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Economic threat predictions will cause the US to manipulate regimes in a non-democratic fashion---link turns the whole case and empirically kills millionsNeocleous, 8 [Mark Neocleous, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, Critique of Security, p95-]

In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all – its economic strength – in order to re-order the world . And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of ‘economic security’.99 Despite the fact that ‘econ omic security’ would never be formally defined beyond ‘economic order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual con sistency between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By playing on notions of ‘economic well-being’, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus‘human’ needs over military ones. The reshaping of global capital , international order and the exercise of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and ‘humanitarian’ . This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal freedom’ and‘social equality’.101 Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102 In the second half of the twentieth century this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest heavily on the logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security. The whole worldbecame a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of security. In the space of fifteen years the concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the globe . Global order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of capitalaccumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also‘secured’ everywhere. Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘ intervention’, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy . Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes the moment of violence . This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong side of history’.104 ‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent commented in 1991,‘there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’ , adding that ‘every covert operation has been

rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’ . 105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have varied : most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security – ‘making the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing ; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA ’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials ; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups , counterinsurgency agencies, death squads . Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties have been co- opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory ‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole world was to be included in the new‘secure’ global liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure . Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘ economic order’ . The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111

Their reliance on economic rationality presupposes a neoliberal form of subjectivity that they superimpose upon the world in order to justify mass violence and homogenization. This also makes transition wars and economic collapse inevitable, as it fails to understand how the crucial problem today is one of symbolic exchange. Against this, we should withdraw from necronomics.Bifo 11 – (Franco, “After the Future,” ed. Genesko & Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-7)//Loyola

More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July 18th 2009 the headline of The Economist read: “What went wrong with economics?” The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth , profit and competition cannot be questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an obsession that has nothing to do with science. It’s a political strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines, aimed to shape behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and the conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the anthropological brand of homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published with the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to identify human beings with calculating devices has produced cultural devastation , and has finally been showed to have been based upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational , because the value of goods is not determined by objective reasons , and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. “We will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature,” say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book Animal Spirits, echoing Keynes’s assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is of radical enough, and does not touch the legitimacy of the economic episteme. Animal Spirits is the title of an other book, by Matteo Pasquinelli (2008). Pasquinelli’s book deals with bodies and digits, and parasites, and goes much deeper in its understanding of the roots of the crisis than its eponymous publication: “Cognitive capitalism emerges in the form of a parasite: it subjects social knowledge and inhibits its emancipatory potential” (Pasquinelli 2008: 93). “Beyond the computer screen, precarious workers and freelancers experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly devouring their everyday life ” (Pasquinelli 2008: 15). Pasquinelli goes to the core of the problem: the virtualization of social production has acted as the proliferation of a parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships, absorbing and neutralizing the living energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only the effect of financial craziness, but also the effect of the de-vitalization of the social field . This is why the collapse of the economic system is also the collapse of economic epistemology that has guided the direction of politics in the last two centuries. Economics cannot understand the depth of the crisis, because below the crisis of financial exchange there is the crisis of symbolic exchange . I mean the psychotic boom of panic, depression, and suicide, the general decline of desire and social empathy . The question that rises from the collapse is so radical that the answer cannot be found in the economic conceptual framework. Furthermore, one must ask if economics really is a science? If the word “science” means the creation of concepts for the understanding and description of an object, economics is not a science . Its object does not exist. The economic object (scarcity, salaried labor, and profit) is not an object that exists before and outside the performative action of the economic episteme. Production, consumption, and daily life become part of the economic discourse when labor is detached and opposed to human activity, when it falls under the domination of capitalist rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual activity, and economic description is in fact a normative action. In this sense Economics is a technique, a process of semiotization of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics is a suggestion and a categorical imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it. Everything within us would like to say that it does not, that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is denied the more it shows itself as Almighty. Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared, giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance…. Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses. (Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England the economic process has been a process of production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far

had been able to cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians, then salaried industrial workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic science is essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food . Inside the condition of scarcity human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who don’t have property other than their own life and body, to lend their life-time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing, implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy. The technique of economic scarcification is based on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods , the Economic concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property , as you read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption . An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that someone else eats your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost ? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private property loses its ground , its raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force . Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to determine price and salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation of the market, first of all the labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated. The mythology of free individuals loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie, too. Real human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle. Economic exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in social life in general . Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the theory, neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die soon. You don’t need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be motivated to kill me overnight. The talk of recovery is based on

necronomy , the economy of death . It’s not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides. But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of spectacular accumulation. Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror , the substitution of present life with future money that will never come, because death will come before . The lesson that we must learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: “the most perfect crime of all – when the victims are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims”. Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion , but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared the basic standard of decision, and the economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.

This manifests itself in a drive for certainty which causes endless violenceBurke, 7 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales at Sydney, Anthony, Johns Hopkins University Press, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Project 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.' 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. This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror' Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that

obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth . 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? 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.

The alternative is to deterritorialize the 1AC through a historical and critical lens – rather than objectively approaching their threat discourse, we choose more diverse forms of analysisKrause and Williams 97 (Keith Krause, professor of political science at the Graduate Institute on International and Development Studies, Michael C Williams, professor of international relations at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, “From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies,” chapter 2 of Critical Security Studies, p 49-50)

The challenges to the conventional understanding of security and the object to be secured also necessitate an epistemological shift in the way security is to be understood and studied. What is involved is a shift in focus from abstract individualism and contractual sovereignty to a stress on culture, civilization, and identity; the role of ideas, norms, and values in the constitution of that which is to be secured; and the historical context within which this process takes place. Epistemologically, this involves moving away from the objectivist, rationalist approach of both neorealism and neoliberalism, and toward more interpretive modes of analysis. While these issues have gained some prominence in debates over the nature of regime theory and the study of international organizations, they have made little impact on security studies.51 This is clearly illustrated by Helga Haftendorn’s attempts to broaden the ambit of security studies. On method, she concludes that the goal of security studies is “to construct an empirically testable paradigm,” which involves defining the “set of observational hypotheses,” the “hard core of irrefutable assumptions,” and the “‘set of scope conditions’ that…are required for a ‘progressive’ research program.” Although she admits that “we might do well to follow [Robert] Keohane’s counsel to apply somewhat ‘softer,’ more interpretive standards,” there is little room in this approach for studying norm change and the role of ideational elements in constituting the historical context within which actors take specific decisions.52 Despite Haftendorn’s goal of incorporating new issues that are normatively driven, the subordination of normative and reflexive conceptions of agency to objectivist visions of method remains largely undisturbed, and she remains committed to the fact value distinction. To understand security from a broader perspective means to look at the ways in which the objects to be secured, the perceptions of threats to them, and the available means of securing them (both intellectual and material) have shifted over time .53 New threats emerge ; new enemies are created ; erstwhile fellow citizens become objects of hatred and violence; former enemies can be transformed into members of the same community. The status of Others is uncertain , needing to be deciphered and determined.54 To comprehend these processes requires an understanding of the problematics of security as constituted by self-reflexive historical practices . The knightly code of honor, for example, was both a central structuring practice of latemedieval conflict and a central object that was to be secured. Honor was an integral part of conflict in its genesis as well as its practice. To view the military conflict of the late-medieval world as a competition between instrumentally rational actors in the modern sense is to misunderstand it in both form and content.55 The shift to interpretive models of understanding (broadly conceived) also yields a different vision of the transformation of practices. As historically grounded, the practices of security become capable of conscious transformation through the process of critical reflection. No longer objective in the sense of a fixed reality that the analyst can only mirror, reality as the realm of subjective practices

and structures becomes self-reflexive . This is most emphatically not to say that security studies needs to move away from studying the role of ideas, institutions, and instruments of organized violence in political life. In this respect, the continuing defenders of traditional strategic/security studies are correct (although this formulation will probably leave them uncomfortable). But if we are to understand these realities, we must take them more seriously than the abstractions of neorealism allow. We must grasp the genesis and structure of particular security problems as grounded in concrete historical conditions and practices, rather than in abstract assertions of transcendental rational actors and scientific methods. We must understand the genesis of conflicts and the creation of the dilemmas of security as grounded in reflexive practices rather than as the outcome of timeless structures.56

Every affirmation is fundamentally a decision and an affirmation of a particular interpretation of what it means to decide – their attempt to elevate their particular method of decision to the status of metaphysics links to all of our offense and begs the question of their justification for exclusionDillon 99 (Michael Dillon, professor of international relations at the University of Lancaster, PhD in philosophy, April 1999, “Another Justice,” published in Political Theory Volume 27 Number 2, page 157-8)I wish to argue, in addition, that the condition of being-in-between is exemplified by the 'inter' of another international relations. Especially in the proximity of the Refugee, for example, there is an explicit manifestation of the advent of the claim of Justice. The traditional intersubjectivity of international relations defaults, through the way in which the advent of the Refugee always calls to presence the stranger in the self itself, into the intra of a plural and divided self. The figure of the sovereign subject so integral to traditional international thought falsely poses the key questions of the self, of origination and of Justice. There can be no sovereign point of departure . The law is always born from a broken law , justice from the absence of Justice. There is always a co-presence of the other in the same ; such that every self is a hybrid. The origin, if it is to issue forth in anything, therefore, must always already come divided and incomplete. The advent of Justice and the possibility of politics arise only because that plethos is ineradicable. There is then no sovereign subject . The self is a divided self from a beginning that is itself incomplete. It is only by virtue of that very division, that very incompleteness, that the question of justice arises at all. Thought of another Justice is therefore a continuous displacement of normal justice, a radical discomfort to it. But I have first to note how normal justice understands its place before considering the taking place of Justice differently. At its simplest the normal model of justice-sometimes known as the distributive model-notes that any society is governed by rules.9 Normal models differ, however, according to how they account for the derivation of those rules, what those rules define as just and unjust, and who or what is empowered by them to make, execute, and interpret the law. The most basic of these rules establish the status and entitlements of those who belong to the community . Correspondingly, these rules also specify who is a stranger, outsider, or alien, and they sometimes make provision for how the alien is to be dealt with should she or he appear at, or cross, the threshold of the community. This, in its crudest terms, is distributive justice. The laws , which it specifies, establish a regime of justice that expresses the ethical beliefs and commitments of that community . More than that, they inaugurate them. Each juridical decision is in some way, great or small, a communal rededication of those beliefs . The law , then, does not merely make a decision or enact a will. It reinaugurates a sense of what it is to have a will and make a decision in that community, as well as to what ends and purposes these may be devoted.10 Such law has to come from somewhere. An official narrative of one form or another supports how the community came to have the law which it does , together with the means and manner by which it is to be interpreted and exercised. That narrative explains both the origins of the law and the way in which it has been handed down. God and covenants, immemorial traditions and social contracts are amongst the most favoured of these. Divine inspiration, the dictates of reason, or a common sense are then said to furnish the law with the secure foundation it is thought to require. Injustice for the normal model, it further follows, is a function of sin, or the breakdown of reason, or the failure to attend to the dictates of common sense. One way or another, each of these ruptures tends to be blamed upon the irruption of irregular passions and desires which the law was inaugurated to limit and control as the means of determining and dispensing justice in the first place. Injustice for the normal model, in short, is the abnormal which effects a breach in the very paternity of the law itself. It is what the normal model claims to keep at bay as distributive justice orders the affairs of the community. All thought of justice and politics must , of course, pass through thought . How could it be otherwise? We think justice in the way that we do because of the various forms through which

it is established and distributed. We also think justice in the way that we do because of the way that we think. The thought of another Justice is necessarily dependent therefore upon a way of thinking other than that which has historically come to govern our diverse onto-theological traditions of justice . That other way of thinking has continuously to be contrasted with the thought that underlies distributive justice, so that the characteristic features of another Justice may be differentiated from those of the normal model. Two of the key points of difference concern the interpretation of Time and the interpretation of the Human. Each of these derives from what I call the return of the ontological in continental thought.

OffA. Interpretation – “economic engagement” means the aff must be an exclusively economic action – it cannot encompass broader forms of engagementJakstaite, 10 - Doctoral Candidate Vytautas Magnus University Faculty of Political Sciences and Diplomacy (Lithuania) (Gerda, “Containment and Engagement as Middle-Range Theories” Baltic Journal of Law & Politics Volume 3, Number 2 (2010), DOI: 10.2478/V10076-010-0015-7)The approach to engagement as economic engagement focuses exclusively on economic instruments of foreign policy with the main national interest being security. Economic engagement is a policy of the conscious development of economic relations with the adversary in order t o change the target state ‟ s behaviour and to improve bilateral relations

That means trade and aid in the form of loans or grantsResnick, 1 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University (Evan, Journal of International Affairs, “Defining Engagement” Vol. 54 No. 2, Political Science Complete)A REFINED DEFINITION OF ENGAGEMENTIn order to establish a more effective framework for dealing with unsavory regimes, I propose that we define engagement as the attempt to influence the political behavior of a target state through the comprehensive establishment and enhancement of contacts with that state across multiple issue-areas (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, cultural). The following is a brief list of the specific forms that such contacts might include:DIPLOMATIC CONTACTSExtension of diplomatic recognition; normalization of diplomatic relationsPromotion of target-state membership in international institutions and regimesSummit meetings and other visits by the head of state and other senior government officials of sender state to target state and vice-versaMILITARY CONTACTSVisits of senior military officials of the sender state to the target state and vice-versaArms transfersMilitary aid and cooperationMilitary exchange and training programsConfidence and security-building measuresIntelligence sharingECONOMIC CONTACTSTrade agreements and promotion Foreign economic and humanitarian aid in the form of loans and/or grants CULTURAL CONTACTSCultural treatiesInauguration of travel and tourism linksSport, artistic and academic exchanges(n25)

B. Violation – the affirmative _____, which is not an exclusively economic instrument

C. Vote negative1. Predictable limits – blurring the lines between economic and other forms of engagement makes any positive interaction with another country topical – becomes impossible for the neg to predict or prepare

2. Equitable ground – the economic limit is vital to critiques of economics, trade disads, and non-economic counterplans

Economy

No impact to the economyThomas P.M. Barnett (senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a contributing editor/online columnist for Esquire magazine) August 2009 “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis” http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspxWhen the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession . Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: * No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); * The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); * Not a single state- on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered ); * No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); * A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and * No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic

crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such " diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.

Royal votes neg – the next page says decline disincentives saber rattlingRoyal, their author, 10—director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense (Jedediah, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, published in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 217, google books)

There is, however, another trend at play. Economic crises tend to fragment regimes and divide polities. A decrease in cohesion at the political leadership level and at the electorate level reduces the ability of the state to coalesce a sufficiently strong political base required to undertake costly balancing measures such as economic costly signals. Schweller (2006) builds on earlier studies (sec, e.g., Christensen, 1996; Snyder, 2000) that link political fragmentation with decisions not to balance against rising threats or to balance only in minimal and ineffective ways to demonstrate a tendency for states to 'underbalance'. Where political and social cohesion is strong, states are more likely to balance against rising threats in effective and costly ways. However, 'unstable and fragmented regimes that rule over divided polities will be significantly constrained in their ability to adapt to systemic incentives; they will be least likely to enact bold and costly policies even when their nation's survival is at stake and they are needed most' (Schweller, 2006, p. 130).

No risk of cyberattacks – no empirics, and their evidence is alarmist fearmongering based on inaccurate corporate reportsRid 13 (Thomas, reader in war studies at King's College London, author of "Cyber War Will Not Take Place," "The Great Cyberscare," 3/13/13, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/13/the_great_cyberscare slim_)The White House likes a bit of threat. In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama wanted to nudge Congress yet again into passing meaningful legislation. The president emphasized that America's enemies are "seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems." After two failed attempts to pass a cybersecurity act in the past two years, he added swiftly: "We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy." Fair enough. A bit of threat to prompt needed action is one thing. Fear- mongering is something else: counterproductive . Yet too many a participant in the cybersecurity debate reckons that puffery pays off. The Pentagon, no doubt, is the master of razzmatazz. Leon Panetta set the tone by warning again and again of an impending " cyber Pearl Harbor ." Just before he left the Pentagon, the Defense Science Board delivered a remarkable report, Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat. The paper seemed obsessed with making yet more drastic historical comparisons: "The cyber threat is serious," the task force wrote, "with potential consequences similar to the nuclear threat of the Cold War." The manifestations of an all-out nuclear war would be different from cyberattack, the Pentagon scientists helpfully acknowledged. But then they added, gravely, that "in the end, the existential impact on the United States is the same." A reminder is in order: The world has yet to witness a single casualty, let alone fatality, as a result of a computer attack . Such statements are a plain insult to survivors of Hiroshima. Some sections of the Pentagon document offer such eye-wateringly shoddy analysis that they would not have passed as an MA dissertation in a self-respecting political science department. But in the current debate it seemed to make sense. After all a bit of fear helps to claim -- or keep -- scarce resources when austerity and cutting seems out-of-control . The report recommended allocating the stout

sum of $2.5 billion for its top two priorities alone, protecting nuclear weapons against cyberattacks and determining the mix of weapons necessary to punish all-out cyber-aggressors. Then there are private computer security companies . Such firms, naturally, are keen to pocket some of the government 's money earmarked for cybersecurity . And hype is the means to that end . Mandiant's much-noted report linking a coordinated and coherent campaign of espionage attacks dubbed Advanced Persistent Threat 1, or "APT1," to a unit of the Chinese military is a case in point: The firm offered far more details on attributing attacks to the Chinese than the intelligence community has ever done, and the company should be commended for making the report public. But instead of using cocky and over-confident language, Mandiant's analysts should have used Words of Estimative Probability, as professional intelligence analysts would have done. An example is the report's conclusion, which describes APT1's work: "Although they control systems in dozens of countries, their attacks originate from four large networks in Shanghai -- two of which are allocated directly to the Pudong New Area," the report found. Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army is also in Pudong. Therefore, Mandiant's computer security specialists concluded, the two were identical: "Given the mission, resourcing, and location of PLA Unit 61398, we conclude that PLA Unit 61398 is APT1." But the report conspicuously does not mention that Pudong is not a small neighborhood ("right outside of Unit 61398's gates") but in fact a vast city landscape twice the size of Chicago. Mandiant's report was useful and many attacks indeed originate in China. But the company should have been more careful in its overall assessment of the available evidence , as the computer security expert Jeffrey Carr and others have pointed out. The firm made it too easy for Beijing to dismiss the report. My class in cybersecurity at King's College London started poking holes into the report after 15 minutes of red-teaming it -- the New York Times didn't. Which leads to the next point: The media want to sell copy through threat inflation . "In Cyberspace, New Cold War," the headline writers at the Times intoned in late February. "The U.S. is not ready for a cyberwar," shrieked the Washington Post earlier this week. Instead of calling out the above-mentioned Pentagon report, the paper actually published two supportive articles on it and pointed out that a major offensive cyber capability now seemed essential "in a world awash in cyber-espionage, theft and disruption." The Post should have reminded its readers that the only military-style cyberattack that has actually created physical damage -- Stuxnet -- was actually executed by the U nited S tates government . The Times, likewise, should have asked tough questions and pointed to some of the evidential problems in the Mandiant report; instead, it published what appeared like an elegant press release for the firm. On issues of cybersecurity, the nation's fiercest watchdogs too often look like hand-tame puppies eager to lap up stories from private firms as well as anonymous sources in the security establishment.

Their understanding of development relies on Western conceptions of the North/South divide Howard, Hume, and Oslender 07 (*David Howard – PhD in Latin America Studies from the University of Oxford; he is a lecturer in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford, **Mo Hume – PhD in Latin American studies from the University of Liverpool; she is a professor of Development and Latin American Politics (Department of Politics) at the University of Glasgow, and ***Ulrich Oslender – PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Glasgow; former research fellow at the University of Glasgow in the Department of Geography, November 2007, “Violence, fear, and development in Latin America: a critical overview”, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25548278.pdf) //MD

Others, however, have criticised 'Mrs Brundtland's disenchanted cosmos' and the fact that sustainable development is still based on the capitalisation of nature , expressed through global views on nature and environment by those who rule, instead of through local respect for surrounding landscapes (Visvanathan 1991). And Sachs (1992) argues in his widely read Development Dictionary that notions of ecology are merely reduced to higher efficiency, while a development framework is still accepted as the norm. Visvanathan (1991: 384) calls for an 'explosion of imaginations' as a form of resistance to this dominant economism and essentially violent development framework: a call echoed by Peet and Watts (1996: 263-8) in their edited collection on 'liberation ecologies', which envisages 'environmental imaginaries' as primary sites of contestation, which are then articulated by social movements that contest normative visions and the 'imperialism of the imaginary'. In many ways, the very notion of development has been radically called into question , as the concept has been linked to neo-colonial intentions of the Global North to intervene in and keep control of the countries in the Global South . For Escobar (1995: 159), dominant development discourse portrays the so-called 'third world' as a space devoid of

knowledge, a 'chronic pathological condition', so that the Western scientist ‘like a good doctor, has the moral obligation to intervene in order to cure the diseased (social) body'. This intervention is always a violent one: one that ruptures the cultural fabric, penetrates the colonised body, and inserts a homogeneous developmental reasoning, often extirpating resistant cultural difference . To break this cycle of violent developmentalism, Escobar (1995) calls for an era of 'post-development' as a necessary step for national projects of decolonisation and for the affirmation of truly emancipatory political projects of self-affirmation.

Drugs

The “war on drugs” renders the US-Mexico border a space of exception where law is suspended by the sovereignParker, 11 – master’s degree in cultural and political studies from Royal Holloway, University of London, written extensively in the academic arena on geopolitics, ‘radical’ politics and protest, and mass media (Lindsay, “The Making of a Space of Exception: the War on Drugs, Agamben, and Ciudad Juarez,” Cultural Geography, August 2011, http://lindsayparkerdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/the-making-of-a-space-of-exception.pdf)//bghs-BIThe “war on drugs” was introduced into the American lexicon by Richard Nixon in 1971 (Cockburn & St. Clair 1998) as a continuation of the prohibitionist drug laws originating from 1914’s Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. The “war on drugs” was simultaneously enforced with Nixon’s “ war on crime ” that both emphasized “radical turn[s] from welfarist criminal justice approaches emphasizing rehabilitation and redistribution, towards coercive penal governance” (Corva 2008:178). Whereas a welfarist order understood illicit behaviour as symptomatic of an unjust socio-economic society and tried to rehabilitate users, the penal state adopted strict rules that would place offenders in prison for even small amounts of possession (Beckett & Sassoon 2000). Currently this “zero tolerance” policy emphasizes prohibition, halting production, distribution, and the consumption of drugs at the cost of $15 billion annually to the federal government, with state and local governments spending another $25 billion in 2010 alone (Office of National Drug Control Policy 2010). Yet the response nationally and internationally from civilians, lawyers, medical professionals, academics, and police enforcement alike is that the “war on drugs” is an overwhelming failure that has not reduced drug use, drug trafficking, or violent crime, but that has rather resulted in the growth of a multi-billion annual black market that promotes violence and results in harmful repercussions to society (Baum 1996; Bertram 1996). A major source of this violence stems from rival drug cartels throughout Central and South America fighting for trade routes and access to portals along the US/Mexican border across which they can smuggle narcotics for US consumption. The passing of NAFTA in 1994 made trafficking easier and more efficient than ever before (Andreas 1995; Campbell 2009) resulting in the competition for domination of border towns and cities, such as Ciudad Juarez, positioned a mere two miles away from the American border. This strategic location is crucial because of the United States’ insatiable demand for narcotics , especially cocaine. It is estimated that 80-90% of Central and South American cocaine ends up in the United States making border cities and towns incredibly valuable and vulnerable spaces of violent competition (United Nations 2010). As Mexico and the United States keep battling drug cartels in what seems an impossible war to win, narcotics are illegally exported into the United States where demand is still high. The war on drugs and resulting turf war in Juarez are indicative of a re-configuration of geographies of sovereignty and exceptional space along and beyond the border . Sovereign power is a key theme to Agamben’s Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Translated from “Sacred Man, “homo sacer” refers to a bare life that is stripped of all citizens” rights that can be killed by anyone without punishment. Human life becomes politicized as it becomes dominated by the sovereign’s suspension of juridical order allowing for otherwise illegal crimes to become normalized because where there is no law, nothing can be illegal. This state of exception is a “point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence” (1998: 32). This threshold is at the core of what Agamben calls the paradox of sovereignty. If sovereign powers are able to declare spaces of exception or suspend the law, they are effectively placing themselves outside of the law. In his own work Agamben uses the example of Nazi concentration camps to exercise the tangibility and physicality of a space of exception, or where juridical order has been indefinitely suspended by sovereign actors. More recently, Agamben and others have identified Guantanamo Bay as such a space (Butler 2002; Gregory 2006). In these examples the sovereign powers, though acting within or outside of the law, were state actors. Agamben’s reading of sovereignty loosely follows Westphalian tenets including the principle of the sovereignty of states and fundamental right to self-determination, the principle of international law equality between states, and the principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of another state (Lyons & Mastanduno 1995). Traditional theorizations of sovereignty stemmed from Westphalia have increasingly come under scrutiny with some even posing the end of a traditional sovereignty in the political realm (Camilleri & Falk 1992; Hardt & Negri 2000; Ward 2003). These are important in considering how ideas of sovereignty have

shifted through history and political landscapes including times of civil disobedience, terrorism, war, and globalization, which is especially intertwined (geo)politically and economically with the drug war . The drug war in Juarez is another example that is challenging traditional ideas of how sovereignty is practiced on the ground and how strict binaries of legal and illegal are being nullified and subverted as sovereign state actors are losing power to drug cartels.

This biopolitical determination of life enables mass violenceAgamben, 98 – professor of philosophy at university of Verona (Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 139-140)It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain countries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of “life devoid of value” (or “life unworthy of being lived”) corre sponds exactly —even if in an apparently different direction—to the bare life of homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every valorization and every “politicization” of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant , becomes only “sacred life,” and can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society —even the most modern— decides who its “sacred men” will be . It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceprio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now— in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty—moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being .

No risk of Mexican collapse – their authors are alarmists NAM, 11 New America Media, the country's first and largest national collaboration and advocate of 2000 ethnic news organizations, founded by the nonprofit Pacific News Service in 1996; “Mexico and the Myth of the ‘Failed State’,” 7/9/2011, http://newamericamedia.org/2011/07/mexico-and-the-myth-of-the-failed-state.php //bghs-msMERIDA, Mexico— For more than four decades, Americans have expressed alarm at what they see the imminent collapse of the Mexican government , warning their fellow citizens that Mexico is a “failed state.” But far from being a “failed state,” Mexico is proving itself to be one of the most successful countries in the world, one that has made the transition from an agrarian economy to a modern industrialized one, while moving from a closed, authoritarian regime to a vibrant democracy . Far too many Americans make the mistake of thinking Mexico as the country portrayed in the 1950s. Over the past half century, it has become one of the most important economies in the world. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the CIA World Factbook each rank Mexico as the 14th largest economy. Mexico has one of the most comprehensive social welfare programs anywhere in the hemisphere. This is a country that strives, albeit imperfectly and not always successfully, to provide for the general well-being. Yes, given its resources and its population, many people fall between the cracks. Of Mexico’s population of 110 million, some 30 million, or a little over a quarter, are living in the “informal economy,” as it is euphemistically called. For comparative purposes, 1.5 in 10 Americans rely on food stamps, and in the largest American city, New York, 1 in 4 children live below the federal poverty line. No country addresses all of the needs of its people, but Mexico is diligent in at least working towards that end. If you think that Mexico is a country with no laws or legal institutions, a kind of place reminiscent of some Hollywood movie where it’s the “Wild, Wild West,” then you are in for a surprise. Mexico is one of the most bureaucratic nations in the hemisphere—it rivals France when it comes to official paperwork! And it rivals the Scandinavian countries when it comes to its aspirations for being a “nanny state.” In fact, international agencies—from the World Bank to the International Monetary Fund—continue to remind Mexico that it has to “streamline” its bureaucracy if it wants to become more competitive in the global economy. Americans, however, are reluctant to give Mexico credit where credit is due. The myth of Mexico as a “failed state” began with Barry Goldwater, who lamented that the 1968 Summer Olympic Games were being held in Mexico City, the capital of what he called a “faltering” nation. Since then, Americans have discovered that Mexico-bashing is a sure way of making a quick buck on trash books .

“This is an attempt to understand Mexico's steep descent into turmoil,” is how Andres Oppenheimer’s 1998 book, Bordering on Chaos, was marketed. Less than two years later, Mexico made a peaceful transition for a single-party state to a full democracy by electing its first opposition leader in seven decades. According to American commentators, a decade later, Mexico is still on the “verge” of collapsing. “The [Mexican] state has not yet taken control of drug trafficking, and its strength is steadily diminishing,” is George Grayson’s 1999 take in his book, “Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?” The book claimed to document “state disintegration.” And the news media continues to feed a constant stream of “failed state” alarmism . From the Wall Street Journal to National Public Radio, Americans are told of Mexico’s impending collapse. Joel Kurtzman warned in the Journal in 2009 that: “Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state. Defense planners liken the situation to that of Pakistan, where wholesale collapse of civil government is possible.”

The affirmative’s discourse of “failed states” legitimizes an interventionist epistemology that effaces difference, makes north-south inequality inevitable, and is self-fulfillingEisenträger 12 (Stian Eisenträger, MA student in IR, board member at International Reporter, a Norwegian NGO, 3-27-12, “Failed State or Failed Label?: The Concealing Concept and the Case of Somalia,” http://www.e-ir.info/2012/03/27/failed-state-or-failed-label-the-concealing-concept-and-the-case-of-somalia/) gz

The end of the Cold War shaped a new international political context where the issues of democracy and human rights were brought out from the internal to the external scene. The weakened role of the Soviet Union gave the United States the possibility to increase its global influence. In this context the absence of effective government emerged on the world political agenda together with the concept of the “failed state” (Akpinarli 2009). Boutros Boutros-Gali and Kofi Annan, the former Secretaries-General of the UN, used the “failed state” term as early as in 1990, although the General Assembly or the Security Council never used it. Somalia, which was a typical case of the absence of effective government, was described by the UN without the use of the term “failed state”. The concept was then applied for the first time in the article “Saving Failed States” published in the winter edition of Foreign Policy Magazine in 1992-1993 (Helman & Ratner). This article, which was written in the post-Cold War context with its high aspirations for democracy, human rights, the more active role of the United Nations in safeguarding collective security and the emergence of the United States’ as the leading agenda-setting actor, established the basic concept and the paradigm. Although some have tried to incorporate “failed states” in international law, the term is highly debated because of the neo-colonial notion attached to it (Akpinarli 2009, 87-89). According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word “fail” can have a range of different meanings: “to lose strength”, “to fade or die away”, “to stop functioning normally”, “to fall short”, “to be or become absent or inadequate”, “to be unsuccessful” and “to become bankrupt or insolvent” (Merriam-Webster 2011). Thus, I would argue that the word is too imprecise to be meaningful in our attempt to broaden our understanding of the world. In addition, the word is heavily value-laden and has loads of negative connotations attached to it, and therefore I find it unsuitable to use in science. That journalists and politicians still use the term, which is both catchy and tabloid, is understandable when we take into consideration the rather brutal limitations of time and space these two occupational groups have in their struggle to reach their audiences. Nevertheless, numbers of scholars have used and still use the failed state label, many even without engaging critically with the term (Bates 2008; Ghani & Lockhart 2008; Holzgrefe & Keohane 2003, just to mention a few). The urge to “fix”: Securitization and intervention The failed state paradigm implies that there is something that needs to be “fixed” or “saved” – of course by “good” liberal democratic external forces . “Preventing states from failing, and rescuing those that do fail, are (…) strategic and moral imperatives”, Robert I. Rotberg (2002) proclaims in an article with the dramatic title “Failed States in a World of Terror” (the argument is elaborated in his book, bearing the same title). One can feel the notion of “the white mans burden”. One of the most neoliberal contributions in the failed states debate is probably that of Ashraf Ghani & Clare Lockhart ( 2008, 124 ) who in their book “Fixing failed states” boldly declare that “today states must fulfil their citizens’ aspirations for inclusion and development and also carry out a constellation of interrelated functions”. They conclude that states “in the world today” should perform ten key functions, which are: 1) Rule of law; 2) A monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; 3) Administrative control; 4) Sound management of public finances; 5) Investments in human capital; 6) Creation of citizenship rights through social policy; 7) Provision of infrastructure services; 8) Formation of a market; 9) Management of public assets; 10) Effective public borrowing. So now when we have the list, can we just go out in the world and start “fixing”? Fixing “failed states” is a dangerous exercise: For many

policymakers the failed state label contributes to open up for and make a good excuse for military and other interventions . Petra Minnerop shows how the US throughout the second half of the 20th century developed several terms, for example “rogue states”, for “states to which it ascribed a high threat potential as regards the United States and international security” (2003). In the years to follow after the 1992 article in Foreign Policy Magazine the international community, with the US in the leading role, carried out military interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis that the chaotic situation in these states poses a threat to the US and international security in general. The terms “failed state”, “rogue state” and “war on terror” have all been given prominent roles in the public debate. As Akpinarli also remarks, these concepts have been invented by the North to “solve” problems in the South , as well as to advocate for and justify military interventions to protect international peace and security (Akpinarli 2009). I would argue that the concept rather causes more trouble than it solves – not only in terms of military intervention, but also by keeping “failed” states in the margins of international relations. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the labelling of “failed states” is a prime example of what the Copenhagen School of Security has dubbed securitization . The founding fathers of this concept point out that “a discourse that takes form of presenting something to an existential threat to the referent object does not by itself create securitization – this is a securitizing move, but the issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts it as such.” (Buzan et al. 1998, 25). The audience – in this instance, ordinary citizens in the North – has to a large extent accepted the “failed state” paradigm, especially with reference to Somalia. Both the media and the large organizations working with/in/for the “failed state” are acting as agents for the securitizing actors – that is the governments in the North, especially the United States’ government. Somalia has been among the top five on the list since the first Failed States Index was published in 2005, and since 2008 Somalia has had the dubious honour of being the world’s “most failed state”. Whether it is possible to measure a state’s “failure” is a question that probably requires a book to be answered. Since 2005 the magazine and Fund for Peace have ranked the world’s countries after measuring the following variables: Demographic pressures, refugees/IDPs, group grievance, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, delegitimization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, factionalized elites and external intervention (Fund for Peace 2011). No doubt that all these measurements may give a good indicator of how the situation is in a number of countries. However, my point and critique is that the index fails in grasping the vast empirical variations within the research object itself in the case of Somalia. Using the juridical state of Somalia as the object of analysis without looking under the surface becomes a serious hindrance of capturing the full picture. Somalia’s image problem As Michael C. Williams (2003, 527) excellently points out, “Security policies today are constructed not only with the question of their linguistic legitimation in mind; they now are increasingly decided upon in relation to acceptable image-rhetorics”. In this context we can identify the visualization of the verbal rhetoric of the failed state paradigm. The presentation of ”failed states” is often accompanied with depictions of a war-torn hell-hole, and the Foreign Policy Magazine takes the lead by presenting the Failed States Index together with a collection of photos appearing under the splash heading: “Postcards from Hell” (Foreign Policy Magazine 2011). When the Failed States Index is referred to by other news outlets, this kind of presentation is reproduced (for a recent example, see: BBC 2011a). I have yet to see an example of any media organization to examine the Index more closely. Only telling one side of the story is a serious problem. We can compare the use of the “failed state” label with how Somalia is depicted in the daily media coverage. How many times can you remember to have seen the pictures from Somalia, the disaster zone, with starving children, heavily armed Islamist fighters and dead people being dragged through the streets by a cheering mob? Quite a few times, I suppose. On the other hand, how many times have you seen pictures from Somalia showing farmers working in their fields, smiling and playful children, or the beach in Mogadishu crowded with both men, women and children? Probably not at all. Of course, the pictures of the disaster zone of Somalia are real and by every journalistic standard it is right to publish such pictures. The practice becomes a problem when these are the only pictures that are being shown, when the stories about starving children and dangerous terrorists are the only stories that are being told about Somalia outside Somalia. This misrepresentation in the media can for a large part be attributed to the “failed state” label that is burn-marked on the country, and which pay so little attention to the variations within the geographical area that makes up the state of Somalia. When a statement is repeated enough times, it becomes a “truth”. Politicians and scholars, as well as the media itself are responsible for this brand marking, and the process is self-reinforcing. The situation has reached the point where members of the Somali diaspora community in Norway has established an organization with one of its main goals to adjust the picture that has been made of Somalia and the Somali people (Iftiin –

somalisk-norsk kunnskapssenter 2011). Somalia has a serious image-problem – literally. Not only does this put the country in risk of external intervention, it also contributes to keep Somalia and much of its population in the margins of international relations . There is a lack of representation of the people inhabiting the territory of the Somali Republic, both because the TFG lacks authority, but also because of the non-recognition of the de facto states of Somaliland and Puntland. Here we have to functional geopolitical entities that are not represented in the UN nor in other global or regional institutions. Furthermore foreign investors and tourists stay away because of the perception and understanding of the whole of Somalia being a ”failed state”. Africa and the Knowledge of Non-Being In his classic work Orientalism, Edward Said (2003 [1978]) scrutinize the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East. He argues that orientalism is a powerful European ideological creation and a way for dealing with the “otherness” of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs . Achille Mbembe applies much of the same argumentation in his critique of Africanism. He says that historically, the West has constructed its own civilization , enlightenment and progress through the “others ”, thus non-Western cultures, and especially Africa. Mbembe argues that: “Africa as an idea, a concept, has historically served, and still continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world” (Mbembe 2001, 2). One of the challenges in grasping how things work outside the Western world is that many, if not even all, of the concepts we use when describing the universe of International Relations is based in Western history and thinking. Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (Weber et al. 1991, 78). In Western thinking, Weber’s definition represents the idea of an “ideal state”, and it seems like many have the perception that Western states fit into this idea or norm . When analyzing states in Africa, this is revealed when African states are compared with the idea of an “ideal state”, which is believed to be a prototype of a Western state – leading to the focus on African states’ absences, lacks and incompleteness, as weak or failed. In this way Mbembe’s analysis is straight to the point when he states that “while we feel we know nearly everything that African states, societies, and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are”. Our knowledge of Africa is to a large degree based on the knowledge of non-being (Mbembe 2001, 9). But claiming that the “Western state” resembles the Weberian state, or even that the “Western state” is the norm, is highly problematic. First of all, every state has its own specific features, and the higher the degree of generalization, the more problematic it is. Secondly, Weber’s state is an idea of a state that has never existed in practice – even not in Europe or North America – for example when we take into account the important fact that private violence and private security has existed through modern history, and even today. Abrahamsen & Williams (2010), Colás & Mabee (2010) and Thomson (1994) are among several scholars who have demonstrated how private violence and private security takes form in e.g. private companies, criminal organizations and vigilante groups. If the states in Europe and North America are to be judged by the same standards as the states in Africa, many of these could get the “failed” label as well. Noam Chomsky, for example, has turned the tables in his book “Failed States”, where he shows that the US shares features with other “failed states” (2007). But does the “failed state” label provide us with more and better insight into how different states work; does it enlighten us in any way? Definitely not. The label conceals more than it enlightens. Abrahamsen & Williams (2010) argues that we must look beyond the state when analysing security issues in Africa. I would argue that we must look both beyond and within the state also when we want to analyse states in Africa, and especially Somalia.

Discourse of proliferation fears creates a racialized division between have and have nots – that ensures political exclusionGusterson, 99, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999, (Hugh, Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination, Cultural Anthropology 14(1):111-143. American Anthropological Association.According to the literature on risk in anthropology, shared fears often reveal as much about the identities and solidarities of the fearful as about the actual dangers that are feared (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Lindenbaum 1974). The immoderate reactions in the West to the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan , and to Iraq's nuclear weapons program earlier, are examples of an entrenched discourse on nuclear proliferation that has played an important role in structuring the Third World , and our relation to it, in the Western imagination. This discourse, dividing the world into nations that can be trusted with nuclear weapons and those that cannot, dates back, at least, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. The Non-Proliferation Treaty embodied a bargain between the five coun- tries that had nuclear weapons in 1970

and those countries that did not. Accord- ing to the bargain, the five official nuclear states (the United States, the Soviet 3 Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China) promised to assist other signatories to the treaty in acquiring nuclear energy technology as long as they did not use that technology to produce nuclear weapons, submitting to international in- spections when necessary to prove their compliance. Further, in Article 6 of the treaty, the five nuclear powers agreed to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament" (Blacker and Duffy 1976:395). One hundred eighty-seven countries have signed the treaty, but Israel, India, and Pakistan have refused, saying it enshrines a system of global "nuclear apartheid." Although the Non-Proliferation Treaty divided the countries of the world into nuclear and nonnuclear by means of a purely temporal metric —designating only those who had tested nuclear weapons by 1970 as nuclear powers—the treaty has become the legal anchor for a global nuclear regime that is increasingly legitimated in Western public discourse in racialized terms . In view of recent developments in global politics—the collapse of the Soviet threat and the recent war against Iraq, a nuclear-threshold nation in the Third World—the importance of this discourse in organizing Western geopolitical understandings is only growing. It has become a n increasingly important way of legitimating U.S. military programs in the post-Cold War world since the early 19 90s , when U.S. military leaders introduced the term rogue states into the American lexicon of fear, identifying a new source of danger just as the Soviet threat was declining (Klare 1995). Thus in Western discourse nuclear weapons are represented so that "theirs" are a problem whereas "ours" are not. During the Cold War the Western discourse on the dangers of "nuclear proliferation" defined the term in such a way as to sever the two senses of the word proliferation. This usage split off the " vertical " proliferation of the superpower arsenals (the development of new and improved weapons designs and the numerical expansion of the stockpiles) from the "horizontal" proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries, presenting only the latter as the "proliferation problem." Following the end of the Cold War, the American and Russian arsenals are being cut to a few thousand weapons on each side. However, the United States and Russia have turned back appeals from various nonaligned nations, especially India, for the nuclear powers to open discussions on a global convention abolishing nuclear weapons. Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty notwithstanding, the Clinton administration has declared that nuclear weapons will play a role in the defense of the United States for the indefinite future. Meanwhile, in a controversial move, the Clinton administration has broken with the policy of previous administrations in basi- cally formalizing a policy of using nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states to deter chemical and biological weapons (Panofsky 1998; Sloyan 1998). The dominant discourse that stabilizes this system of nuclear apartheid in Western ideology is a specialized variant within a broader system of colonial and postcolonial discourse that takes as its essentialist premise a profound Otherness separating Third World from Western countries. This inscription of Third World (especially Asian and Middle Eastern) nations as ineradicably different from our own has, in a different context, been labeled "Orientalism" by Edward Said (1978). Said argues that orientalist discourse constructs the world in terms of a series of binary oppositions that produce the Orient as the mirror image of the West: where "we" are rational and disciplined, " they" are impul- sive and emotional; where " we" are modern and flexible, "they" are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where " we" are honest and compassionate , "they" are treacherous and uncultivated. While the blatantly racist orientalism of the high colonial period has softened, more subtle orientalist ideologies endure in contemporary politics. They can be found, as Akhil Gupta (1998) has argued, in discourses of economic development that represent Third World nations as child nations lagging behind Western nations in a uniform cycle of development or, as Lutz and Collins (1993) suggest, in the imagery of popular magazines, such as National Geographic. I want to suggest here that another variant of contemporary orientalist ideology is also to be found in U.S. national security discourse. Following Anthony Giddens (1979), I define ideology as a way of con- structing political ideas, institutions, and behavior which (1) makes the political structures and institutions created by dominant social groups, classes, and na- tions appear to be naturally given and inescapable rather than socially con- structed; (2) presents the interests of elites as if they were universally shared; (3) obscures the connections between different social and political antagonisms so as to inhibit massive, binary confrontations (i.e., revolutionary situations); and (4) legitimates domination. The Western discourse on nuclear prolif eration is ideological in all four of these senses : (1) it makes the simultaneous ownership of nuclear weapons by the major powers and the absence of nuclear weapons in Third World countries seem natural and reasonable while problematizing at- tempts by such countries as India, Pakistan, and Iraq to acquire these weapons; (2) it presents the security needs of the established nuclear powers as if they were

everybody's; (3) it effaces the continuity between Third World countries' nuclear deprivation and other systematic patterns of deprivation in the underde- veloped world in order to inhibit a massive north-south confrontation; and (4) it legitimates the nuclear monopoly of the recognized nuclear powers.

2NC

FW

Situatedness determines political efficacyDillon 99 (Michael Dillon, professor of politics at the University of Lancaster, 1999, “Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics,” pp 97-8)

Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable . For one cannot say anything about anything that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought , in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it . What this ontological turn does to other regional modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another . You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision , a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being , and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.

Framing determines the outcomes of policy – uniquely true in the context of securityCalkivik 10 (Emine Asli Calkivik, PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota, October 2010, “Dismantling Security,” http://purl.umn.edu/99479) gz

In contrast to traditional approaches to security, which assume an objective¶ world that operates according to ahistorical formal models and rely on a statist¶ political ontology that naturalizes the meaning of what security is and how it can be¶ achieved,120 critical approaches attend to the relations of power that structure the ¶ production of in/securities and expose the processes by which national identities and ¶ what are deemed as a danger to those identities are constructed. A common point¶ shared by these engagements is their emphasis on the ethical dimension of scholarly¶ inquiry as well as the recognition that knowledge claims are always embedded in ¶ relations of power . Their emphasis on the “ought” rather than the “is” reflects less a¶ reworking of the hierarchy between material and ideational power than an emphasis¶ on the social nature of global politics and an understanding that all phenomenon¶ pertaining to international relations exists through the cultural and ideological¶ structures through which they are given meaning and legitimated.121¶ Definition and construction of threats and the way in which states respond to¶ those threats constitutes one of the primary items on the agenda of critical scholars.122¶ While conventional analyses of security conceive threats as arising from material¶ capabilities of sovereign states located in a self-help system, critical approaches point¶ to the ways in which threats and intentions are not objectively given but socially ¶ constructed : they involve history, culture, and power relations that cannot be reduced ¶ to an objective measure of military capabilities . They investigate the ways in which¶

systems of signification and normative structures constrain or regulate collective ¶ security practices or transform conduct in war. All of these studies reveal the ¶ historically situated dynamics underlying practices that shape the desire to secure ¶ bodies, nations, and states. ¶ Primary examples of these engagements come from scholars working under¶ the broad banner of Constructivism.123 These scholars take as their premise the¶ proposition that interests and actions of states are socially constructed and therefore¶ subject to change. While leaving intact the traditional assumptions about military and¶ state-centric understandings of security, some of these studies nevertheless challenge ¶ the traditional frameworks by explaining security practices through a recourse to ¶ ideational elements such as norms and identities rather than relying on material ¶ factors .124 In particular, these works challenge Neorealist and Neoliberal approaches, ¶ which assume that states are rational, self-help actors in an anarchic environment. For¶ instance, Alexander Wendt in his seminal study shows how different (Hobbesian or¶

Kantian) anarchical cultures can play a role in channeling the security practices of ¶ states on different paths.125 Focusing on international norms, such as the prohibitions¶ against the use of chemical and nuclear weapons or norms of humanitarian¶ intervention, other scholars argue that questions about international security cannot be ¶ answered by Realist materialist explanations alone .126 An example to these¶ investigations is provided by Risse-Kappen, who argues that NATO’s post-Cold War¶ survival can only be explained with reference to ideational factors such as values and¶ identity—in this case, democratic, liberal values—that guarantee the institution’s¶ survival in the absence of a distinct threat.127¶

The post-Cold War security environment and proliferating threat discourses in ¶ the absence of the “Soviet enemy” provide ample resource for scholars who focus on ¶ the representational practices that played role in the construction of threats to state ¶ security. For instance, Mutimer examines in detail the linguistic and metaphorical¶ construction of threats to the United States and its allies through the “image of¶

proliferation.”128 He points out the way in which a particular discursive framing of a ¶ problem—in this case, the construction of the use of chemical or biological weapons ¶ as a problem of proliferation as opposed to a problem of disarmament— shapes the ¶ constitution of identities and interests of the actors in question and gives way to ¶ particular patterns of foreign policy .¶ The discourse of threats and their social production—as well as the¶ construction of the objects of security as an inextricable aspect of security¶

discourses—constitutes an important item on the agenda of critical investigations.129¶ In conventional analyses, the purported state of nature populated by instrumentally¶ rational actors is taken as the departure point of analysis. Within this framework, the¶ state acts as the primary source of authority, the guarantor of order, and the primary¶ protector of the values and interests of these individuals. While the state is rendered¶ the locus of security, security of the state gets equated to the security of the citizen. In¶

contrast to the positing of the state as the locus of security with a neutrally given¶ interest of survival, critical scholars argue that a concept like national security needs to¶ be understood as a social construction rather than an objectively given fact. For¶ instance, in her case study of the Cuban missile crisis, Jutta Weldes shows how a core ¶ concept such as the national interest is discursively constituted through ¶ representational practices and linguistic elements. 130 Other investigations explore the¶ working of security as a political practice, or the processes of construction of threats¶ through institutional mobilization and knowledge production. Some of these scholars¶ use “speech-act theory” to study how utterances of security constitute certain issues as¶ security problems.131¶ A related line of analysis, conducted mostly from post-structural and postcolonial ¶ perspectives, is to trace the operation of power in its various guises and to ¶ map the hierarchical relations, highlighting the gaps and silences of hegemonic ¶ security narratives. In his Writing Security, David Campbell investigates how certain ¶ risks are interpreted as dangers, what power effects these interpretative articulations ¶ produce, and how they police the boundaries of the political community and produce ¶ obedient subjects. 132 Going against the grain of state-centric, strategic accounts of war,¶ scholars such as Michael Shapiro bring to focus the role of political violence in the ¶ construction of the geopolitical imaginary and the production/ affirmation of collective ¶ identity .133 Others focus on the international interventions that took place during the ¶ 1990s and discuss the ways in which these imperial investments are legitimated by the ¶ West through a moral discourse based on universal values .134¶ Other studies lay bare the historical biases, Eurocentric assumptions , and ¶ racialized or gendered content of conceptions, analyses, theories, and practices of ¶ security . Attending to the power of representation, they expose the links between ¶ economies of power and “truth” in the re/production of international hierarchies and ¶ in/securities. Problematizing the representation of post-colonial states as “failed” or ¶ lacking, and hence as a major threat to international security, some of these scholars ¶ demonstrate how these so-called failures were precisely the products of unequal ¶ encounters with Western colonialism, pointing out the ways in which these ¶ hierarchical relations

were being reproduced through ongoing unequal economic, ¶ social, and military relations. 135 They analyze the construction of the non-Western ¶ subject as the inferior other—“the Southern” or “the Oriental”—and attend to the ¶ ways in which these representations are mobilized to legitimate certain security ¶ practices and policies such as nuclear proliferation in the Third World. 136 Introducing¶ feminist perspectives into their analyses, other scholars expose the gender biases ¶ imbued in security practices, problematizing state security for rendering violence and ¶ insecurity from the perspective of women. 137

Giving the tool of imagination over to the state exonerates us from responsibility – we should imagine our own role in violence Kappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence, pgs 9-11)

War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation , the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the 'outbreak' of war, of sexual violence , of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all. 'We are the war,' writes Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her existential analysis of the question, 'what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell my friend, but I see it everywhere . It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you. in the fact that you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values - in short: us. We are the war. , , And I am afraid that we cannot hold anyone else responsible. We make this war possible , we permit it to happen . 'We are the war' - and we also are' the sexual violence , the racist violence , the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called 'peacetime", for we make them possible and we permit them to happen. 'We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of 'collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective 'assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence , our own power and our own responsibility - leading to the well- known illusion of our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying phenomenon - our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina or Somalia _ since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us in to thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events , or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major power mongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do ' anything , say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president , the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones , and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I

were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‘I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention ', 'I want to stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. '? 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our 'non- comprehension' : our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don 't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others'. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence.

AT: Perm

Footnoting DADer Derian 95 (James, Professor of Political Science – University of Massachusetts, International Theory: Critical Investigations, p. 374)But what happens - as seems to be the case to this observer - when the 'we' fragments, 'realism' takes on prefixes and goes plural, the meaning of meaning itself is up for grabs? A stop-gap solution is to supplement the definitional gambit with a facile gesture. The IR theorist, mindful of a creeping pluralism, will note the 'essentially contested' nature of realism - duly backed up with a footnote to W. B. Gallie or W E. Connolly - and then get down to business as usual , that is, using realism as the best language to reflect a self-same phenomenon. This amounts to an intellectual plea of nolo-contendere : in exchange for not contesting the charge that the meaning of realism is contestable, the IR 'perp' gets off easy, to then turn around and commit worse epistemological crimes . In honor of the most notorious benefactor of nolo-contendere in recent American legal history, we might call this the 'Spiro-ette effect' in International Relations.

AT: drive for growth natural

Human nature can be changedSchor 10 (Julie Schor, professor of economics at Boston College, “Plentitude: The New Economies of True Wealth, pages 11-2)And we don’t have to. What’s odd about the narrowness of the national economic conversation is that it leaves out theoretical advances in economics and related fields that have begun to change our basic understandings of what motivates and enriches people. The policy conversation hasn’t caught up to what’s happening at the forefront of the discipline. One of the hallmarks of the standard economic model , which hails from the nineteenth century, is that people are considered relatively unchanging . Basic preferences, likes and dislikes, are assumed to be stable, and don’t adjust as a result of the choices people make or the circumstances in which they find themselves. People alter their behavior in response to changes in prices and incomes, to be sure, and sometimes rapidly. But there are no feedback loops from today’s choices to tomorrow’s desires. This accords with an old formulation of human nature as fixed, and this view still dominates the policy conversation. However, there’s a growing body of research that attests to human adaptability . Newer thinking in behavioral economics, cultural evolution, and social networking that has developed as a result of interdisciplinary work in psychology, biology, and sociology yields a view of humans as far more malleable. It’s the economic analogue to recent findings in neuroscience that the brain is more plastic than previously understood , or in biology that human evolution is happening on a time scale more compressed than scientists originally thought . As economic actors, we can change, too. This has profound implications for our ability to shift from one way of living to another, and to be better off in the process. It’s an important part of why we can both reduce ecological impact and improve wellbeing. As we transform our lifestyles, we transform ourselves. Patterns of consuming, earning, or interacting that may seem unrealistic or even negative before starting down this road become feasible and appealing. Moreover, when big changes are on the table, the narrow tradeoffs of the past can be superseded. If we can question consumerism, we’re no longer forced to make a mandatory choice between well-being and environment. If we can admit that full-time jobs need not require so many hours, it’ll be possible to slow down ecological degradation, address unemployment, and make time for family and community. If we can think about knowledge differently, we can expand social wealth far more rapidly. Stepping outside the “there is no alternative to business-as-usual” thinking that has been a straitjacket for years puts creative options into play . And it opens the doors to double and triple dividends: changes that yield benefits on more than one front. Some of the most important economic research in recent years shows that a single intervention—a community reclamation of a brownfield or planting on degraded agriculture land—can solve three problems. It regenerates an ecosystem, provides income for the restorers, and empowers people as civic actors. In dire straits on the economic and ecological fronts, we have little choice but to find a way forward that addresses both. That’s what plenitude offers.

AT: Util

Utilitarian problem solving justifies mass atrocity and turns its own endWeizman 11 (Eyal Weizman, professor of visual and spatial cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011, “The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza,” pp 8-10)The theological origins of the lesser evil argument cast a long shadow on the present. In fact the idiom has become so deeply ingrained, and is invoked in such a staggeringly diverse set of contexts – from individual situational ethics and international relations , to attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the efforts of human rights and humanitarian activists to manoeuvre through the paradoxes of aid – that it seems to have altogether taken the place previously reserved for the ‘good’. Moreover, the very evocation of the ‘good’ seems to everywhere invoke the utopian tragedies of modernity, in which evil seemed lurking in a horrible manichaeistic inversion . If no hope is offered in the future, all that remains is to insure ourselves against the risks that it poses, to moderate and lessen the collateral effects of necessary acts, and tend to those who have suffered as a result. In relation to the ‘war on terror,’ the terms of the lesser evil were most clearly and prominently articulated by former human rights scholar and leader of Canada’s Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff. In his book The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff suggested that in ‘balancing liberty against security’ liberal states establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some human rights and legal norms, and allow their security services to engage in forms of extrajudicial violence – which he saw as lesser evils – in order to fend off or minimize potential greater evils , such as terror attacks on civilians of western states .11 If governments need to violate rights in a terrorist emergency, this should be done, he thought, only as an exception and according to a process of adversarial scrutiny. ‘Exceptions’, Ignatieff states, ‘do not destroy the rule but save it , provided that they are temporary, publicly justified, and deployed as a last resort.’12 The lesser evil emerges here as a pragmatist compromise, a ‘tolerated sin’ that functions as the very justification for the notion of exception. State violence in this model takes part in a necro-economy in which various types of destructive measure are weighed in a utilitarian fashion , not only in relation to the damage they produce, but to the harm they purportedly prevent and even in relation to the more brutal measures they may help restrain. In this logic, the problem of contemporary state violence resembles indeed an all-too-human version of the mathematical minimum problem of the divine calculations previously mentioned, one tasked with determining the smallest level of violence necessary to avert the greater harm. For the architects of contemporary war this balance is trapped between two poles: keeping violence at a low enough level to limit civilian suffering, and at a level high enough to bring a decisive end to the war and bring peace.13

More recent works by legal scholars and legal advisers to states and militaries have sought to extend the inherent elasticity of the system of legal exception proposed by Ignatieff into ways of rewriting the laws of armed conflict themselves.14 Lesser evil arguments are now used to defend anything from targeted assassinations and mercy killings , house demolitions, deportation, torture ,15 to the use of (sometimes) non-lethal chemical weapons , the use of human shields, and even ‘the intentional targeting of some civilians if it could save more innocent lives than they cost .’16 In one of its more macabre moments it was suggested that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima might also be tolerated under the defence of the lesser evil . Faced with a humanitarian A-bomb, one might wonder what , in fact, might come under the definition of a greater evil. Perhaps it is time for the differential accounting of the lesser evil to replace the mechanical bureaucracy of the ‘banality of evil’ as the idiom to describe the most extreme manifestations of violence. Indeed, it is through this use of the lesser evil that societies that see themselves as democratic can maintain regimes of occupation and neo-colonization . Beyond state agents, those practitioners of lesser evils, as this book claims, must also include the members of independent nongovernmental organizations that make up the ecology of contemporary war and crisis zones. The lesser evil is the argument of the humanitarian agent that seeks military permission to provide medicines and aid in places where it is in fact the duty of the occupying military power to do so, thus saving the military limited resources. The lesser evil is often the justification of the military officer who attempts to administer life (and death) in an ‘enlightened’ manner; it is sometimes, too, the brief of the security contractor who introduces new and more efficient weapons and spatio-technological means of domination , and advertises them as ‘humanitarian technology’. In these cases the logic of the lesser evil opens up a thick political field of participation belonging together otherwise opposing fields of action, to

the extent that it might obscure the fundamental moral differences between these various groups. But, even according to the terms of an economy of losses and gains , the conception of the lesser evil risks becoming counterproductive : less brutal measures are also those that may be more easily naturalized, accepted and tolerated – and hence more frequently used, with the result that a greater evil may be reached cumulatively, Such observations amongst other paradoxes are unpacked in one of the most powerful challenges to ideas such as Ignatieff’s – Adi Ophir’s philosophical essay The Order of Evils. In this book Ophir developed an ethical system that is similarly not grounded in a search for the ‘good’ but the systemic logic of an economy of violence – the possibility of a lesser means and the risk of more damage – but insists that questions of violence are forever unpredictable and will always escape the capacity to calculate them. Inherent in Ophir’s insistence on the necessity of calculating is, he posits, the impossibility of doing so. The demand of his ethics are grounded in this impossibility.17

1NR

Econ

Every economy impact is overwhelmingly empirically denied Moisés Naím 10, editor in chief of Foreign Policy, January/February 2010, “It Didn’t Happen,” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/it_didnt_happen?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=fullJust a few months ago, the consensus among influential thinkers was that the economic crisis would unleash a wave of geopolitical plagues. Xenophobic outbursts, civil wars , collapsing currencies, protectionism , international conflicts , and street riots were only some of the dire consequences expected by the experts . It didn't happen. Although the crash did cause severe economic damage and widespread human suffering, and though the world did change in important ways for the worse -- the International Monetary Fund, for example, estimates that the global economy's new and permanent trajectory is a 10 percent lower rate of GDP growth than before the crisis -- the scary predictions for the most part failed to materialize. Sadly, the same experts who failed to foresee the economic crisis were also blindsided by the speed of the recovery. More than a year into the crisis, we now know just how off they were. From telling us about the imminent collapse of the international financial system to prophecies of a 10-year recession, here are six of the most common predictions about the crisis that have been proven wrong: The international financial system will collapse . It didn't. As Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac crashed, as Citigroup and many other pillars of the financial system teetered on the brink, and as stock markets everywhere entered into free fall, the wise men predicted a total system meltdown. The economy has "fallen off a cliff," warned investment guru Warren Buffett. Fellow financial wizard George Soros agreed, noting the world economy was on "life support," calling the turbulence more severe than during the Great Depression, and comparing the situation to the demise of the Soviet Union. The natural corollary of such doomsday scenarios was the possibility that depositors would lose access to the funds in their bank accounts. From there to visions of martial law imposed to control street protests and the looting of bank offices was just an easy step for thousands of Internet-fueled conspiracy theorists. Even today, the financial system is still frail, banks are still failing, credit is scarce, and risks abound . But the financial system is working, and the perception

that it is too unsafe to use or that it can suddenly crash out of existence has largely dissipated. The economic crisis will last for at least two years and maybe even a decade. It didn't. By fall of 2009, the economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan had begun to grow again, and many of the largest developing economies, such as China, India, and Brazil, were growing at an even faster pace. This was surely a far cry from the doom-laden -- and widely echoed -- prophecies of economist Nouriel Roubini. In late 2008 he warned that radical governmental actions at best would prevent "what will now be an ugly and nasty two-year recession and financial crisis from turning into a systemic meltdown and a decade-long economic depression." Roubini was far from the only pessimist. "The danger," warned Harvard University's Kenneth Rogoff, another distinguished economist, in the fall of 2008, "is that instead of having a few bad years, we'll have another lost decade." It turned out that radical policy reactions were far more effective than anyone had expected in shortening the life of the recession. The U.S. dollar will crash. It didn't. Instead, the American currency's value increased 20 percent between July 2008 and March 2009, at the height of the crisis. At first, investors from around the world sought refuge in the U.S. dollar. Then, as the U.S. government bailed out troubled companies and stimulated the economy with aggressive public spending, the U.S. fiscal deficit skyrocketed and anxieties about a dollar devaluation mounted. By the second half of 2009, the U.S. currency had lost value. But devaluation has not turned out to be the catastrophic crash predicted by the pessimists. Rather, as Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf noted, "The dollar's correction is not just natural; it is helpful. It will lower the risk of deflation in the U.S. and facilitate the correction of the global 'imbalances' that helped cause the crisis." Protectionism will surge. It didn't . Trade flows did drop dramatically in late 2008 and early 2009, but they started to grow again in the second half of 2009 as economies recovered. Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization, had warned that the global financial crisis was bound to lead to surges in protectionism as governments sought to blame foreigners for their problems. "That is exactly what happened in the 1930s when [protectionism] was the virus that spread the crisis all over the place," he said in October 2008, echoing a widely held sentiment among trade experts. And it is true that many governments dabbled in protectionism, including not only the U.S. Congress's much-derided "Buy American" provision, but also measures such as increased tariffs or import restrictions imposed in 17 of the G-20 countries. Yet one year later, a report from the European Union concluded that "a widespread and systemic escalation of protectionism has been prevented ." The protectionist temptation is always there, and a meaningful increase in trade barriers cannot be ruled out. But it has not happened yet. The crisis in rich countries will drag down developing ones. It didn't. As the economies of America and Europe screeched to a halt during the nightmarish first quarter of 2009, China's economy accelerated, part of a broader trend in which emerging markets fared better through the crisis than the world's most advanced economies. As the rich countries entered a deep recession and the woes of the U.S. financial market affected banking systems everywhere, the idea that emerging economies could "decouple" from the advanced ones was widely mocked. But decouple they did. Some emerging economies relied on their domestic markets, others on exports to other growing countries (China, for example, displaced the United States last year as Brazil's top export market). Still others had ample foreign reserves, low

exposure to toxic financial assets, or, like Chile, had taken measures in anticipation of an eventual global slowdown. Not all developing countries managed to escape the worst of the crisis -- and many, such as Mexico and Iran, were deeply hurt -- but many others managed to avoid the fate of the advanced economies. Violent political turmoil will become more common . It didn't . Electorates did punish governments for

the economic hard times. But this was mostly in Europe and mostly peaceful and democratic . "There will be blood," prophesied Harvard historian Niall Ferguson last spring. "A crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political [conflict] ... It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable."

No, it turns out: They aren't.

More evidence – countries turn inwardLloyd deMause, director of The Institute for Psychohistory, postgraduate work in political science, “Nuclear War as an Anti-Sexual Group Fantasy” Updated December 18th 2002, http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/ja/nucsex.htmThe nation "turns inward" during this depressed phase of the cycle. Empirical studies have clearly demonstrate d that major economic downswings are accompanied by "introverted" foreign policy moods, characterized by fewer armed expeditions , less interest in foreign affairs in the speeches of leaders, reduced military expenditures, etc. (Klingberg, 1952; Holmes, 1985). Just as depressed people experience little conscious rage--feeling "I deserve to be killed" rather than "I want to kill others" (Fenichel, 1945, p. 393)-- interest in military adventures during the depressed phase wanes, arms expeditures decrease and peace treaties multiply.

Their evidence cites correlation not causationNiall Ferguson (Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University) 2006 Foreign Affairs, September/October, Vol. 85, Issue 5Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out . Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered. Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such regimes start wars of aggression . In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.

Drugs

The war metaphor collapses the distinction between criminal and enemy – peace becomes impossible until the enemy is annihilatedLajous, 12 – doctor of Law at Yale, professor and researcher at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, a Mexican center of research and higher education specialized in social sciences (Alejandro Madrazo, “Criminals and enemies? The Mexican drug trafficker in official discourse and in narcocorridos,” translated by Fernanda Alonso)//bghs-BIIII. The criminal and the enemy in the official discourse On December 4th, 2006, just three days after assuming the presidency of the Mexican government, Felipe Calderon announced the first deployment of federal forces, Army included, so as to perform police functions in a state: his native state, Michoacan. "Be assured that my government is working hard to win the war against crime" (Calderón, 2011q). With this, the President defined his crime fighting strategy as a wa r; he justified the move on the fact that the number of drug-related killings in the region during the previous year exceeded 500.10 A few weeks later, on January 22, 2007, at the XXI Session of the National Security Council, the President went further: "To win the war against crime it is essential that we work together beyond our differences [...] beyond any political party’s flag and any private interest." (Calderon, 2007n) He presented the war as a reason to demand national unity in a country deeply divided by party likes and dislikes, after a competed and questioned election. Infancy is destiny; the use of war metaphors marked the official narrative surrounding crime and security throughout the his administration. Since then, the government does not pursue common criminals in the fulfillment of police functions or law enforcement, but instead confronts them in a war , for which there will be no truce until the enemy is defeated. The war jargon in the war on drugs has dominated the narrative, the political imaginary and the current government policy . The war metaphor in the government’s discourse has obvious practical and strategic functions. On the one hand, "(...) it is applied to keep justifying the use of the Armed Forces ..." (Miguel Lopez Norzagaray David 2010; 172), one of the building blocks of the security policy for the administration. On the other hand, it functions as a rhetorical framework to call for national unity. However, it also has consequences that go beyond those that it seemingly seeks. On the one hand, it builds up crime and on the other it blurs the boundaries between different categories within the law. The government does not prosecute people who commit different types of crimes –kidnapping, drug trafficking, and murder– but crime itself. In this sense, "(...) drug trafficking was framed within a larger enemy, an enemy that is even more sparse than the very same drug trafficking, one ranging from common crime to the organized social structure needed to commit a crime." (Norzagaray Lopez 2010; 229) This section looks to explore how, in the official discourse dominated by the war metaphor, the distinction between criminal and enemy collapses. By labeling delinquents as enemies, President Calderon is not only establishing an identity between the terms, but also establishing in the political imaginary, on which he reflects and builds his discourse, that the criminal fulfills the function of the enemy (and not only shares his label).11

The entirety of the world is reduced to bare life in an attempt to rid the public sphere of all risk. The only option becomes the extermination of all life – turns their nuclear war impactsDuarte, 5 – professor of Philosophy at Universidade Federal do Paraná (André, “Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the Arendtian critique of the present,” April 2005, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=andre_duarte)//bghs-BIThese historic transformations have not only brought more violence to the core of the political but have also redefined its character by giving rise to biopolitical violence. As stated, what characterizes biopolitics is a dynamic of both protecting and abandoning life through its inclusion and exclusion from the political and economic community . In Arendtian terms, the biopolitical danger is best described as the risk of converting animal laborans into Agamben’s homo sacer, the human being who can be put to death by anyone and whose killing does not imply any crime whatsoever 13).  When politics is conceived of as biopolitics, as the task of increasing the life and happiness of the national animal laborans, the nation-state becomes ever more violent and murderous . If we link Arendt’s thesis from The Human Condition to those of The Origins of Totalitarianism, we can see the Nazi and Stalinist extermination camps as the

most refined experiments in annihilating the “ bare life ” of animal laborans (although these are by no means the only instances in which the modern state has devoted itself to human slaughter). Arendt is not concerned only with the process of the extermination itself, but also the historical situation in which large-scale exterminations were made possible – above all, the emergence of ‘uprooted’ and ‘superfluous’ modern masses, what we might describe as animal laborans balanced on the knife-edge of ‘bare life.’ Compare her words in ‘Ideology and Terror’ (1953), which became the conclusion of later editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism: Isolation is that impasse into which men [humans] are driven when the political sphere of their lives… is destroyed… Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary ‘metabolism with nature’ is of concern to no one. Isolation then become loneliness… Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all 14). The conversion of homo faber, the human being as creator of durable objects and institutions, into animal laborans and, later on, into homo sacer, can be traced in Arendt’s account of nineteenth century imperialism. As argued in the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism, European colonialism combined racism and bureaucracy to perpetrate the “most terrible massacres in recent history, the Boers’ extermination of Hottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in German Southeast Africa, the decimation of the peaceful Congo population – from 20 to 40 million reduced to 8 million people; and finally, perhaps worst of all, it resulted in the triumphant introduction of such means of pacification into ordinary, respectable foreign policies.” 15)  This simultaneous protection and destruction of life was also at the core of the two World Wars , as well as in many other more local conflicts, during which whole populations have become stateless or deprived of a public realm. In spite of all their political differences, the United States of Roosevelt, the Soviet Russia of Stalin, the Nazi Germany of Hitler and the Fascist Italy of Mussolini were all conceived of as states devoted to the needs of the national animal laborans. According to Agamben, since our contemporary politics recognizes no other value than life, Nazism and fascism, that is, regimes which have taken bare life as their supreme political criterion are bound to remain standing temptations 16).  Finally, it is obvious that this same logic of promoting and annihilating life persists both in post-industrial and in underdeveloped countries, inasmuch as economic growth depends on the increase of unemployment and on many forms of political exclusion. When politics is reduced to the tasks of administering , preserving and promoting the life and happiness of animal laborans it ceases to matter that those objectives require increasingly violent acts , both in national and international arenas. Therefore, we should not be surprised that the legality of state violence has become a secondary aspect in political discussions, since what really matters is to protect and stimulate the life of the national (or, as the case may be, Western) animal laborans. In order to maintain sacrosanct ideals of increased mass production and mass consumerism, developed countries ignore the finite character of natural reserves and refuse to sign International Protocols regarding natural resource conservation or pollution reduction, thereby jeopardising future humanity. They also launch preventive attacks and wars, disregard basic human rights, for instance in extra-legal detention camps such as Guantánamo,27)  and multiply refugee camps. Some countries have even imprisoned whole populations, physically isolating them from other communities, in a new form of social, political and economic apartheid. In short, states permit themselves to impose physical and structural violence against individuals and regimes (‘rogue states’ 18) ) that supposedly interfere with the security and growth of their national ‘life process.’ If, according to Arendt, the common world consists of an institutional in-between meant to outlast both human natality and mortality, in modern mass societies we find the progressive abolition of the institutional artifice that separates and protects our world from the forces of nature 19).  This explains the contemporary feeling of disorientation and unhappiness, likewise the political impossibility we find in combining stability and novelty 20).  In the context of a “waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end,” 21)  it is not only possible, but also necessary, that people themselves become raw material to be consumed, discarded, annihilated. In other words, when Arendt announces the “grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption,” 22)  we should also remember that human annihilation, once elevated to the status

of an ‘end-in-itself’ in totalitarian regimes, still continues to occur – albeit in different degrees and by different methods, in contemporary ‘holes of oblivion’ such as miserably poor Third World neighbourhoods 23)  and penitentiaries, underpaid and slave labour camps, in the name of protecting the vital interests of animal laborans. To talk about a process of human consumption is not to speak metaphorically but literally. Heidegger had realized this in his notes written during the late thirties, later published under the title of Overcoming Metaphysics. He claimed that the difference between war and peace had already been blurred in a society in which “metaphysical man [human], the animal rationale, gets fixed as the labouring animal,” so that “labour is now reaching the metaphysical rank of the unconditional objectification of everything present.” 24)  Heidegger argued that once the world becomes fully determined by the “circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption” it is at the brink of becoming an ‘unworld’ (Unwelt), since ‘man [human], who no longer conceals his character of being the most important raw material, is also drawn into the process. Man is “the most important raw material” because he remains the subject of all consumption.’ 25)  After the Second World War and the release of detailed information concerning the death factories Heidegger took his critique even further, acknowledging that to understand man as both subject and object of the consumption process would still not comprehend the process of deliberate mass extermination. He saw this, instead, in terms of the conversion of man into no more than an “item of the reserve fund for the fabrication of corpses” (Bestandestücke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen). According to Heidegger, what happened in the extermination camps was that death became meaningless, and the existential importance of our anxiety in the face of death was lost; instead, people were robbed of the essential possibility of dying, so that they merely “passed away” in the process of being “inconspicuously liquidated” (unauffällig liquidiert). 26)  The human being as animal laborans (Arendt), as homo sacer (Agamben), as an ‘item of the reserve fund’ (Heidegger) – all describe the same process of dehumanisation whereby humankind is reduced to the bare fact of being alive, with no further qualifications. As argued by Agamben, when it becomes impossible to differentiate between biós and zóe, that is, when bare life is transformed into a qualified or specific ‘form of life,’ we face the emergence of a biopolitical epoch 27).  When states promote the animalisation of man by policies that aim at both protecting and destroying human life, we can interpret this in terms of the widespread presence of the homo sacer in our world: “If it is true that the figure proposed by our age is that of an unsacrificeable life that has nevertheless become capable of being killed to an unprecedented degree, then the bare life of homo sacer concerns us in a special way… If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.” 28) Investigating changes in the way power was conceived of and exercised at the turn of the nineteenth century, Foucault realized that when life turned out to be a constitutive political element, managed, calculated, and normalized by means of biopolitics, political strategies soon became murderous. Paradoxically, when the Sovereign’s prerogative ceased to be simply that of imposing violent death, and became a matter of promoting the growth of life, wars became more and more bloody, mass killing more frequent. Political conflicts now aimed at preserving and intensifying the life of the winners, so that enmity ceased to be political and came to be seen biologically: it is not enough to defeat the enemy; it must be exterminated as a danger to the health of the race, people or community . Thus Foucault on the formation of the modern biopolitical paradigm at the end of the nineteenth century:…death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death… now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life that endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone ; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men [humans] to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars have caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end of point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living – has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is

no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. 29)  Arendt proposed no political utopias, but she remained convinced that our political dilemmas have no necessary outcome, that history has not and will not come to a tragic end. Neither a pessimist nor an optimist, she wanted only to understand the world in which she lived in and to stimulate our thinking and acting in the present. It is always possible that radically new political constellations will come into our world, and responsibility for them will always be ours. If we wish to remain faithful to the spirit of Arendt’s political thinking, then we must think and act politically without constraining our thinking and acting in terms of some pre-defined understanding of what politics ‘is’ or ‘should’ be. In other words, I believe that the political challenge of the present is to multiply the forms, possibilities and spaces in which we can act politically. These may be strategic actions destined to further the agendas of political parties concerned with social justice. They can also be discrete, subversive actions favoured by small groups at the margins of the bureaucratised party machines, promoting political interventions free of particular strategic intentions, since their goal is to invite radical politicisation of existence. Finally, there are also actions in which ethical openness towards otherness becomes political: small and rather inconspicuous actions of acknowledging and welcoming, of extending hospitality and solidarity towards others.

Failed States

Do not evaluate short term impact framing in the context of our kritikBilgin and Morton 4 Pinar Bilgin IR @ Bilikent AND Adam David MORTON Senior Lecturer and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice IR @ Nottingham“From ‘Rogue’ to ‘Failed’ States? The Fallacy of Short-termism” Politics 24 (3) p. Wiley Interscience

Calls for alternative approache s to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that such alternatives could only work in the long term whereas 'something' needs to be done here and now . Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to point to the fallacy of 'short-termism' in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as 'approaching security issues within the time frame of the next election, not the next generation'. Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic thinking. The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually be come self-defeating . The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused . Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the problem of state 'failure'. Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of 'state failure' in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167–170), divergent issues might then come to the fore when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the lenses of an incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are readily identified (al-Qa'eda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, 'strong'/'weak' states) and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information . Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame, policy responses are subject to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors assumed to be constant within an incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the 'war on terror' be waged for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the underlying forces that shape current trajectories. Shifting attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode 'wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds', towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to 'failed states', the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of 'failure' raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention frompractitioners across the academy and policymaking communities alike.