issues are global
or at least transregional: the depletion of the ozone layer and
global warming (climate change). These are global in the sense that
they are responded to by negotiations among all states where all
become more or less dependent on each other. In another sense,
global warming is interesting for producing distinct subgroups with
shared interests and mutual dependence but along non-regional lines
(yet shaped by geography): e.g., AOSIS, the Alliance of Small
Island States, is a group of states with shared interests they
would more or less disappear with rising sea levels, but they are
spread across the globe. As yet, however, and despite considerable
help from Hollywood, global warming and other global environmental
threats (such as asteroids and comets crashing into the earth) have
not been successfully securitised. They are certainly on the
political agenda, but are not yet widely seen as first-priority
existential threats demanding emergency action. Transnational
organised crime Although transnational drugs mafias have a long
history, organised crime has in recent years taken increasingly
international shape. Much of this is regional because it takes a
network character, andmuchof its business is land-based, such as
smuggling drugs, people, or arms across borders, and therefore
distance matters this is ceteris paribus easier over short than
long distances. Accordingly, right after the fall of communism, the
Russian mafia started challenging the Italian in much of Europe,
only to be followed by Albanians stronger on the crucial capital in
this business: ruthlessness. A decade later, however, the scene is
gradually shifting from a regional set-up to an increasingly global
one, where the Japanese and Chinese organisations penetrate Europe,
and various kinds of smuggling (of drugs, migrants, women, guns)
and money laundering take on a more global scale. Transnational
crime is substantially deterritorialised but, although it has
achieved standing as a political issue, it is not yet generally
securitised (Shelley 1995; Viano 1999; Mandel 1999; Williams 2001)
in this global respect. In analyses of particularly troubled
(sub)regions like the Andean and the Balkans, it has become
increasingly common to point to organised crime as a key security
problem (Corpora 2002; Hansen 2002), but then again it is on a
(sub)regional scale, not global. ImpactsViolenceSecuritization
creates all possibility for violenceFriis 2000(Karaten, UN Sector
at Norweigan Intitute of International Affairs, Peace and Conflict
Studies, From Liminars to Others: Securitization Through Myths,
http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=2) //ACT The
problem with societal securitization is one of representation. It
is rarely clear in advance who it is that speaks for a community.
There is no system of representation as in a state. Since
literately anyone can stand up as representatives, there is room
for entrepreneurs. It is not surprising if we experience a struggle
between different representatives and also their different
representations of the society. What they do share, however, is a
conviction that they are best at providing (a new) order. If they
can do this convincingly, they gain legitimacy. What must be done
is to make the uncertain certain and make the unknown an object of
knowledge. To present a discernable Other is a way of doing this.
The Other is represented as an Other -- as an unified single actor
with a similar unquestionable set of core values (i.e. the capital
O). They are objectified, made into an object of knowledge, by
re-presentation of their identity and values. In other words, the
representation of the Other is depoliticized in the sense that its
inner qualities are treated as given and non-negotiable. In Jef
Huysmans (1998:241) words, there is both a need for a mediation of
chaos as well as of threat. A mediation of chaos is more basic than
a mediation of threat, as it implies making chaos into a meaningful
order by a convincing representation of the Self and its
surroundings. It is a mediation of ontological security, which
means ...a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity ... by
fixing social relations into a symbolic and institutional order
(Huysmans 1998:242). As he and others (like Hansen 1998:240) have
pointed out, the importance of a threat construction for political
identification, is often overstated. The mediation of chaos, of
being the provider of order in general, is just as important. This
may imply naming an Other but not necessarily as a threat. Such a
dichotomization implies a necessity to get rid of all the liminars
(what Huysmans calls strangers). This is because they ...connote a
challenge to categorizing practices through the impossibility of
being categorized, and does not threaten the community, ...but the
possibility of ordering itself (Huysmans 1998:241). They are a
challenge to the entrepreneur by their very existence. They confuse
the dichotomy of Self and Other and thereby the entrepreneurs
mediation of chaos. As mentioned, a liminar can for instance be
people of mixed ethnical ancestry but also representations of
competing world-pictures. As Eide (1998:76) notes: Over and over
again we see that the liberals within a group undergoing a
mobilisation process for group conflict are the first ones to go.
The liminars threaten the ontological order of the entrepreneur by
challenging his representation of Self and Other and his mediation
of chaos, which ultimately undermines the legitimacy of his policy.
The liminars may be securitized by some sort of disciplination,
from suppression of cultural symbols to ethnic cleansing and
expatriation. This is a threat to the ontological order of the
entrepreneur, stemming from inside and thus repoliticizing the
inside/outside dichotomy. Therefore the liminar must disappear. It
must be made into a Self, as several minority groups throughout the
world have experienced, or it must be forced out of the territory.
A liminar may also become an Other, as its connection to the Self
is cut and their former common culture is renounced and made
insignificant. In Anne Nortons (1988:55) words, The presence of
difference in the ambiguous other leads to its classification as
wholly unlike and identifies it unqualifiedly with the archetypal
other, denying the resemblance to the self. Then the liminar is no
longer an ontological danger (chaos), but what Huysmans (1998:242)
calls a mediation of daily security. This is not challenging the
order or the system as such but has become a visible, clear-cut
Other. In places like Bosnia, this naming and replacement of an
Other, has been regarded by the securitizing actors as the solution
to the ontological problem they have posed. Securitization was not
considered a political move, in the sense that there were any
choices. It was a necessity: Securitization was a solution based on
a depoliticized ontology.10 This way the world-picture of the
securitizing actor is not only a representation but also made into
reality. The mythical second-order language is made into
first-order language, and its innocent reality is forced upon the
world. To the entrepreneurs and other actors involved it has become
a natural necessity with a need to make order, even if it implies
making the world match the map. Maybe that is why war against
liminars are so often total; it attempts a total expatriation or a
total solution (like the Holocaust) and not only a victory on the
battlefield. If the enemy is not even considered a legitimate
Other, the door may be more open to a kind of violence that is way
beyond any war conventions, any jus in bello. This way,
securitizing is legitimized: The entrepreneur has succeeded both in
launching his world-view and in prescribing the necessary measures
taken against it. This is possible by using the myths, by speaking
on behalf of the natural and eternal, where truth is never
questioned.
EnvironmentSecurity causes environmental destructionChernus
86(Ira, professor of religious studies at Univeristy of Colorado,
Dr. Strangegod; on the symbolic meaning of nuclear weapons 1986)
//ACTWe lose the subtleties and nuances of human complexity and see
the world in absolutes, "us versus them." We view human
relationships in terms of the mythic, apocalyptic vision, a vision
whose ultimate promise is the annihilation of "their" machine and
unlimited license for "our" machine to do whatever it wants. In
fact, the ultimate goal of machine people is always to have total
dominance, unlimited autonomy to manipulate the environmentboth
human and naturalin endless technological ways. Thus the machine
God also shapes our relationship with our physical and material
environment, leading us to the environmental crisis that we now
face. Again, the fouling of the air, water, and land was hardly
begun in the nuclear age, but the symbolism of the Bomb makes it
much more difficult to escape from this predicament too. Behind our
callousness toward the natural realm there is not only a desire for
quick and easy profit, but a more fundamental view of ourselves as
radically separated from nature. In the battle of the machines to
dominate the elements, we are clearly on the side of the machineswe
are the machinesand this battle is seen in radically dualistic,
even apocalyptic, terms. Thus, having no meaningful relationship
with nature, we are free, perhaps even compelled, to manipulate it
endlessly. The transformation of raw materials into manufactured
goods thus becomes our primary goal and value; if the Bomb is God,
then t