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KNDI 2011Security K

Karen, Julian, VictoriaJuniors

Security K-KNDI-Karen Julian Victoria

Security K-KNDI-Karen Julian Victoria .................................................................................... 1

2NC Link Wall Colonization ........................................................................................................ 3

2NC Link Wall Weaponization .................................................................................................... 4

2NC Link Wall Small Tech Affs ................................................................................................... 6

2NC Impact Block Generic ......................................................................................................... 22

Terrorism ...................................................................................................................................... 25

Post-Colonial Thought ................................................................................................................. 27

2NC Realism Debate .................................................................................................................... 27

A2: Classic Double Bind .............................................................................................................. 32

AT: Empirics ................................................................................................................................ 37

AT: Securitization Inevitable ...................................................................................................... 38

Reps Come First ........................................................................................................................... 45

Perm Do Both ............................................................................................................................... 48

Cede the Political ......................................................................................................................... 52

Bad Reps Inevitable ..................................................................................................................... 60

Link Turn ..................................................................................................................................... 61

AT: Reps Shape Reality .............................................................................................................. 61

Threat con good ........................................................................................................................... 62

NASA Threat Con Good ............................................................................................................. 62

Case Turns the K ........................................................................................................................... 63

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a. The rhetoric of space advocacy serves in the interest of American expansionism, and constructs an ideology that the US is and must be the only nation who with a justifiable manifest destiny. Billing, 7[ linda Billing, PhD NASA Astrobiology Program 2007 “ chapter 25 Overview: Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight—Evolution of a Cultural Narrativhttp://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter25. http://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter25.pdf] KZ

examining the history of spacelight advocacy reveals an ideology of spacelight that draws deeply on a durable american cultural narrative—a national mythology—of frontier pioneering, continual progress, manifest destiny, free enterprise, rugged individualism, and a right to life without limits. this ideology rests on a number of assumptions, or beliefs, about the role of the united States in the global community, the american national character, and the “right” form of political economy.according to this ideology, the united States is and must remain “number one” in the world community, playing the role of political, economic, scientific, technological, and moral leader. that is, the united States is and must be exceptional. this ideology constructs americans as independent, pioneering, resourceful, inventive, and exceptional, and it establishes that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism (or capitalist democracy) constitute the only viable form of political economy. 2 the rhetoric of space advocacy exalts those enduring american values of pioneering, progress, enterprise, freedom, and rugged individualism, and it advances the cause of capitalist democracy.

b. Security rhetoric furthers the perpetual threat of destruction and justifies unending, state-sanctioned violence.Coviello 2000 [Peter Coviello, assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College, “Apocalypse From Now On”, 2000]

Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed – it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida’s suitably menacing phrase) “remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,” then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an “other” people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished “general population.” This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag’s incisive observation, from 1989, that, “Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On.’” The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, though the perpetual threat of destruction – through the constant reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse – the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addressess himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, “life-administering.” Power, he contends, “exerts a positive influence on life … [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.” In his brief comments on what he calls “the atomic situation,” however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as “managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,” agencies of modern power presume to act “on the behalf of the existence of everyone.” Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating. “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power,” Foucault writes, “this is not because of a recent return to 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.” For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.

c. The Alternative is to reject the Affirmative’s security discourse –only a conscious disengagement can allow escape from the scope of the state. Neocleous, 8[Mark Neocleous Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, 2008 “Critique of Security”]

The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether - to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that can

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not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain 'this is an insecure world' and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end - as the political end - constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible - that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve 'security', despite the fact that we are never quite told - never could be told - what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more 'sectors' to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that's left behind? But I'm inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered of humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up reaffirming the state as the terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That's the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding 'more security' (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn't damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that 'security' helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and 'insecurities' that come with being human; it requires accepting that 'securitizing' an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.143

***LINKS***

2NC Link Wall Colonization

Group the link debate – the plan misses the point of the overall US Space policy – even if it seems like we’re decreasing our posture, we’re really just allowing ourselves to expand our presence through better technology. This further exacerbates the underlying problem of militarism

The Aff links to the criticism by implying that the US must be the only one to go to space, because the US is the only one that deserves this manifest destiny that’s our Billing Evidence

Their construction of the earth as a threat is a link – it begs the question of what constitutes a threat – they simply construct it as an “other” that needs to be avoided this is made worse

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by the fact that they claim that extinction is inevitable, that is their justification for going into space.

The Affirmative’s ideology is founded in Christian Folklore; it creates apocalyptic scenarios that depict the earth as a threatMcMillen, 04 (Ryan Jeffrey, Ph. D Philosophy, SPACE RAPTURE: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization, COLONIZING HEAVEN, JG)

The frontier myth is a powerful organizing force in American culture, but the frontier myth has no meaning outside of the ideological and religious roots which call for the conquest of the frontier. Manifest Destiny was, at its heart, a Christian enterprise, an attempt to remake the world in a holy unity under the banner of American Christian idealism. To disconnect Manifest Destiny from its religious roots is to make it merely the hunger for power, but the inner turbine – the dynamo – within Manifest Destiny was Christianity, and an American messianic Christianity of compelling ideological power. While Gerard O'Neill characterized his colonies as an extension of the American frontier, their true inspiration came from Biblical, and specifically New Testament, Scripture. Space colonies, in the vision of O'Neill and others, represent the ultimate utopia of the extraterrestrial millennialist fantasy. O'Neill's colonies in particular promise a heavenly techno-Garden of Eden and are the logical extraterrestrial millennialist completion of the unfinished drama begun with Adam and Eve. In returning to an Eden in the sky, the colonies promise the union of God’s heavenly domain with God’s lost and perfect Earthly paradise. In offering a democratic ascension off of the Earth, the space colonies become the ultimate Christian rapture wish in which the chosen – the hardy, spacebound pioneers – escape the doomed Earth before its demise. And in ascending into heaven, the space colonists help to immortalize the human race in a massive imitation of Christ’s solo flight to deathlessness.

Space settlement suggests the fear of eastern states, and sets the ground for longstanding western power.MacDonald, no date [Fraser MacDonald Lecturer in Human Geography Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/rmg/geography/papers/anti-outerspace.pdf] KZ

There is also, I think, scope for a wider agenda on the translation of particular Earthly historical geographies into space, just as there was a translation of early occidental geographies onto imperial spaces. When Donald Rumsfeld talks of a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’, there is plainly a particular set of historico–geographical imaginaries at work that give precedence, in this case, to American experience. Rumsfeld has not been slow to invoke Pearl Harbour, most famously in the aftermath of September 11; notably, in all these examples – Hawaii in 1941; New York in 2001; and the contemporary space race – there lurks the suggestion of a threat from the East 9 . All of this is a reminder that the colonisation of space, rather than being a decisive and transcendent break from the past, is merely an 34extension of longstanding regimes of power. As Peter Redfield succinctly observed, to move into space is ‘a form of return’: it represents ‘a passage forward through the very pasts we might think we are leaving behind’ (Redfield, 2002: 814). All of this supports the idea that space is part and parcel of the Earth’s geography (Cosgrove, 2004: 222). We can conceive of the human geography of space as being, in the words of Doreen Massey, ‘the sum of relations, connections, embodiments and practices’ (Massey, 2005: 8). She goes on to say that ‘these things are utterly everyday and grounded, at the same time as they may, when linked together, go around the world’. To this we might add that they go around and beyond the world. The ‘space’ of space is both terrestrial and extraterrestrial: it is the relation of the Earth to its firmament. Lisa Parks and Ursula Biemann have described our relationship with orbits as being ‘about uplinking and downlinking, [the] translation [of] signals, making exchanges with others and positioning the self’ (Parks and Biemann, 2o03). It is precisely this relational conception of space that might helpfully animate a revised geographical understanding of the Outer Earth.

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Their construction of the earth as a threat is a link – it begs the question of what constitutes a threat – they simply construct it as an “other” that needs to be avoided this is made worse by the fact that they claim that extinction is inevitable, that is their justification for going into space.

The Aff creates the possibility of a “space wars” in order to justify the weaponization of spaceDuval and Hovercraft, 06 (Raymond, PhD Minesota, Jonathan, Phd British Colombia, Taking Sovereignty out of this world, http://www.ligi.ubc.ca/sites/liu/files/Publications/Havercroft_paper.pdf, JG)

Explicitly invoking the frightening image of a “Space Pearl Harbor” as a potential disaster the United States must strive to avoid, the 2001 Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization urged official policy action on “five matters of key importance”.1 First among those recommendations is the “demand that U.S. national security space interests be recognized as a top national security priority”.2 In making this call, the Commission, originally chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, was speaking in terms unfamiliar to neither the national security community, nor even to Congress. Indeed, the mandate of the Commission on its establishment in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 20003 was similarly framed: The commission shall, concerning changes to be implemented over the nearterm, medium term and long-term that would strengthen United States national security, assess the following: (1) The manner in which military space assets may be exploited to provide support for United States military operations.4 These statements, which are now far from unusual, together with the substantial resources being committed to investment in the militarization of space, indicate clearly that earth’s orbital space is currently very much part of the territorial object of military-security planning.5 The strategic imaginary of several contemporary militaries, most prominently that of the United States, includes securitization of, through, and from outer space under such rubrics as missile defense, space control, and force application from space. Space weapons, then, are no longer just a fantasy, an unrealizable fiction. They are rapidly becoming a very real possibility. The questions that arise are: What is to be made of this development? What are the implications if that possibility were actualized? Specifically, how will the deployment of weapons in orbital space affect the structure and character of modern international relations? We take up those questions in this article.

Space exploration, independently, is a response to security discourse. Columbia Peoples, 10 (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, The growing ‘securitization’ of outer space) andrea

The reasoning behind this introduction of securitization theory here into debates on space policy is that the militarization/ weaponization debate only partially captures (at best) the multiple ways in which outer space is being linked to security in the space policy discourses of leading states and international organizations e ways that encompass not only ‘traditional’ military security but also the security of economic, environmental, scientific and technical infrastructures. As is discussed below, space policy is one of the areas where we have seen a rapid proliferation of ‘securitizing moves’ that identify space as crucial to national security and survival in a variety of ways. Even if some of these moves might be argued to be more successful than others in terms of their actual political effects, the sheer prevalence of attempted securitization within space policy provides a rationale for revisiting the question of whether militarization/ weaponization is a sufficient way of framing the analysis of space policy in relation to security.

The US Valorizes itself and securitizes everyone else to justify space militarizationLupro, 09 (Michael Mooradian, Doctor of Philosophy, INTRODUCTION: MUSICAL SUBVERSION OF SPACE TOURISM, SPACE ODDITIES FOR THE AGE OF SPACE TOURISM, JG)

The existing discursive construction of space, to which this project is an amendment, valorizes American exceptionalism, normalizes frontier militarism, and perpetuates myths of technological and capitalist superiority. The space of twentieth century popular culture is of both endless opportunity and unlimited danger. From Star Wars to the Star Trek franchise, the Alien trilogy to Battlestar Galactica, the combatants and contests may differ but the regime of violent conflict is unchallenged. Even within the discourse of opportunity in space, the opportunities are circumscribed by socially constructed terrestrial limits on who gets to participate, how they do so, and to what ends. In other words, the Star Trek franchise may feature ethnically diverse crews and even a female captain in one case, and Trekkies consistently profess tolerant values, but the

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universalism is wrapped in militarism, the economics are ubiquitously capitalist, and uneasy differences like queerness or class are erased and made invisible.

Their Justification for putting weapons in space is based on the construction of space threats in the Government through HollywoodDavis, 01 (Doug, Ph D Georgia Institute for Technology, Doomsday Summer, "A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs": Total War in the Fossil Record, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v009/9.3davis.html, JG)

Armageddon's producers may have wrapped their product in Big Science, but as numerous critics quickly pointed out, there is very [End Page 461] little science in the film. There is, however, a massive amount of conspicuous destruction. Throughout the film asteroids rain down like smart bombs, homing in on the world's major urban areas, toppling landmarks such as New York City's Chrysler Building, and incinerating the hub of Paris. People die just as they died in all of the twentieth century's strategic bombing campaigns: as targets, and often without knowing what hit them. Director Michael Bay offers us quick views of the cosmic assault from vantage points reminiscent of war reporting, intercutting unsteady ground footage with static long shots familiar to atomic tests. The finest and most crowd-pleasing moments of Armageddon are its documentary scenes of death from above. That cities are the primary targets of Outer Space's bombing campaign should come as no surprise, for (aside from being more exciting than blowing up fields of tundra) cities have been the presumed targets of strategic bombardment ever since German Zeppelins terrorized Londoners at the onset of the First World War—a presumption driven further home by the fire and atomic bombing campaigns of the Second World War. In a cruel coincidence, the first city utterly destroyed in Armageddon, Shanghai, also happens to be the one of the first cities ever subjected to a truly massive aerial bombardment, by the Japanese in the summer of 1937—the year when the aerial bombing of cities and civilians became a commonplace of modern warfare. Armageddon is not a scientific film; it is a war film, and in particular a nuclear war film, with Outer Space cast as the ruthless enemy behind an apocalyptic bombing campaign. Disney Studios actually chose to raise Armageddon's death-toll in order to compete at the box office, when their film was scheduled to open a month after another impact disaster film, Mimi Leder's surprisingly popular Deep Impact. Director Bay flew crews to Paris and Shanghai less than a month before Armageddon's opening in order to shoot extra location footage for additional bombardment sequences. 2 The story told by the retooled Armageddon reiterates Cold War fears of nuclear escalation: a limited meteor strike (against where else but New York) is followed by increasingly destructive strikes against disparate nations' cities; more and more countries are drawn into the fray until, finally, global destruction threatens. While Armageddon's familiar tale of commando heroics may be simply one more instance of Hollywood's reliance on the proven formula, the likeness of its asteroid threat to a Cold War story of nuclear destruction actually tells us as much about the science that inspired [End Page 462] the film as it does about Hollywood. For Armageddon serves as loud witness to how the Cold War continues to influence scientific representation. The threat of a massive impact and the threat of a nuclear war indeed are, in many ways, the same thing, and the Doomsday Summer of 1998 thus enters the annals of the history of science as our most popular record of how the science of cataclysmic impacts has come to understand the threat of such impacts. Armageddon was inspired by the popularity of the science of impact-extinction theory, the much-publicized theory that an asteroid or comet impact caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While it was hardly apparent at the time, with the publication of "the Alvarez thesis" in 1980 by the father-and-son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez and two nuclear chemists from the Berkeley Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, the Cold War had finally come to paleontology. Catastrophic impacts may look like World War III on the silver screen—but only, as I will argue, because by the summer of 1998 asteroid and comet impacts themselves already looked a good deal like World War III, visiting destruction upon the earth in a way very much like that threatened by the policy of strategic nuclear deterrence.

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Their construction of the earth as a threat is a link – it begs the question of what constitutes a threat – they simply construct it as an “other” that needs to be avoided this is made worse by the fact that they claim that extinction is inevitable, that is their justification for going into space.

Nuclear weapons were a product of securitization, which lead to the loss of millions of livesDavis, 01 (Doug, Ph D Georgia Institute for Technology, Doomsday Summer, "A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs": Total War in the Fossil Record, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v009/9.3davis.html, JG)

If we take the interaction theory of metaphor seriously, then we have to grant that just as the threat of nuclear war describes elements of the impact world, impact-extinction theory's figurative war stories are also about our threatened world, and especially that long-lost world of the 1980s.In the long tradition of fable, animals live the trials of men, and their sometimes funny and often gruesome rewards serve as lessons for the proper order of human affairs. For [End Page 499] those who have fought and survived the Cold War, the dawning recognition that the animals of the Cretaceous lived and died much like Cold War subjects is variously seen as a reason to celebrate, to take urgent action, or, frankly, to do nothing at all. For those who suffer their lives under the delegated mechanisms of nuclear deterrence, finding total war in the fossil record underscores the innateness and unhumanity of the world's nuclear arsenals. Making nuclear weapons "absolute weapons" was a historical choice, but in a world defined by Cold War politics it fast became a national imperative, and America's arsenal grew as if an object unto its own. With the discovery of nature's own total war machine, the massive destruction promised by nuclear deterrence becomes more than a protestable fact of geopolitical life and turns into a state of nature. The implicit meaning of impact-extinction theory is indeed a frightening one, for it means that we have always been living under the threat of a total war machine, and as a naturalistic fable the theory may make the nuclear war machine—and the society that built it—seem all that more natural, and even necessary. In popular culture, the impact threat provides an occasion to crow about America's survival of the Cold War and commitment to nuclear weaponry. The post-Cold War headlines announcing the explosive death of the dinosaurs, along with Hollywood depictions of scrapes with planetary doom, such as the 1998 blockbusters Deep Impact and Armageddon, both exploit and assuage any fears left over from four decades lived under nuclear deterrence, leaving their audiences somewhat humbled but all the happier with the present nuclear peace. The death of the dinosaurs, when not put to earnest use by nuclear winter proponents, is a voyeuristic and macabre peek at a World War III that near-missed. The dinosaurs' explosive demise serves up a thrill for American audiences in particular because in American culture the dinosaur already has a very human presence. In his examination of the past century's fascination with dinosaurs, The Last Dinosaur Book, W. J. T. Mitchell details the abundant, contradictory ways in which the dinosaur has been rallied throughout the American popular imagination, from advertisements, films, political cartoons, and children's entertainment to, of course, museum displays and gift shops. The dinosaur represents size, strength, and ferocity—yet at the same time it is a model of failure and obsolescence. Civilization is defined both through and against the dinosaurs. Americans find these particular dead beasts so useful, Mitchell argues somewhat playfully, because they function in American culture as the totem animal of modernity. Like the totems of past tribes, the dinosaur has specific functions for modernity's tribe: it [End Page 500] serves as the epitome of capitalism's temporal cycles of innovation and obsolescence, it embodies the sundry contradictions of modern life, and it figures in a number of enculturing rituals. Either through learning to count, to differentiate categories, and to sing with them as children, or by using them allegorically to justify planned obsolescence and social injustice, Americanized subjects find the meaning of their works and their lives in dinosaurs as in no other animal.

Space Policy is infected with militaristic securitization discourseColumbia Peoples, 10 (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, The growing ‘securitization’ of outer space)

Attempts at securitization are thus a rapidly growing feature of contemporary space policy discourse. Merely making this observation, however, leaves aside the question of whether such securitizing moves should be encouraged or avoided by policy makers and analysts. On the one hand, the idea of space as a key part of the ‘connective tissue’ that binds global security might seeman attractive proposition to those seeking to shift the emphasis away from militaristic national concerns. In this light, attempts to securitize environmental monitoring, critical infrastructure and economic prosperity under the rubric of space security might be welcomed as the basis for a moremultilateral, cooperative global approach. On the other hand, there is a legitimate concern that the securitization of space policy effectively acts as a Trojan horse for the expansion of nationalemilitary interests. One previous viewpoint contributor contends in relation to EU space policy that ‘.Europe’s “security research” has slowly pavedtheway for the introductionofmuchmore controversial “military research” within the European domain’14, and Manriquez suspects that, with Japan’s space law revision, ‘the nation inches [further] towards re-militarization with the likely opening of space formilitary use.’15 Similarly, the newspace policy of the Obama administration appeals simultaneously to an expansive definition of global security and a more narrow, traditional focus on the nationalemilitary interest of the USAincluded within this. All of this points to the importance of taking the securitization of space policy seriously as a key element of debates on space security. Focusing on militarization and weaponization alone simply isn’t sufficient.

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Policy Debate

The 1AC advantages are made up – solvency is a rigged game and they result in error replicationDillon and Reid, 2k – (Michael Dillon and Julian Reid Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency. By: Dillon, Michael, Reid, Julian, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 03043754, Jan-Mar2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1)

More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy " client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy , for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want . Yet serial policy failure --the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their

Generic Threat Construction

The 1AC uses threat construction which is a type of national “insecurity” that nations use to justify several attacks Béland ‘07Béland, Daniel, Department of Sociology University of Calgary, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2007, pp. 317-340 (Article) http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/Beland.pdf VB

Before sketching a theoretical framework for the construction of collective insecurity, one must clarify the meaning of this concept. Insecurity refers both to the subjective feeling of anxiety and to the concrete lack of protection. The starting point of this analysis is that collective insecurity is a social and political construction. Far from meaning that people live

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in a world of pure illusions, the idea of social and political construction of reality refers to the manner in which actors collectively make sense of the world in which they live. Although individuals experience fear and anxiety in everyday life collective insecurity involves transforming personal or environmental matters into social and political issues. As the psychological literature on “risk amplification” suggests, collective insecurity is “the product of processes by which groups and individuals learn to acquire or create interpretations of risk. These interpretations provide rules for selecting, ordering, and explaining signals emanating from [the environment]” (Kasperson et al. 2003: 15). Once perceived sources of insecurity are defined as collective problems affecting a significant segment of the population, they can enter the policy agenda. The analytical framework sketched below focuses on agenda setting and how political leaders both construct and respond to the forms of collective insecurity that move in and out of the policy agenda. Although recognizing that collective insecurity is a social construction, the sociological and political analysis of insecurity must pay serious attention to the structural characteristics of the collective threats featured in the politics of insecurity. This means that there is a “threat infrastructure” to the politics of insecurity because the nature of collective threats creates constraints and opportunities for political leaders. “Threat infrastructure” can be defined as the nature of the risks that characterize a policy area, and, by extension, the basic political conditions that are likely to stem from such risks.10 Consequently, each domain of state protection exhibits a distinct set of political opportunities and constraints related to the nature of the threat under consideration. For example, highly episodic threats such as terrorism are more likely to generate panic waves than more structural sources of insecurity like unemployment or, as in the United States, the lack of health care coverage. Episodic and dramatic threats may stimulate more sweeping legislative actions than low profile risks like environmental hazards that have yet to be publicly defined as a major danger to human life. Because particular threats, such as unemployment, are closer to the everyday life of citizens, the potential level of political manipulation surrounding their social and political definition may be reduced. The constructivist analysis of collective insecurity must include an examination of the “threat infrastructure” specific to the policy area under consideration, which does not mean that this infrastructure entirely determines the shape that collective insecurity will take. Amidst structural constraints, it is clear that political leaders often play a major role in shaping the perception of collective threats (Béland, 2007). The concept of “threat infrastructure” helps draw an analytical line between the structural and the constructed aspects of the threats citizens face and points to the concrete characteristics of each collective threat and policy area. These characteristics include threat stability (episodic versus constant threats), distance (immediate versus remote threats), visibility (prominent versus low-profile threats), and origin (human-made, natural, or hybrid threats). Consequently, the concept of “threat infrastructure” points to the structural elements that actors involved in the construction of insecurity generally take into account. Yet, even these structural elements are subject to the framing processes that affect the perception of collective threats. This is why we can say that the concrete nature of threat does not fully determine the political dynamic

Generic Space Exploration

Space exploration is a militaristic self-fulfilling prophecy. Columbia Peoples, 10 (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, The growing ‘securitization’ of outer space) andrea

Attempts at securitization are thus a rapidly growing feature of contemporary space policy discourse. Merely making this observation, however, leaves aside the question of whether such securitizing moves should be encouraged or avoided by policy makers and analysts. On the one hand, the idea of space as a key part of the ‘connective tissue’ that binds global security might seeman attractive proposition to those seeking to shift the emphasis away from militaristic national concerns. In this light, attempts to securitize environmental monitoring, critical infrastructure and economic prosperity under the rubric of space security might be welcomed as the basis for a moremultilateral, cooperative global approach. On the other hand, there is a legitimate concern that the securitization of space policy effectively acts as a Trojan horse for the expansion of nationalemilitary interests. One previous viewpoint contributor contends in relation to EU space policy that ‘.Europe’s “security research” has slowly pavedtheway for the introductionofmuchmore controversial “military research” within the European domain’14, and Manriquez suspects that, with Japan’s space law revision, ‘the nation inches [further] towards re-militarization with the likely opening of space formilitary use.’15 Similarly, the newspace policy of the Obama administration appeals simultaneously to an expansive definition of global security and a more narrow, traditional focus on the nationalemilitary interest of the USAincluded within this. All of this points to the importance of taking the securitization of space policy seriously as a key element of debates on space security. Focusing on militarization and weaponization alone simply isn’t sufficient.

Space Policy is infected with militaristic securitization discourseColumbia Peoples, 10 (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, The growing ‘securitization’ of outer space)

Attempts at securitization are thus a rapidly growing feature of contemporary space policy discourse. Merely making this observation, however, leaves aside the question of whether such securitizing moves should be encouraged or avoided by policy makers and analysts. On the one hand, the idea of space as a key part of the ‘connective tissue’ that binds global security might seeman attractive proposition to those seeking to shift the emphasis away from militaristic national concerns. In this light, attempts to securitize environmental monitoring, critical infrastructure and economic prosperity under the rubric of space

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security might be welcomed as the basis for a moremultilateral, cooperative global approach. On the other hand, there is a legitimate concern that the securitization of space policy effectively acts as a Trojan horse for the expansion of nationalemilitary interests. One previous viewpoint contributor contends in relation to EU space policy that ‘.Europe’s “security research” has slowly pavedtheway for the introductionofmuchmore controversial “military research” within the European domain’14, and Manriquez suspects that, with Japan’s space law revision, ‘the nation inches [further] towards re-militarization with the likely opening of space formilitary use.’15 Similarly, the newspace policy of the Obama administration appeals simultaneously to an expansive definition of global security and a more narrow, traditional focus on the nationalemilitary interest of the USAincluded within this. All of this points to the importance of taking the securitization of space policy seriously as a key element of debates on space security. Focusing on militarization and weaponization alone simply isn’t sufficient.

Space exploration is classified as national defense, normalizing security constructs.Columbia Peoples, 10 (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, The growing ‘securitization’ of outer space) andrea

What, then, is ‘securitization’, and why should it be regarded as anything other than another ‘-ation’ to be added to the pot? Recent decades have seen a rapid and extensive ‘broadening’ of the contexts in which the concept of security is applied and in the range of issues it is seen to cover. From a relatively circumscribed historical association with military threats and issues, the concept of security is increasingly used in reference to ‘non-traditional’ issues, such as migration and environmental degradation. In both policy and academic discourse non-military issues are now frequently referred to as ‘security’ issues by policy makers. Space policy has been far from immune from this wider trend. Such moves to widen the spectrum of security issues can be classified as attempts at ‘securitization’, a term coined by the group of scholars within security studies commonly referred to as the ‘CopenhagenSchool’.2 Securitization is, in broad terms, the process through which a non-military issue comes to be seen as an issue of security. When an issue comes to be treated as an issue of national security, it is justifiable to use exceptional political measures to deal with it. It is ‘securitized’: that is, it is treated with the same degree of urgency as military threats to the very existence of a state (as traditionally captured in the concept of ‘national security’), or what the Copenhagen School labels ‘existential threats’. At its most fundamental the idea of national security assumes that the state must be protected, therefore it is necessary for the state to maintain standing armies, weapons production and procurement, intelligence agencies, and so on. One of the ways we can distinguish an existential threat, then, is by the level of response it generates. When an issue or development is successfully presented as an existential threat, it legitimises the use of exceptional political measures. A classic military example in international relations is a state’s right to self-defence. If a state is under attack, it claims the legitimate use of extraordinary measures that go beyond normal day-to-day politics: the declaration of a state of emergency or martial law, the rationing of certain goods and services, closure of roads and schools, and so on. Commonly, then, the identification of existential threats sets in chain a number of effects that characterize the specific quality of security problems: urgency e the issue takes priority; and extraordinary measures e authorities claim powers that they would not otherwise have, or curtail rights and liberties that might otherwise apply. In short, securitization is a style of argumentation used in attempts to legitimate the application of extraordinary measures by positioning an issue as equivalent to a threat to national security as it is more traditionally understood. By attempting to portray an issue as a security issue, a securitizing move is made; that is, a move to class an issue in the same category as national defence.

Outer space is exploited as America’s frontier for neoliberal hegemony. MacDonald, no date [Fraser MacDonald Lecturer in Human Geography Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/rmg/geography/papers/anti-outerspace.pdf] KZ

Among the technical and logistical advances in space technology too numerous to detail here, there are two tendencies that stand out. Firstly, space – and in particular the Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) – can no longer be considered remote. The journey through the Earth’s atmosphere is now made on an almost weekly basis. Such is the steady passage of space vehicles that there is now a growing literature on traffic management (Johnson, 2004; Lála, 2004). The costs of entering space are now so low that students at Cambridge University have tested an ‘amateur’ rocket that they hope can be readily launched to the edge of space (up to 32 km altitude) for under £1000 (Sample, 2006). Secondly, space is becoming ordinary. Space-based technology is routinely reconfiguring our experience of home, work, education and healthcare through applications in the transport, telecommunications, agricultural and energy sectors (Rumsfeld Commission, 2001). Our everyday lives already extend to the outer-Earth in ways that we entirely take for granted. America’s Global Positioning System (GPS), for instance, has become essential to the regular functioning of a variety of machines from bank tellers to super-tankers. The space-based science of weatherforecasting is now integrated into the day-to-day management of domestic and national affairs. Satellite-based telecommunications, particularly international and cellular telephony, are a mundane part of everyday life in the West (see

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Warf, 2006). More obvious, perhaps, are the technical advances in space-enabled warfare that have inspired recent American military operations in the Balkans, 4Afghanistan and Iraq (Gray, 2005; Graham, 2004). Following in the vapour-trails of the United States, Europe, Russia and China are also trying to extend their sovereignty into outer space. As I will go on to discuss, terrestrial geopolitics are increasingly being determined by extra-terrestrial strategic considerations. More abstractly, I want to argue that through space exploration, we are forging new subjectivities and new forms of sociality here on earth (Stern, 2000; Shaw 2004). Space is a modality for hyper-mobile information which, in combination with advanced technologies of ‘software-sorting’ (Graham, 2005), has enabled a wider ‘automatic production of space’ (Thrift and French, 2002; see also Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). Above all, I will make the case that outer space is the next frontier for military–neoliberal hegemony, as an earlier conception of space as common property, enshrined in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty (OST), becomes subject to re-negotiation. In place of the OST is the prospect of a new space regime, as transformative in its own way as the Bretton Woods consensus, that would oversee the privatisation of space resources in the narrow interests of a global elite. Moreover, it is this conquest of space, I will argue, that underwrites much of the dynamic technological shaping and re-shaping of Earthly environments recently discussed by Nigel Thrift (Thrift 2005).

Space Militarization

The Aff creates the possibility of a “space wars” in order to justify the weaponization of spaceDuval and Hovercraft, 06 (Raymond, PhD Minesota, Jonathan, Phd British Colombia, Taking Sovereignty out of this world, http://www.ligi.ubc.ca/sites/liu/files/Publications/Havercroft_paper.pdf, JG)

Explicitly invoking the frightening image of a “Space Pearl Harbor” as a potential disaster the United States must strive to avoid, the 2001 Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization urged official policy action on “five matters of key importance”.1 First among those recommendations is the “demand that U.S. national security space interests be recognized as a top national security priority”.2 In making this call, the Commission, originally chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, was speaking in terms unfamiliar to neither the national security community, nor even to Congress. Indeed, the mandate of the Commission on its establishment in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 20003 was similarly framed: The commission shall, concerning changes to be implemented over the nearterm, medium term and long-term that would strengthen United States national security, assess the following: (1) The manner in which military space assets may be exploited to provide support for United States military operations.4 These statements, which are now far from unusual, together with the substantial resources being committed to investment in the militarization of space, indicate clearly that earth’s orbital space is currently very much part of the territorial object of military-security planning.5 The strategic imaginary of several contemporary militaries, most prominently that of the United States, includes securitization of, through, and from outer space under such rubrics as missile defense, space control, and force application from space. Space weapons, then, are no longer just a fantasy, an unrealizable fiction. They are rapidly becoming a very real possibility. The questions that arise are: What is to be made of this development? What are the implications if that possibility were actualized? Specifically, how will the deployment of weapons in orbital space affect the structure and character of modern international relations? We take up those questions in this article.

The Affs Justification for putting weapons in space is based on the construction of space threats in the Government through HollywoodDavis, 01 (Doug, Ph D Georgia Institute for Technology, Doomsday Summer, "A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs": Total War in the Fossil Record, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v009/9.3davis.html, JG)

Armageddon's producers may have wrapped their product in Big Science, but as numerous critics quickly pointed out, there is very [End Page 461] little science in the film. There is, however, a massive amount of conspicuous destruction. Throughout the film asteroids rain down like smart bombs, homing in on the world's major urban areas, toppling landmarks such as New York City's Chrysler Building, and incinerating the hub of Paris. People die just as they died in all of the twentieth century's strategic bombing campaigns: as targets, and often without knowing what hit them. Director Michael Bay offers us quick views of the cosmic assault from vantage points reminiscent of war reporting, intercutting unsteady ground footage with static long shots familiar to atomic tests. The finest and most crowd-pleasing moments of Armageddon are its documentary scenes of death from above. That cities are the primary targets of Outer Space's bombing campaign should come as no surprise, for (aside from being more exciting than blowing up fields of tundra) cities have been the presumed targets of strategic bombardment ever since German Zeppelins terrorized Londoners at the onset of the First World War—a presumption driven further home by the fire and atomic bombing campaigns of the Second World War. In a cruel coincidence, the first city utterly

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destroyed in Armageddon, Shanghai, also happens to be the one of the first cities ever subjected to a truly massive aerial bombardment, by the Japanese in the summer of 1937—the year when the aerial bombing of cities and civilians became a commonplace of modern warfare. Armageddon is not a scientific film; it is a war film, and in particular a nuclear war film, with Outer Space cast as the ruthless enemy behind an apocalyptic bombing campaign. Disney Studios actually chose to raise Armageddon's death-toll in order to compete at the box office, when their film was scheduled to open a month after another impact disaster film, Mimi Leder's surprisingly popular Deep Impact. Director Bay flew crews to Paris and Shanghai less than a month before Armageddon's opening in order to shoot extra location footage for additional bombardment sequences. 2 The story told by the retooled Armageddon reiterates Cold War fears of nuclear escalation: a limited meteor strike (against where else but New York) is followed by increasingly destructive strikes against disparate nations' cities; more and more countries are drawn into the fray until, finally, global destruction threatens. While Armageddon's familiar tale of commando heroics may be simply one more instance of Hollywood's reliance on the proven formula, the likeness of its asteroid threat to a Cold War story of nuclear destruction actually tells us as much about the science that inspired [End Page 462] the film as it does about Hollywood. For Armageddon serves as loud witness to how the Cold War continues to influence scientific representation. The threat of a massive impact and the threat of a nuclear war indeed are, in many ways, the same thing, and the Doomsday Summer of 1998 thus enters the annals of the history of science as our most popular record of how the science of cataclysmic impacts has come to understand the threat of such impacts. Armageddon was inspired by the popularity of the science of impact-extinction theory, the much-publicized theory that an asteroid or comet impact caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While it was hardly apparent at the time, with the publication of "the Alvarez thesis" in 1980 by the father-and-son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez and two nuclear chemists from the Berkeley Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, the Cold War had finally come to paleontology. Catastrophic impacts may look like World War III on the silver screen—but only, as I will argue, because by the summer of 1998 asteroid and comet impacts themselves already looked a good deal like World War III, visiting destruction upon the earth in a way very much like that threatened by the policy of strategic nuclear deterrence.

Space exploration, independently, is a response to security discourse. Columbia Peoples, 10 (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, The growing ‘securitization’ of outer space) andrea

The reasoning behind this introduction of securitization theory here into debates on space policy is that the militarization/ weaponization debate only partially captures (at best) the multiple ways in which outer space is being linked to security in the space policy discourses of leading states and international organizations e ways that encompass not only ‘traditional’ military security but also the security of economic, environmental, scientific and technical infrastructures. As is discussed below, space policy is one of the areas where we have seen a rapid proliferation of ‘securitizing moves’ that identify space as crucial to national security and survival in a variety of ways. Even if some of these moves might be argued to be more successful than others in terms of their actual political effects, the sheer prevalence of attempted securitization within space policy provides a rationale for revisiting the question of whether militarization/ weaponization is a sufficient way of framing the analysis of space policy in relation to security.

The US Valorizes itself and securitizes everyone else to justify space militarizationLupro, 09 (Michael Mooradian, Doctor of Philosophy, INTRODUCTION: MUSICAL SUBVERSION OF SPACE TOURISM, SPACE ODDITIES FOR THE AGE OF SPACE TOURISM, JG)

The existing discursive construction of space, to which this project is an amendment, valorizes American exceptionalism, normalizes frontier militarism, and perpetuates myths of technological and capitalist superiority. The space of twentieth century popular culture is of both endless opportunity and unlimited danger. From Star Wars to the Star Trek franchise, the Alien trilogy to Battlestar Galactica, the combatants and contests may differ but the regime of violent conflict is unchallenged. Even within the discourse of opportunity in space, the opportunities are circumscribed by socially constructed terrestrial limits on who gets to participate, how they do so, and to what ends. In other words, the Star Trek franchise may feature ethnically diverse crews and even a female captain in one case, and Trekkies consistently profess tolerant values, but the universalism is wrapped in militarism, the economics are ubiquitously capitalist, and uneasy differences like queerness or class are erased and made invisible.

Generic Militarization

Nuclear weapons were a product of securitization, which lead to the loss of millions of livesDavis, 01 (Doug, Ph D Georgia Institute for Technology, Doomsday Summer, "A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs": Total War in the Fossil Record, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v009/9.3davis.html, JG)

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If we take the interaction theory of metaphor seriously, then we have to grant that just as the threat of nuclear war describes elements of the impact world, impact-extinction theory's figurative war stories are also about our threatened world, and especially that long-lost world of the 1980s.In the long tradition of fable, animals live the trials of men, and their sometimes funny and often gruesome rewards serve as lessons for the proper order of human affairs. For [End Page 499] those who have fought and survived the Cold War, the dawning recognition that the animals of the Cretaceous lived and died much like Cold War subjects is variously seen as a reason to celebrate, to take urgent action, or, frankly, to do nothing at all. For those who suffer their lives under the delegated mechanisms of nuclear deterrence, finding total war in the fossil record underscores the innateness and unhumanity of the world's nuclear arsenals. Making nuclear weapons "absolute weapons" was a historical choice, but in a world defined by Cold War politics it fast became a national imperative, and America's arsenal grew as if an object unto its own. With the discovery of nature's own total war machine, the massive destruction promised by nuclear deterrence becomes more than a protestable fact of geopolitical life and turns into a state of nature. The implicit meaning of impact-extinction theory is indeed a frightening one, for it means that we have always been living under the threat of a total war machine, and as a naturalistic fable the theory may make the nuclear war machine—and the society that built it—seem all that more natural, and even necessary. In popular culture, the impact threat provides an occasion to crow about America's survival of the Cold War and commitment to nuclear weaponry. The post-Cold War headlines announcing the explosive death of the dinosaurs, along with Hollywood depictions of scrapes with planetary doom, such as the 1998 blockbusters Deep Impact and Armageddon, both exploit and assuage any fears left over from four decades lived under nuclear deterrence, leaving their audiences somewhat humbled but all the happier with the present nuclear peace. The death of the dinosaurs, when not put to earnest use by nuclear winter proponents, is a voyeuristic and macabre peek at a World War III that near-missed. The dinosaurs' explosive demise serves up a thrill for American audiences in particular because in American culture the dinosaur already has a very human presence. In his examination of the past century's fascination with dinosaurs, The Last Dinosaur Book, W. J. T. Mitchell details the abundant, contradictory ways in which the dinosaur has been rallied throughout the American popular imagination, from advertisements, films, political cartoons, and children's entertainment to, of course, museum displays and gift shops. The dinosaur represents size, strength, and ferocity—yet at the same time it is a model of failure and obsolescence. Civilization is defined both through and against the dinosaurs. Americans find these particular dead beasts so useful, Mitchell argues somewhat playfully, because they function in American culture as the totem animal of modernity. Like the totems of past tribes, the dinosaur has specific functions for modernity's tribe: it [End Page 500] serves as the epitome of capitalism's temporal cycles of innovation and obsolescence, it embodies the sundry contradictions of modern life, and it figures in a number of enculturing rituals. Either through learning to count, to differentiate categories, and to sing with them as children, or by using them allegorically to justify planned obsolescence and social injustice, Americanized subjects find the meaning of their works and their lives in dinosaurs as in no other animal.

Changes in military tech causes a power shift to violence. Duvall and Havercroft ’06 [Raymond Duvall University of Minnesota, U.S. Army Special Agent at Fort Huachuca, Arizona in September 1989 and have remained in the same specialty for 20 years] [Jonathan Havercroft University of British Columbia Ph.D. Minnesota) specializes in political theory. His primary research focus is on the historical transformation of sovereignty in the discourses of political philosophy from the 17th century to the present,] [October 2006] VBhttp://www.ligi.ubc.ca/sites/liu/files/Publications/Havercroft_paper.pdf

Scholars and practitioners have long recognized that technologies of destruction and economies/cartographies of violence have substantial impact on the form and character of relations within and among political societies.7 A substantial literature on the warinducing/ war-preventing effects of offensive versus defensive military balances provides testimony to that recognition,8 as do arguments commonplace in realist theory that changes in military technology can bring about changes in the distribution of power and, in turn, often violent international systemic change,

Colonization

The Affirmative’s ideology is founded in Christian Folklore; it creates apocalyptic scenarios that depict the earth as a threatMcMillen, 04 (Ryan Jeffrey, Ph. D Philosophy, SPACE RAPTURE: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization, COLONIZING HEAVEN, JG)

The frontier myth is a powerful organizing force in American culture, but the frontier myth has no meaning outside of the ideological and religious roots which call for the conquest of the frontier. Manifest Destiny was, at its heart, a Christian enterprise, an attempt to remake the world in a holy unity under the banner of American Christian idealism. To disconnect Manifest Destiny from its religious roots is to make it merely the hunger for power, but the inner turbine – the dynamo – within Manifest Destiny was Christianity, and an American messianic Christianity of compelling ideological power. While Gerard O'Neill characterized his colonies as an extension of the American frontier, their true inspiration came from Biblical, and specifically New Testament, Scripture. Space colonies, in the vision of O'Neill and others, represent the ultimate utopia of the extraterrestrial millennialist fantasy. O'Neill's colonies in particular promise a heavenly techno-Garden of Eden and are the logical extraterrestrial millennialist completion of the unfinished drama begun with Adam and Eve. In returning to an Eden in the sky, the colonies promise the union of God’s heavenly domain with God’s lost and perfect

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Earthly paradise. In offering a democratic ascension off of the Earth, the space colonies become the ultimate Christian rapture wish in which the chosen – the hardy, spacebound pioneers – escape the doomed Earth before its demise. And in ascending into heaven, the space colonists help to immortalize the human race in a massive imitation of Christ’s solo flight to deathlessness.

Space settlement suggests the fear of eastern states, and sets the ground for longstanding western power.MacDonald, no date [Fraser MacDonald Lecturer in Human Geography Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/rmg/geography/papers/anti-outerspace.pdf] KZ

There is also, I think, scope for a wider agenda on the translation of particular Earthly historical geographies into space, just as there was a translation of early occidental geographies onto imperial spaces. When Donald Rumsfeld talks of a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’, there is plainly a particular set of historico–geographical imaginaries at work that give precedence, in this case, to American experience. Rumsfeld has not been slow to invoke Pearl Harbour, most famously in the aftermath of September 11; notably, in all these examples – Hawaii in 1941; New York in 2001; and the contemporary space race – there lurks the suggestion of a threat from the East 9 . All of this is a reminder that the colonisation of space, rather than being a decisive and transcendent break from the past, is merely an 34extension of longstanding regimes of power. As Peter Redfield succinctly observed, to move into space is ‘a form of return’: it represents ‘a passage forward through the very pasts we might think we are leaving behind’ (Redfield, 2002: 814). All of this supports the idea that space is part and parcel of the Earth’s geography (Cosgrove, 2004: 222). We can conceive of the human geography of space as being, in the words of Doreen Massey, ‘the sum of relations, connections, embodiments and practices’ (Massey, 2005: 8). She goes on to say that ‘these things are utterly everyday and grounded, at the same time as they may, when linked together, go around the world’. To this we might add that they go around and beyond the world. The ‘space’ of space is both terrestrial and extraterrestrial: it is the relation of the Earth to its firmament. Lisa Parks and Ursula Biemann have described our relationship with orbits as being ‘about uplinking and downlinking, [the] translation [of] signals, making exchanges with others and positioning the self’ (Parks and Biemann, 2o03). It is precisely this relational conception of space that might helpfully animate a revised geographical understanding of the Outer Earth.

Hegemony

Representation of American hegemony creates racial hierarchies – they demonize all others as threats to the liberal order.Campbell, 7 [Luiza Bialasiewicz , David Campbell , Stuart Elden , Stephen Graham , Alex Jeffrey , Alison J. William 2007 “Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy” http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/campbell-et-al-performing-security-pol-geog-2007.pdf]

Again, it is essential that we conceptualize these strategies as both containing and making imaginative geographies; specifying the ways ‘‘the world is’’ and, in so doing, actively (re)making that same world. This goes beyond merely the military action or aid programmes that governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production of ways of seeing the world, which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as political strategy. These performative imaginative geographies are at the heart of this paper and will re-occur throughout it. Our concern lies specifically with the ways in which the US portrays e and over the past decade has portrayed e certain parts of the world as requiring involvement, as threats, as zones of instability, as rogue states, ‘‘states of concern’’, as ‘‘global hotspots’’, as well as the associated suggestion that by bringing these within the ‘‘integrated’’ zones of democratic peace, US security e both economically and militarily e can be preserved. Of course, the translation of such imaginations into actual practice (and certainly results) is never as simple as some might like to suggest. Nonetheless, what we wish to highlight here is how these strategies, in essence, produce the effect they name. This, again, is nothing new: the United States has long constituted its identity at least in part through discourses of danger that materialize others as a threat (see Campbell, 1992). Equally, much has been written about the new set of threats and enemies that emerged to fill the post-Soviet void e from radical Islam through the war on drugs to ‘‘rogue states’’ (for a critical analyses see, among others, Benjamin & Simon, 2003; Stokes, 2005; on the genealogies of the idea of ‘‘rogue states’’ see Blum, 2002; Litwak, 2000). What is crucial in the rendering of these strategies, rather, is how those perceived threats are to be dealt with. PNAC, for instance, urged Clinton to take a more hawkish line on Iraq in a 1998 letter (signed by many who would later populate the Bush administration), which concluded with an exhortation: ‘‘We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk’’ (PNAC, 1998). Yet another of PNAC’s co-founders chose to remain on the ‘outside’, howevere and it is to his work that we now turn.

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“Space Race” Rhetoric

The space race is a self-fulfilling prophecy to establish power over nations that pose threats. Siddiqi, 7 [Asif Siddiqi 2007, assistant professor of history of technology, Fordham university, Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Revisiting the Space Race” http://fiftieth.shotnews.net/NSF/siddiqi.pdf] KZ

Both the United States and the Soviet Union, the two earliest space-faring nations, then, produced narratives on space exploration that were deeply grounded in domestic cultural discourses that simultaneously couched their achievements as if they had universal import. These dichotomy runs through most of the historiography on both the Soviet and American space programs. The grand narratives of each nation—frequently utopian in nature—rely on the assumption that each is the normative history of space exploration. This is not a trivial issue, since how we remember and write history bequeaths to future generations how they will remember and memorialize human efforts to explore space. But who will write a history that reflects a global consensus? Is it even possible to propose such a thing? In a recent book, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (2000), authors Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke argue that: The early space race was, amongst other things, a discursive battle over entitlement to represent Universal Man in the biggest story told in modern times. Who was going to be the script writer and the protagonist of the master narrative of mankind’s cosmic exodus? This was and is a question that matters a great deal when the official story of spaceflight is retold. 20 Who writes the history of space exploration and how do you account for multiple and contradictory national narratives? In their recent book, Hubris and Hybrids, Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison describe the process of “cultural appropriation” of science and technology as “the discursive, institutional, and daily practices through which technology and science are given human meaning.” 21 How do you account for cultural appropriations of the same technological events—say, Cold War space history—that are wildly different? And finally, how do these particular cultural appropriations which are essentially nation-specific narratives make claims as global narratives, or the “global normative”?

The space race securitizes the ultimate high ground, the us perceives other nations as threats to our manifest destiny. West, 11[Jessica West, PhD Candidate, 2011 “Governing Contemporary Security Challenges: The Canadian Approach to Polyvalent Security in Outer Space” http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2011/West.pdf] KZ

Space has predominantly served traditional national security purposes, which emerged in the context of the Cold War following the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik-1, by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. Viewed through the lens of the existential competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, Sputnik was interpreted as a threat to the survival of the nation similar to iconic events such as Pearl Harbor and the development of the atomic bomb; as the ultimate weapon in a do-or-die competition for the world. 5 This view quickly infiltrated government lexicon through the efforts of individuals such as Lyndon B. Johnson, who referred to outer space as the “ultimate high ground” and described the emerging space race as a “race for survival.” 6 This security discourse was largely replaced with a complimentary focus on techno-nationalism and prestige that operated on both sides of an emerging race for space. 7 From the Soviet perspective, Sputnik was a symbol of the superiority of the Soviet system and of its triumph in science and technology as part of a global struggle with the United States for ‘hearts and minds.’ 8 Likewise, the establishment of the US National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 and the ensuing mission to the Moon was aimed in large part at national prestige and securing its place as the leader of the free world. 9 But the use of space as an instrument for the military security of the state continued, albeit in silence. Popular terms such as ‘peaceful use’ and ‘freedom of space,’ which were institutionalized within the international framework for space activities set out in the Outer Space Treaty, became euphemisms for military use because of what they did not mean – no military use – thereby serving as rhetorical mask for what was a race for the narrow, military security of two nations.

“Space Leadership” RhetoricThe US uses threats to justify violent militaristic domination of spaceMacDonald, no date [Fraser MacDonald Lecturer in Human Geography Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/rmg/geography/papers/anti-outerspace.pdf] KZ

Although Dolman claims that ‘no attempt will be made to create a convincing argument that the United States has a right to domination in space’, in almost the next sentence he goes on to argue ‘that, in this

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case, might does make right’, ‘the persuasiveness of the case’ being ‘based on the self-interest of the state and stability of the system’ (156; my emphasis). Truly, this is Astropolitik: a veneration of the ineluctable logic of power and the permanent rightness of those who wield it. And if it sounds chillingly familiar, Dolman hopes to reassure us with his belief that ‘the US form of liberal democracy … is admirable and socially encompassing’ (156) and it is ‘the most benign state that has ever attempted hegemony over the greater part of the world’ (158). His sunny view that the United States is ‘willing to extend legal and political equality to all’ sits awkwardly with the current suspension of the rule of law in Guantanamo Bay as well as in various other ‘spaces of exception’ (see Gregory, 2004; Agamben, 2005).

Surveillance

US satellites were established as a result of securitization and are the single greatest opportunity for us world dominationOrr, 04 (Jackie, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University, The Securitization of Inner Space PDF, JG)

The battles for which the U.S. Space Command is prepared are not futuristic science fiction scenarios. As the command center responsible for the protection and proliferation of military and commercial satellites, and for the rejuvenated National Missile Defense program, the Space Command is already a key player in the conduct of U.S. war. Satellitemediated infotech warfare has arrived. The militarized use of space-based satellites to provide real-time flows of information and imagery debuted in the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, developed in the 1990s during the U.S.-led war against Iraq and in the killing fields of Kosovo, and is today an integral component of U.S. military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq (Gray 1997; Grossman 2001). “Space support to NATO’s operations in Kosovo was a perfect example of how the United States will fight its wars in the future,” the Space Command reported in 2002, “Satelliteguided munitions, communications, navigation, and weather all combined to achieve military objectives in a relatively short amount of time and without the loss of a single U.S. troop.” 4 As home to an increasingly sophisticated and expensive infrastructure of satellites, and to a proposed network of (possibly nuclear-powered) space stations equipped with laser weaponry, ‘outer space’ is now the final, fantastic frontier for the U.S. military’s imaginary and material battlefields. With Full Spectrum Dominance as its official doctrine, the U.S. Space Command clearly articulates its 21st century mission: to ensure that the United States will remain a global power and exert global leadership during the current “globalization of the world economy.” Noting with admirable sociological acumen that this globalization will create a “widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ . . . [and] [t]his gap will widen – creating regional unrest,” the U.S. Space Command announces that the new strategic situation requires “a global perspective to conduct military operations and support regional warfighting. . .” 5 The U.S. Space Command stands ready to serve.

Surveillance tech signifies the importance of Litfin, 99[KAREN T. LITFIN “The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Di f fus ion of Epistemic Sovereignty” 1999 http://faculty.washington.edu/litfin/research/litfin-status.pdf] KZ

Surve i l l anc e technologies have be en the ba s i s for the s t a t e ' s administrative power throughout the modern era, a s Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault have argued, albeit in different ways and reaching different conclusions.f1 Indeed, "statistics" and " s t a t e " a r e derived from the same root (Latin, " to s t and" ) ; not coincidentally, the large-scale collection of statistics began with the emergence of the mode rn state. 7 As Giddens notes, the importance of surveillance a s a medium of powe r ha s not be en gr a sped by e i the r the liberal or the socialist t r adi t ions in political and economic theory,S Nor has it been grasped by any of the dominant approaches within international relations theory.

The idea that you can monitor space in interest of the state reaffirms insecurity and leaves no room for personal freedom.Laurence, 7[Nardon, Laurence (2007) 'Cold War Space Policy and Observation Satellites', Astropolitics, 5:1, 29 – 62 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14777620701509280] KZ

Although his ideas have been criticized, Foucault’s analyses supply innovative and fruitful concepts for the understanding of international relations and of surveillance techniques as a tool of power. Foucault studied how power and discipline are at work in our societies. He particularly emphasized the idea that knowledge, be it medical knowledge or social sciences teachings, is always representative of the political philosophy of a particular moment in history. Social discourses are never neutral. They convey particular political messages to the masses and each individual is prey to these powerful

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instruments. Towards the end of his life, Foucault applied these theories to international relations, developing concepts of international power. Contemporary Power The balance of power in Western societies has evolved in time and description of these evolutions is an important aspect of Foucault’s work. Contemporary power, he explains, is a type of political power that first appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries, along with the Enlightenment era. Before that time, notably in medieval times, governments left the population relatively free in its daily pursuits but signaled the existence of law by enforcing rare but Cold War Space Policy and Observation Satellites Contemporary power, by contrast, creates a multiplicity of control networks, such as schools, prisons, hospitals, military conscription, and churches, which surround each individual. People are expected to obey the norms set up by these institutions. Little by little, they will do so. As the individual becomes more self-disciplined, deterrence by punishment finally becomes less necessary. A characteristic of contemporary society is that the focus of interest has switched from the King as source of power—with the rest of society remaining an obscure mass—to a system where different techniques seek to watch the latter, putting them in full light. This feature is reminiscent of satellite observation, a hidden technology that monitors human activities. A further element of Foucault’s work also provides a link to post 1945 observation techniques. In his book, Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault describes the reformatory prison as a disciplining institution that is characteristic of contemporary power.

China Threatcon

The affirmative views China as a security threat to be contained or stopped, based on orientalist assumptions which over-inflate China’s goals Latham 1[Andrew A., assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota. PhD from Yotk University, Toronto. “China in the contemporary American geopolitical imagination” Asian Affairs: “]

China in the U.S. Geopolitical Imagination How does China fit into this new geopolitical imaginary? The rhetorical representations circulating in connection with the April 2001 U.S.--China spy plane incident provide perhaps the clearest answer to this question. Simply put, this episode revealed two (related) elements of the contemporary U.S. cultural framing of China. First, as became abundantly clear during the spy plane crisis, China is now viewed by many Americans as failing to meet the standards of civilized international conduct that would qualify it for full membership in the global "family of nations." During the crisis, for example, China was routinely represented in policy, media, and academic circles as being unable to grasp or play by the rules of civilized international society (especially those regarding aircraft in distress, sovereign immunity of damaged military aircraft, and international property rights); undemocratically contemptuous of universal human rights; irresponsible; dangerous; irredentist; militaristic; childishly nationalistic; technologically backward; and willfully blind to America's benign/stabilizing role in the Asia-Pacific region. In the new U.S. geopolitical imaginary, then, although China does not quite make it into the category of "rogue" state, it is clearly represented as sharing with states like North Korea and Iraq some of the characteristics of an 'irrational and threatening rogue. At a minimum, there is a widespread belief that China is a dangerous state that cannot be counted on to act in accordance with the norms of civilized international relations. Second, the rhetoric surrounding the spy plane incident also clearly revealed a powerful tendency within the United States to view China as a country that poses an actual challenge to American regional leadership and that harbors ambitions of becoming a global peer competitor of the United States. Media commentary on the crisis repeatedly made reference to China's regional hegemonic ambitions, :suggesting over and over again that China wanted not only to reintegrate Taiwan but also to deny the United States military access to sensitive areas like the South China Sea and ultimately to realize military dominance in the region. Some have even suggested that in the not-too-distant future China will have economic and military capabilities that will allow it to threaten U.S. interests beyond the Asia-Pacific region. The rhetorical exaggeration displayed in the U.S. media during this crisis--especially when set against China's actually quite limited military and political capability to pursue such goals--suggests that this view of China was less a rational appraisal of an objective threat than an artifact of a profoundly interpretive exercise that was powerfully conditioned by a geopolitical imaginary that had already framed China as an aggressive, militaristic, and expansionist near-rogue state. To sum up: In this new geopolitical imaginary China figures somewhere between a rogue state and a global strategic rival on the order of the old Soviet Union. Underpinning this contemporary framing is a centuries-old set of orientalist assumptions about the nature of Chinese society, as well as a more recent discourse

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related to the threat of (and need to contain) communism. To be sure, not all Americans accept this view of China; many see the possibilities associated with engaging China. Even here, however, the dominant geopolitical imaginary retains its grip; for the purpose of engagement in the minds of many Americans is to transform China via expanded trade and investment ties into a democratic country that will become a responsible member of the international community

Representations of China as a security threat are self-fulfilling prophesiesPan 4[Chengxin Pan, Chengxin Pan is Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University, Australia. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the Australian National University. “The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”]

More specifically, I want to argue that U.S. conceptions of China as a threatening other are always intrinsically tied to how U.S. policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example). As such, they are not value-free, objective descriptions of an independent, preexisting Chinese reality out there, but are better understood as a kind of normative, meaning-giving practice that often legitimates power politics in U.S.-China relations and helps transform the "China threat" into social reality. In other words, it is self-fulfilling in practice, and is always part of the "China threat" problem it purports merely to describe. In doing so, I seek to bring to the fore two interconnected themes of self/other constructions and of theory as practice inherent in the "China threat" literature--themes that have been overridden and rendered largely invisible by those common positivist assumptions.

The “China threat” serves as a construct that denies individual Chinese identity. Pan 4[Chengxin Pan, Chengxin Pan is Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University, Australia. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the Australian National University. “The "China Threat" in American Self-Imagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics”]

Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions. In this sense, the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism, a positivist, ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo)realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other," (45) and "All other states are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itself." (48) As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers." (49) Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability. The enemy is instability." (51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" (52) Thus understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a

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threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but certainly not all. (54) The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China," (55) argues Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat) was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)." (56) It is mainly on the basis of this self-fashioning that many U.S. scholars have for long claimed their "expertise" on China. For example, from his observation (presumably on Western TV networks) of the Chinese protest against the U.S. bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, Robert Kagan is confident enough to speak on behalf of the whole Chinese people, claiming that he knows "the fact" of "what [China] really thinks about the United States." That is, "they consider the United States an enemy--or, more precisely, the enemy.... How else can one interpret the Chinese government's response to the bombing?" he asks, rhetorically. (57) For Kagan, because the Chinese "have no other information" than their government's propaganda, the protesters cannot rationally "know" the whole event as "we" do. Thus, their anger must have been orchestrated, unreal, and hence need not be taken seriously. (58) Given that Kagan heads the U.S. Leadership Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is very much at the heart of redefining the United States as the benevolent global hegemon, his confidence in speaking for the Chinese "other" is perhaps not surprising. In a similar vein, without producing in-depth analysis, Bernstein and Munro invoke with great ease such all-encompassing notions as "the Chinese tradition" and its "entire three-thousand-year history." (59) In particular, they repeatedly speak of what China's "real" goal is: "China is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to dominate Asia.... China aims at achieving a kind of hegemony.... China is so big and so naturally powerful that [we know] it will tend to dominate its region even if it does not intend to do so as a matter of national policy." (60) Likewise, with the goal of absolute security for the United States in mind, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen argue: The truth is that China can pose a grave problem even if it does not become a military power on the American model, does not intend to commit aggression, integrates into a global economy, and liberalizes politically. Similarly, the United States could face a dangerous conflict over Taiwan even if it turns out that Beijing lacks the capacity to conquer the island.... This is true because of geography; because of America's reliance on alliances to project power; and because of China's capacity to harm U.S. forces, U.S. regional allies, and the American homeland, even while losing a war in the technical, military sense. (61) By now, it seems clear that neither China's capabilities nor intentions really matter. Rather, almost by its mere geographical existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and for the U.S. self. Little wonder that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for the United States, with the "severe disproportion between the keen attention to China as a security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security concerns in the current debate." (62) At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves. (63) "We" alone can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic distinction between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly." (64) It may be the case that there is nothing inherently wrong with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with mainstream U.S. China watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the inherent fluidity of Chinese identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference from "us," a kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it becomes difficult to find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently volatile, amorphous China (65) or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is contingent essentially on how

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"we" in the United States and the West in general want to see it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it. (66) Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely ed to how "we" as "what we are" deal with "them" as "what they are" in the practical realm. This is exactly how the discursive strategy of perceiving China as a threatening other should be understood, a point addressed in the following section, which explores some of the practical dimension of this discursive strategy in the containment perspectives and hegemonic ambitions of U.S. foreign policy.

The threat of the “China Rise” is a hypocritical and false construct.Gries 7[Peter Hays Gries 2007 “& US-China Relations” http://www.ou.edu/uschina/harmony.pdf] KZ

A new discourse of difference is emerging in twentyfirst-century China. Wang Jisi, the dean of American studies in China today, wrote one of its first cogent manifestos in 2003. In “The Logic of American Hegemony,” Wang argues that there is a close link between American liberalism and American hegemony. He quotes Walter Russell Mead and Arthur Schlesinger at length to claim that Americans “worship violence,” have a “warlike disposition,” and are “bloodthirsty.” Wang concludes with a clear policy prescription: “To eradicate American hegemony,” he argues, “we must make them believe that there are other systems that are more admirable.” 1 Little is left to the imagination: that “other system” is clearly Chinese. A discourse of difference between an inherently aggressive U.S. “hegemony” and an inherently “peaceful” China is central to emerging Chinese nationalist views of China’s “harmonious civilization.” Chinese Occidentalism—Chinese uses of the “West” in general and the United States in particular as others against which to define what it means to be “Chinese”— is nothing new. 2 Ever since the emergence of popular Chinese nationalism in the mid-1990s, with best-sellers like China Can Say No (1996) and Behind the Demonization of China (1997), the United States has been central to Chinese nationalist constructions of “China’s rise,” both as a marker of similarity against which to establish China’s great-power status and as a marker of difference against which to establish China’s “peaceful” nature. A discourse of similarity was central to late-1990s Chinese responses to American “clash of civilizations” and “China threat” discourses. In each case, many Chinese nationalists objected to American implications that China might be threatening—but simultaneously delighted in being perceived as threatening. This paradox begs explanation. American perceptions of a China threat, in my view, served to confirm Chinese nationalist assertions about China’s great-power status. Indeed, many Chinese nationalists obsessively compare China to the United States, generating a discourse of U.S.-China similarity. Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” argument created a sensation among Chinese nationalists in the 1990s less out of a stated opposition to his view of a “Confucian threat” to the West than out of a secret delight that high-status Westerners like Huntington felt threatened by China. Writing in Beijing’s influential Reading magazine, for instance, the Chinese Academy of Social Science’s Li Shenzhi argued that China “should take Huntington’s perspectives seriously because they represent a kind of deep [racial] fear.” 3 Huntington’s argument was celebrated because it provided external validation of Chinese nationalists’ own claims about “China’s rise.”

Russia Threatcon

The US Space Command is inherently securitizing, it was created on the very premise of a Russian threat.Orr, 04 (Jackie, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University, The Securitization of Inner Space PDF, JG)

The ‘war against terrorism’ is the repetitiously proffered answer to this last query. But a little bit of history and the website of the U.S. Space Command suggest another story. The U.S. Space Command was established in 1985 as the coordinating military body unifying Army, Navy, and Air Force activities in outer space. “As stewards for military space,” states General Howell M. Estes III, the Space Command’s ex-Commander in Chief, “we must be prepared to exploit the advantages of the space medium.” In Joint Vision 2010, an operational plan for securing and maintaining unchallengeable “space power,” the U.S. Space Command describes how “the medium of space is the fourth medium of warfare – along with land, sea, and air.” The end result of the “emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority” is the achievement of Full Spectrum Dominance: the capacity of the U.S. military to dominate in any conflict, waged in any terrestrial or extraterrestrial medium. Or, in the Space Command’s words, displayed onscreen against the black, star studded background of empty space: “U.S. Space Command – dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.

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“Cold War” Rhetoric

The Affs Justification of Space Exploration is based on Cold War Rhetoric, which securitized everyone outside of the USSage, 08 (Daniel, Institute of Geography and Earth Science, Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space, JG)

Implicit in Kennedy’s speech is the idea that outer space can be staged as the universal destiny of humankind, and that America, to ensure its national destiny of leading humanity, must strive to reach this frontier first. In effect, the claiming of frontier space and frontier time was conflated. Retrospectively, the space race also drained vast amounts of cash from the USSR’s military programmes, which, in hindsight, appears to have indeed served a strategic purpose, while the technology developed by the US did indeed have many military and civilian ‘spin-off’ applications. And yet, as Kennedy’s words imply, this was not the way in which Cold War political campaigns, or indeed the space race, was framed and legitimised. Just as the western frontier in the nineteenth century provided a canvas upon which to articulate discourses of American nationalism through writers such as Frederick Jackson Turner, so, as the Apollo programme developed, NASA could evoke a Bonestellian, romanticised vision of outer space as the ‘new’, American frontier. In other words, popular geopolitical imaginations were feeding into practical geopolitical decision-making processes and technological developments. For example, in 1964 NASA administrator James Webb explained how “the frontier thesis . . . based on the ‘wild and unperturbable’ forces of the frontier . . . have the feedback effect of generating in the pioneer those qualities which have made for the American democratic system, the same kind of analogy may be considered in connection with efforts such as space.”71 In the same year President Johnson referred to how Americans were going towards a “future of horizons that are unlimited”; the conquest of space would “determine how we live” and whether Americans can win the fight for liberty over Communist enslavement.72 In the next section I address the enduring geopolitical importance of these Bonestellian aesthetic codes, starting with the memorialisation of the Apollo landings. This discussion then leads on to some concluding comments about how the Bonestellian ‘geopolitical-aesthetic’ code has been imbricated into NASA’s current plans for human space exploration.

Cold war discourse and the manifest destiny concept is deeply rooted in geopolitical concern in interest of the state. Donglai, no date [Dr. Ren Donglai, Hopkins-Nanjing Center, “ From the Contemporary American Geopolitical Imagination to a contemporary American Geopolitical Strategy” http://irchina.org/en/xueren/china/pdf/rdl1.pdf] KZ

So, either in the Cold War discourse or the Post-Cold War discourse, the basic elements of American geopolitical imagination has not been changed much. The Americans still feel unsecured and threat from outside, and still have a kind of “Manifest Destiny” in leading the world to a promised land”. Just as Dr. Latham proposes, “with the end of the Cold War, the key elements of America’s geopolitical imagination have been transformed in ways that mark a partial break with the Cold War discourse.” If the contemporary American geopolitical imagination break partially with the Cold War discourse, we have reasons to believe that elemental strategic thinking of American policy makers, which was shaped in the Cold War, still works in formation of American foreign and defense policy for new century. Meanwhile, all most no one denies that there was the U.S. grand or global strategy in the Cold War, whatever it was named containment or anticommunism. So it is fair to say there is some kind of strategy in area of American foreign and defense, at least in the eyes of leadership and scholarship in China. For the Chinese readers, their understanding of “ strategy” is based on a common sense or a simple meaning, it is “long-term and overall planning”(David Robertson, A Dictionary of Modern politics, London, 1996,p.499).

“Morality/enlightenment” Rhetoric

Humanist enlightenment assumptions are only to control the world around us.George ’94 [Jim, Senior lecturer in international relations in the Department of Political Science, Australian National University, “Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations,”]

With the development of a modern physics in the seventeenth century, the iments of an empiricist theory of knowledge were emerging, particularly in Western Europe and Britain. Galileo, in particular, was important in this regard as the first to formulate a conception of science, based on exper imentation and quantitative laws.l6 In England, moreover, Francis Bacon was pronouncing the "old" tradition of Greek philosophy as of no more value than "prattle . . . characteristic of boys" because, for all its philosoph ical contemplation, it had not "adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man."17 Accordingly, insisted Bacon, the real purpose of modern knowledge was "the building in the human understanding [of] a true model of the world, such as it is in fact, not such as man's own reason would have it be."18 In the same vein, and in terms that bring the knowledge/power nexus more starkly into focus (particularly Foucault's focus), Bacon's search for an objective knowledge of the world was stimulated by the desire to gain

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"command over things natural over bodies, medicine, mechanical power and infinite others of this kind."19

The concept of morality is only an excuse that the sovereign uses to justify violenceNeocleous 8 [Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy; Head of Department of Politics & History of Brunel University, Critique of Security, Edinburgh University Press Ltd, page 17-18]

The doctrine of reason of state holds that besides moral reason there is another reason independent of traditional (that is, Christian) values and according to which power should be wielded, not accord – ing to the dictates of good conscience or morality, but according to whatever is needed to maintain the state. The underlying logic here is order and security rather than ‘the good’, and the underlying basis of the exercise of power is necessity. The doctrine is thus founded on principles and assumptions seemingly antithetical to the liberal idea of liberty – in either the moral or the legal sense. Courses of action that would be condemned as immoral if conducted by individuals could be sanctioned when undertaken by the sovereign power. ‘When I talked of murdering or keeping the Pisans imprisoned, I didn’t perhaps talk as a Christian: I talked according to the reason and practice of states’. 21 Hence for Machiavelli, Romulus deserved to be excused for the death of his brother and his companion because ‘what he did was done for the common good’. 22 The doctrine of reason of state thus treats the sovereign as autonomous from morality; the state can engage in whatever actions it thinks right – ‘contrary to truth, contrary to charity, contrary to humanity, contrary to religion’ 23 – so long as they are necessary and performed for the public good. But this is to also suggest that the state might act beyond law and the legal limits on state power so long as it does so for ‘the common good’, the ‘good of the people’ or the ‘preservation of the state’.

“9/11” Rhetoric

The US used September 11 to justify a regime of security that stretched to the presentOrr, 04 (Jackie, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University, The Securitization of Inner Space PDF, JG)

Finally, perhaps most importantly, efforts to militarize post-September 11 civilian psyches lean heavily on a coded politics of meaning. If militarization always depends on the successful construction of confident borders between an evil ‘them’ and a good ‘us,’ then ‘we’ must notice the particular kind of border work being done today by the word ‘terrorism’ itself. ‘Terrorism’ does not only name and condemn specific acts, it also promotes a specific kind of psychological relationship. The word encodes a set of psychological meanings; it not only names but performs a form of self-other relationship. “As a boundary marker, the terrorist at once unsettles and stabilizes, filling a position recently vacated by the Communist in a post-Cold War era,” writes Lon Troyer (2002). The unsettling threat of the ‘terrorist’ as radically outside cultural intelligibility and beyond moral understanding, secures for the presumably ‘non-terrorist’ self its own moral grounding and cultural membership. The ‘terrorist’ is grotesquely, yet gratifyingly, ‘other.’ The historical fact that the 20th century usage of the word ‘terrorism’ emerged in the violent ambiguities of colonial occupation – in the violation of national, racial, ethnic, cultural, sexual, religious, linguistic, economic, and psychological borders – is not coincidental. Used, for example, by French colonial forces in the 1950s to name strategies of violent struggle by Algerian guerillas against French domination, ‘terrorism’ became a way to police forms of violence conducted without recourse to nationalized armies or centralized military command. 37 ‘Terrorism’ became a name for the violence deployed by people at an enormous military disadvantage, outside the boundaries of a mutually agreed upon battlefield. ‘Terrorism’ stages the theater of war, by force and of necessity, inside the realms of everyday life and everyday imagination and everyday fear.

***IMPACTS***

2NC Impact Block Generic

Kritik outweighs and turns case

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The A Sub-point is that it makes extinction inevitable – the notion that military solutions are needed to solve global problems ensures US involvement globally, meaning wars and violence will continue to occur. There’s only a risk of nuclear war in the world of the planSandy & Perkins 1 – Leo R., co-founder of Peace Studies at Plymouth State College and Ray, teacher of philosophy at Plymouth State College, The Nature of Peace and Its Implications for Peace Education Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolutions, 4.2

In its most myopic and limited definition, peace is the mere absence of war . O'Kane (1992) sees this definition as a "vacuous, passive, simplistic, and unresponsive escape mechanism too often resorted to in the past - without success." This definition also commits a serious oversight: it ignores the residual feelings of mistrust and suspicion that the winners and losers of a war harbor toward each other. The subsequent suppression of mutual hostile feelings is not taken into account by those who define peace so simply. Their stance is that as long as people are not actively engaged in overt, mutual, violent, physical, and destructive activity, then peace exists. This, of course, is just another way of defining cold war. In other words, this simplistic definition is too broad because it allows us to attribute the term " peace" to states of affairs that are not truly peaceful (Copi and Cohen, p. 194). Unfortunately, this definition of peace appears to be the prevailing one in the world. It is the kind of peace maintained by a "peace through strength" posture that has led to the arms race , stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and the ultimate threat of mutually assured destruction . This version of peace was defended by the "peacekeeper" - a name that actually adorns some U.S. nuclear weapons deployed since 1986. Also, versions of this name appear on entrances to some military bases. Keeping "peace" in this manner evokes the theme in Peggy Lee's old song, "Is That All There is?" What this really comes down to is the idea of massive and indiscriminate killing for peace, which represents a morally dubious notion if not a fault of logic. The point here is that a "peace" that depends upon the threat and intention to kill vast numbers of human beings is hardly a stable or justifiable peace worthy of the name. Those in charge of waging war know that killing is a questionable activity. Otherwise, they would not use such euphemisms as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs" to obfuscate it.

B. Their securitized logic creates an us-them dichotomy, where if we think something is a threat, we’ll go and exterminate it. This causes genocides globally. I’ll give a few examples of this. We thought that Iraq represented a “threat” to US security, even with a lack of evidence, justifying an invasion. This led to thousands of deaths.We thought that getting to space first was key to maintaining global order, so many astronauts died in the processEven if these are small impacts, the addition of the thousands of deaths they’ve each caused outweighs a nuclear warVote Neg to have a critical re-evaluation of securitization

C. The 1AC advantages are made up – solvency is a rigged game and they result in error replicationDillon and Reid 2k – Michael Dillon and Julian Reid Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency. By: Dillon, Michael, Reid, Julian, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 03043754, Jan-Mar2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1

More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or

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otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becom ing a policy problem . Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy , for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation . There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such " paralysis of analysis " is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want . Yet serial policy failure --the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.

Genocide

Securitization is a precondition to genocide- their advantage descriptions will be used to justify massive violenceFriis 2k, (Karstin, UN Sector @ the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2k [Peace and Conflict Studies7.2,“FromLiminarstoOthers:SecuritizationThroughMyths,”http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=2]

The problem with societal securitization is one of representation. It is rarely clear in advance who it is that speaks for a community. There is no system of representation as in a state. Since literately anyone can stand up as representatives, there is room for entrepreneurs. It is not surprising if we experience a struggle between different representatives and also their different representations of the society. What they do share, however, is a conviction that they are best at providing (a new) order. If they can do this convincingly, they gain legitimacy. What must be done is to make the uncertain certain and make the unknown an object of knowledge. To present a discernable Other is a way of doing this. The Other is represented as an Other -- as an unified single actor with a similar unquestionable set of core values (i.e. the capital “O”). They are objectified, made into an object of knowledge, by re-presentation of their identity and values. In other words, the representation of the Other is depoliticized in the sense that its inner qualities are treated as given and non-negotiable. In Jef Huysmans (1998:241) words, there is both a need for a mediation of chaos as well as of threat. A mediation of chaos is more basic than a mediation of threat, as it implies making chaos into a meaningful order by a convincing representation of the Self and its surroundings. It is a mediation of “ontological security”, which means “...a strategy of managing the limits of reflexivity ... by fixing social relations into a symbolic and institutional order” (Huysmans 1998:242). As he and others (like Hansen 1998:240) have pointed out, the importance of a threat construction for political identification, is often overstated. The mediation of chaos, of being the provider of order in general, is just as important. This may imply naming an Other but not necessarily as a threat. Such a dichotomization implies a necessity to get rid of all the liminars (what Huysmans calls “strangers”). This is because they “...connote a challenge to categorizing practices through the impossibility of being categorized”, and does not threaten the community, “...but the possibility of ordering itself” (Huysmans 1998:241). They are a challenge to the entrepreneur by their very existence. They confuse the dichotomy of Self and Other and thereby the entrepreneur’s mediation of chaos. As mentioned, a liminar can for instance be people of mixed ethnical ancestry but also representations of competing world-pictures. As Eide (1998:76) notes: “Over and over again we see that the “liberals” within a group undergoing a mobilisation process for group conflict are the first ones to go”. The liminars threaten the

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ontological order of the entrepreneur by challenging his representation of Self and Other and his mediation of chaos, which ultimately undermines the legitimacy of his policy. The liminars may be securitized by some sort of disciplination, from suppression of cultural symbols to ethnic cleansing and expatriation. This is a threat to the ontological order of the entrepreneur, stemming from inside and thus repoliticizing the inside/outside dichotomy. Therefore the liminar must disappeas. It must be made into a Self, as several minority groups throughout the world have experienced, or it must be forced out of the territory. A liminar may also become an Other, as its connection to the Self is cut and their former common culture is renounced and made insignificant. In Anne Norton’s (1988:55) words, “The presence of difference in the ambiguous other leads to its classification as wholly unlike and identifies it unqualifiedly with the archetypal other, denying the resemblance to the self.” Then the liminar is no longer an ontological danger (chaos), but what Huysmans (1998:242) calls a mediation of “daily security”. This is not challenging the order or the system as such but has become a visible, clear-cut Other. In places like Bosnia, this naming and replacement of an Other, has been regarded by the securitizing actors as the solution to the ontological problem they have posed. Securitization was not considered a political move, in the sense that there were any choices. It was a necessity: Securitization was a solution based on a depoliticized ontology.10 This way the world-picture of the securitizing actor is not only a representation but also made into reality. The mythical second-order language is made into first-order language, and its “innocent” reality is forced upon the world. To the entrepreneurs and other actors involved it has become a “natural” necessity with a need to make order, even if it implies making the world match the map. Maybe that is why war against liminars are so often total; it attempts a total expatriation or a total “solution” (like the Holocaust) and not only a victory on the battlefield. If the enemy is not even considered a legitimate Other, the door may be more open to a kind of violence that is way beyond any war conventions, any jus in bello. This way, securitizing is legitimized: The entrepreneur has succeeded both in launching his world-view and in prescribing the necessary measures taken against it. This is possible by using the myths, by speaking on behalf of the natural and eternal, where truth is never questioned.

Terrorism

Soldiers are state sponsored terrorists Orr, 04 (Jackie, Department of Sociology, Syracuse University, The Securitization of Inner Space PDF, JG)

But the purportedly distinguishing features of ‘terrorism’ – that civilians are the direct target of attack, and that the attacks are designed to create extreme fear and terror in the broader population – are, as I have tried to show here, a routinely practiced, planned-for feature of 20th century warfare. No, the difference between ‘terrorism’ and other forms of violence lies elsewhere. ‘Terrorists’ are a species of civilian-soldier who could not exist without the psychological and historical disavowal by other civiliansoldiers who refuse to remember that the boundary between civilian and military, between lethal violence and everyday life, has been breached and is bleeding into almost every psyche, every 21st century civilian-soldier’s nightmare of domination or sweet dream of social justice. The boundary that the word ‘terrorist’ really draws is between some civilian-soldiers and certain other civilian-soldiers. Historically, it is often a racialized boundary, sedimented with histories of colonization, and material and symbolic exploitation. Currently in the U.S., it is a racialized name used against some civilian-soldiers by other civilian-soldiers who refuse recognition of their own historical and contemporary role in the military manufacture of everyday violence. It is a name used today to mobilize and militarize U.S. civilian psychology for the production of continued, intensified violence – often against other civilians. It is a word that promotes violence across unacknowledged borders, in the name of borders that don’t exist. It is a secret coded message sending covert psychological instructions through political and historical, ambiguous and bloody networks of violent fear.

Pre-emptive action

Threat construction causes the US to take pre-emptive action. Campbell, 7 [Luiza Bialasiewicz , David Campbell , Stuart Elden , Stephen Graham , Alex Jeffrey , Alison J. William 2007 “Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy” http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/campbell-et-al-performing-security-pol-geog-2007.pdf] KZ

What is crucial in the rendering of these strategies, rather, is how those perceived threats are to be dealt with. PNAC, for instance, urged Clinton to take a more hawkish line on Iraq in a 1998 letter (signed by many who would later populate the Bush administration), which concluded with an exhortation: ‘‘We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk’’ (PNAC, 1998). Yet another of PNAC’s co-founders chose to remain on the ‘outside’, however e and it is to his work that we now turn. The ‘scribe’ in question is Robert Kagan, who in June 2002 published a highly influential piece in the foreign policy journal Policy Review, later expanded as a

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book (Kagan, 2003). At the time, Kagan was a political commentator for the Washington Post and a writer for a number of conservative monthlies, and had served in the State Department from 1984 to 1998. In the early 1980s he was a member of the Department’s policy planning unit, and worked in the first Bush Administration as Secretary of State George Schultz’s speechwriter. Entitled ‘‘Power and Weakness’’, Kagan’s essay detailed what he argued was the increasingly evident disparity between American and European worldviews, particularly with regard to the conduct of international affairs. But his analysis, as we will argue here, constituted above all a justification for American power, and its exercise wherever and however necessary. Kagan’s analysis as part of a wider ‘‘understanding’’ of the ways in which the post-ColdWar world ‘‘works’’ developed by neoconservative intellectuals would prepare the ground, indeed, make ‘‘indispensable’’, US unilateralism and its doctrine of pre-emptive action.

Policy failure

Absent the negatives problemetization of security there will be a violent global governance and serial policy failure. Dillon 2k [Michael Dillon, Professor of Political Science at Lancaster and internationally renowed author and Julian Reid, lecturer on international relations and progessor of political Science at King’s College in Longon, “Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”]

As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[ 34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becominga policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure.

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***ALTERNATIVES***

Rejection

The alternative is to disengage from the astro-political imperialist logic. MacDonald, no date [Fraser MacDonald Lecturer in Human Geography Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/rmg/geography/papers/anti-outerspace.pdf] KZ

Rather than actively supporting the dominant structures and mechanisms of power, a critical astropolitics must place the primacy of such forces always already in question. Critical astropolitics aims to scrutinise the power politics of the expert/think-tank/tactician as part of a wider project of deepening public debate and strengthening democratic accountability (Ó Tuathail, 1999: 108). 3. Mackinder’s ‘end of geography’ thesis held that the era of terrestrial exploration and discovery was over, leaving only the task of consolidating the world order to fit British interests (O’ Tuathail, 1996: 27). Dolman’s vision of space strategy bears striking similarities. And like Ó Tuathail’s 32critique of Mackinder’s imperial hubris, Astropolitik could be reasonably described as ‘triumphalism blind to its own precariousness’ (O’ Tuathail, 1996: 28). Dolman, for instance, makes little effort to conceal his tumescent patriotism, observing that ‘the United States is awash with power after its impressive victories in the 1991 Gulf War and 1999 Kosovo campaign, and stands at the forefront of history capable of presiding over the birth of a bold New World Order’. One might argue, however, that Mackinder – as the theorist of imperial decline – may in this respect be an appropriate mentor (Ó Tuathail, 1999: 112). It is important, I think, to demystify Astropolitik: there is nothing ‘inevitable’ about US dominance in space, even if the US were to pursue this imperial logic.

Post-Colonial Thought

The alternative is to engage in post-colonial thought. By doing this you reject the affirmative’s security claims, making proactive thought possible.Siddiqi, 7 [Asif Siddiqi 2007, assistant professor of history of technology, Fordham university, Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Revisiting the Space Race” http://fiftieth.shotnews.net/NSF/siddiqi.pdf] KZ

postcolonial thought makes possible a provocative rethinking of both the Indian space program and the history of space exploration in general. Western evaluations of the Indian space program have reflexively been grounded in assumptions about the marriage of poverty and high technology, i.e., a rhetorical questionmark about why a nation so poor should have a space program at all. Because the project of space exploration has been a normatively Western idea, non-Western space programs such as the Indian one are understood in relation to aspirations for aWestern modernity.

***2NC BLOCKS**

2NC Realism Debate

1. The alt is key to breaking down the bad parts of realism – rejection allows us to determine what is undesirable, preventing things like needless threat creations and genocide. Realism is only inevitable is we think it is – that’s 1NC Neocleous

2. Their methodology for determining realism is inevitable is flawed

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Busser 6 (Mark, Masters Candidate at the Dept of Political Science at York University. Aug 2006. (“The Evolution of Security: Revisiting the Human Nature Debate in International Relations http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/documents/WP40-Busser.pdf)

Responding directly to Thayer, Duncan Bell and Paul MacDonald have expressed concern at the intellectual functionalism inherent in sociobiological explanations, suggesting that too often analysts choose a specific behaviour and read backwards into evolutionary epochs in an attempt to rationalize explanations for that behaviour . These arguments , Bell and MacDonald write, often fall into what Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould have called ‘adaptionism,’ or “the attempt to understand all physiological and behavioural traits of an organism as evolutionary adaptations.”42 Arguments such as these are hand- crafted by their makers, and tend to carry forward their assumptions and biases . In an insightful article, Jason Edwards suggests that sociobiology and its successor, evolutionary psychology, are fundamentally political because they frame their major questions in terms of an assumed individualism. Edwards suggests that the main question in both sub-fields is: “given human nature, how is politics possible?”43 The problem is that the ‘givens’ of human nature are drawn backward from common knowledges and truths about humans in society, and the game-theory experiments which seek to prove them are often created with such assumptions in mind. These arguments are seen by their critics as politicized from the very start. Sociobiology in particular has been widely interpreted as a conservative politico-scientific tool because of these basic assumptions, and because of the political writings of many sociobiologists.44 Because sociobiology naturalizes certain behaviours like conflict , inequality and prejudice, Lewontin et al. suggest that it “sets the stage for legitimation of things as they are.”45 The danger inherent in arguments that incorporate sociobiological arguments into examinations of modern political life, the authors say, is that such arguments naturalize variable behaviours and support discriminatory political structures. Even if certain behaviours are found to have a biological drives behind them, dismissing those behaviours as ‘natural’ precludes the possibility that human actors can make choices and can avoid anti -social, violent , or undesirable action . 46 While the attempt to discover a geneticallydetermined human nature has usually been justified under the argument that knowing humankind’s basic genetic programming will help to solve the resulting social problems, discourse about human nature seems to generate self-fulfilling prophesies by putting limits on what is considered politically possible. While sociobiologists tend to distance themselves from the naturalistic fallacy that ‘what is’ is ‘what should be,’ there is still a problem with employing adaptionism to ‘explain’ how existing political structures because conclusions tend to be drawn in terms of conclusions that assert what ‘must be’ because of biologicallyingrained constraints.47 Too firm a focus on sociobiological arguments about ‘natural laws’ draws attention away from humanity’s potential for social and political solutions that can counteract and mediate any inherent biological impulses, whatever they may be. A revived classical realism based on biological arguments casts biology as destiny in a manner that parallels the neo-realist sentiment that the international sphere is doomed to everlasting anarchy. Jim George quotes the English School scholar Martin Wight as writing that “hope is not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue.”48 George questions the practical result of traditional realist claims, arguing that the suggestion that fallen man’s sinful state can only be redeemed by a higher power puts limitations on what is considered politically possible . Thayer’s argument rejects the religious version of the fallen man for a scientific version, but similar problems remain with his ‘scientific’ conclusions.

3. Realism causes extinction – that was in the overview – it’s try or die

4. War isn't human nature—archeology provesSmoke and Harman 87 – Richard Smoke, professor of political science, and Willis Harman, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. 1987. (Paths to peace: exploring the feasibility of sustainable peace, pg 81)

Historically speaking, it is not in fact true that humanity has nearly always been engaged in wars. According to the archeological evidence, warfare scarcely existed among any known tribe or group prior to approximately 5000 B.C. Sometime around this date, war was "invented ." If there was a time in humanity's past when war did not exist, it is not unrealistic to imagine a time in its future when war again does not exist. However, as long as we can only theorize about why war was invented some 7,000 years ago, this historical fact, while significant, is not directly useful.

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5. History proves that realism is wrong Tworney 3 – Professor of PolSci at Boston College (Issues & Studies, 39.2 June, p. 253)

Offensive realism argues that “the system encourages states to look for opportunities to maximize their power vis-à-vis other states ” (p. 29). Since territory often confers power (that is, conquest “pays,” see pp. 147-52) and aggression is often successful (p. 39), wars of territorial expansion are a key prediction for the theory (pp. 147-52). Aside from a few minor factors (see “Conceding Power for Realist Reasons” at pp. 164-65), Mearsheimer’s primary explanation for instances of restraint in the international system relies on a power-based argument of deterrence success: they are merely instances of aggressors who lack the capability to expand success-fully (pp. 37,169). Chapter 7 of the book discusses two great powers that are frequently restrained by the “stopping power of water”: the United States and Great Britain. Beyond this, Mearsheimer allows one anomaly (German restraint in 1905, see p. 10). However, several other historically important cases of great power restraint cannot be explained as deterrence success, and thus contradict the theory . For instance, Japan and Germany in the ‘ post-World War II era both have passed up opportunities to increase their power . Mearsheimer explains that neither is a great power (pp. 181, 393), primarily because they lack nuclear weapons. However, Mearsheimer both accepts that the two nations could obtain nuclear weapons (pp. 394, 399) and views such weapons as an important component of national power (pp. 128-33). These cases then contradict the theory: nations should not choose to abstain from power competition . France in the interwar period presents another concern. At a time when German power was small compared to that of France (p. 305), Paris should have pursued an offensive policy . By taking portions of German territory, French power would have been enhanced and future German power might have been constrained. Yet, France sat out of the power-maximization game in the 1920s. Offensive realism cannot explain this non-barking dog . Several cases of early Cold War moderation by the Soviet Union also cry out for explanation . As Mearsheimer notes, Moscow retreated rather quickly when confronted in Iran in 1946 (p. 323). It would seem harm to code this as a case of successful compellence since (1) we know that it is hard to compel great powers in general (pp. 152-53) and (2) U.S. power was quite low at this point. Soviet flexibility in returning portions of Manchuria and in renouncing rights to Port Arthur to the Chinese in 1949 are other examples of selfless behavior. Finally, during the late part of the Cold War both superpowers displayed some restraint in their strategic competition in the nuclear arena. The existence of the SALT, START, and- in particular- the ABM treaty cannot be explained by offensive realism. For example, the latter treaty forced both sides to check their efforts to develop defenses that might have led to nuclear superiority by one side or the other, which Mearsheimer argues is a goal of great powers (p. 147). Of course, no theory of social science is infallible (p. 10). Yet, as these anomalies accumulate, we must temper our confidence in Mearsheimer’s conclusions. Nations seek to maximize power and secure hegemony… except when they do not . Since we do not know whether China too might be an outlier in this regard, we should tread carefully when considering Mearsheimer’s policy prescriptions aimed to stymie Chinese growth . Such a policy would raise prospects for security dilemmas, spirals, and self-fulfilling prophesies in Sino-American relations. Those costs should weigh heavily given the uncertainties that remain in the validity of the theory.

6. Policymakers can change realism – proves alt solvencyLegro and Moravcsik 1 – *Chair of Foreign Affairs at UVA AND **Professor of PolSci and IR at Princeton (July-August 2001, Jeffrey and Andrew, “Faux Realism.” Foreign Policy, No. 125, pg. 80-82)

The Bush administration has coined a foreign-policy doctrine. President George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell herald “the new realism .” Think you know what they are up to? OK, then fill in the blank: The “new realism” is_____ If you find the blank hard to fill, don’t worry; so would most of today’s international-relations scholars. Indeed, one fundamental problem with the Bush administration’s new doctrine is that “ realism” no longer has any real intellectual coherence . Until recently, realism was

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a venerable school of thought with a distinct thrust. Realpolitikers such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz visualized world politics as an anarchic realm in which the struggle for survival required prudent management of material (generally military) resources, and where the balance of power ultimately determined outcomes. Realists chastised “liberals,” “legalists,” and “idealists,” who believe that material and military power are secondary to factors such as the form of domestic government (democratic or authoritarian), the mutual advantages of economic interdependence, the functional benefits of international institutions, and the sway of national and transnational beliefs. Yet a funny thing happened on the way past the Cold War. While still attached to the realist label, many realists have abandoned their distinctive realpolitik precepts. I nternational- r elations scholars today are far more inclined to accept that major trends —European integration, global trade liberalization, the surprising power of small countries in limited wars such as Vietnam, the impact of human rights and environmental norms, and the spread of a “democratic peace”— are not shaped simply, or even primarily, by power . Balance-of-power calculations are often trumped by imperatives rising from economic globalization, political democratization, particular belief systems, and the role of international law and institutions. Realists have broadened their definition of “realism” in an attempt to embrace this smorgasbord of factors. But the consequence has been conceptual incoherence. Why does the Bush administration associate itself with an academic theory that no longer seems to mean anything in particular? Aside from the chance that George W. Bush has not been keeping up with International Security, two broad possibilities stand out:

AT: Framework1. Not responsive- we are impact turning the fundamental justifications for the plan TO BE passed.

You would still vote neg as a policy maker.

2. We meet: We are a defense of the status quo. We embrace the SQ for what it is chaos and absurd.

3. Counter Interpretation- The affirmative should have to defend the justifications for the 1AC before we evaluate fiat.

A. It’s best for education, gives us knowledge we can use day-to-day and the only way to prevent government atrocities from being committed through fantasmatic policymaking.

4. Education – A. They do not teach a THING about real policymaking. Congressional bills

aren’t 2 sentences long.B. Policymaking skills can be learned under our interpretation equally.

The issues now won’t be pertinent by the time we might have positions in office. The way we think, and align ourselves has actual value in policy making and real world.

C. An unfair debate about important issues is still better than an absurd well-played game.

5. Even if they win fiat is good– A. Still evaluate our kritik, The plan’s result in a perpetuation of status

quo harms. If we win our link argument, we’ll win their impacts replicate, and we turn case.

6. The framework links to our criticism – The drive to save traditional debate from the radicals who threaten it IS the logic of securitization.

7. They have to defend their representations. If you allow them to sever their reps, then they have no justification for voting aff, their impacts are the justification for an aff ballot, you have to vote neg anyways because if you allow affirmatives to win without justifications then teams, will just sever their entire aff, and win on presumption.

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2NC Alt Extension

1. Extend our Neoclus 2008, the alt is to reject the affirmative security logic, allowing for actual political thought. Accepting their descriptions and responses only colonizes the debate.

2. The alternative isn’t to reject the affirmative, it is to call into question the assumptions they take as truth. Questioning the credibility of the calculative logic used by the government changes our relationship from one dictated in rational terms as tools in a game where life is wagered to advance national interests to one where we accept insecurity and acknowledge a set of possibilities outside what is been dictated by the state

3. This means alternative solves case- our discursive criticism enables us to find new ways to act not dictated by security. By not accepting security in international relations as inevitable we can shift away from a history of securitization. This shift prevents national security from capitalizing on our fear allowing us to act in new unprecedented ways. Security constrains ethical decision making by making security the center of politic. There is nothing but security.

AT: Perm

1) The permutation still links, the impacts are the justifications for the policy.

2) Just One More: The permutation ethically delays the alternative as an attempt to do the very thing it criticizes, this is exactly what causes it to be impossible. We say we are embracing political thought, but for one more time we securitize the world, leads to an endless cycle of securitization.

3) The perm offers no net benefit: their harms are constructions founded on destructive representational practices.

4) continuing this securitized mindset only further triggers the impact. That’s our covellio 2000 from the 1NC-state sanctioned violence

5) Only a conscious disengagement from the securitized mindset before action can prevent cooptionCampbell, 98 [David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 202 ]

Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security becomes the central dynamic in governmental rationality, so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today , not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in a “society of security,” in which practices of national security and practices of social security structure intensive and extensive power relations, and constitute the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside! outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and so on23 The theory of police and the shift from a sovereign’s war to a popula tion’s war thus not only changed the nature of “man” and war, it constituted the identity of “man” in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that might pose a threat to security. The ma-jor implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no ontological status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, “the state” is “the mobile effect of a multiple regime of governmentality,” of which the practices of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is one of the preconditions necessary to suggest some of the political implications of this study. Specifically, it has been the purpose of this book to argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important moment in the production and reproduction of American identity in ways consonant with the logic of a “society of security” To this end, the analysis of the texts of Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the consideration of Eisenhower’s security policies in chapter 6, and the examination of the in-terpretation of danger surrounding “the war on drugs” in chapter 7, demonstrated that even when these issues are represented in terms of national security and territorial boundaries, and even when these issues are written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse, they all

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constitute “the ensemble of the population” in terms of social security and ethical borders. Likewise, Foucault’s argument underpins the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the post—World War II period.

6. The alternative and the plan are mutually exclusive:

a. You cannot combine a strategy that employs joy and affirms life with a strategy that lives to run from death.

b. We must posit possibility against probability, which means that reducing our alternative to calculations recreates the harms isolated by the criticism

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A2: Cede the Political/Boggs/McClean/Anti-Ptx

This is offense for us – our re-evaluation allows policymakers to be effective in the future – we don’t put them in an ivory tower

We don’t linkA. Power shifts are because of voters, not because of language. The kritik doesn’t withdraw from all parts of politicsB. Matters on the national scale are irrelevant – we should engage the local sphere, which is key to engaging in politics

Also, cede the political is just another link to the kritik – it omits the discussion of representations from the debate – if we win reps are important, this argument is irrelevant.

Alt is key to left movementsReinsborough 3, (Organizer, Rainforest Action Network and Wake Up America Campaign) 2003 (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, August 2003, Volume 1, Issue 2, Patrick).

The worst thing that can happen to our movements right now is to settle for too little . But tragically that is exactly what is happening. We are failing to frame the ecological, social and economic crisis as a symptom of a deeper values crisis and a pathological system. Too many of our social change resources are getting bogged down in arenas of struggle that can’t deliver the systemic shifts we need . Most of the conventional venues for political engagement – legislation, elections, courts, single issue campaigns, labor fights – have been so co- opted by elite rule that its very difficult to imagine how to use strategies that name the system, undermine the control mythology or articulate values crisis from within their limited parameters. One of the most telling symptoms of our colonized imaginations has been the limited scope of social change institutions. Most social change resources get directed towards enforcing inadequate regulations, trying to pass watered-down legislation, working to elect mediocre people or to win concessions that don’t threaten the current corporate order. One of the main reasons that so many social change resources get limited to the regulatory, electoral and concessionary arenas is the fact that much of social change has become a professionalized industry. The NGO – non-governmental organization – a term made popular by the United Nations policy discussion process have become the most familiar social change institution. These groups are frequently made up of hard working, under-paid, dedicated people and NGOs as a group do lots of amazing work. However we must also acknowledge that generally the explosion of NGO's globally is a loose attempt to patch the holes that neoliberalism has punched in the social safety net. As government cedes its role in public welfare to corporations, even the unlucrative sectors have to be handed off to someone. A recent article in the Economist revealingly explains the growth of NGO's as "… not a matter of charity but of privatiziation." 21 My intention is not to fall into the all too easy trap of lumping the thousands of different NGOs into one dismissable category but rather to label a disturbing trend particularly among social change NGO's. Just as service oriented NGO's have been tapped to fill the voids left by the state or the market, so have social change NGO's arisen to streamline the chaotic business of dissent. Let's call this trend NGOism, that terrifyingly widespread conceit among professional "campaigners" that social change is a highly specialized profession best left to experienced strategists, negotiators and policy wonks. NGOism is the

conceit that paid staff will be enough to save the world. This very dangerous trend ignores the historic reality that collective struggle and mass movements organized from the bottom up have always been the springboard for true progress and social change. The goal of radical institutions – whether well funded NGOs or gritty grassroots group – should be to help build movements to change the world. But NGOism institutionalizes the amnesia of the colonized imagination and presents a major obstacle to moving into the post-issue activism framework. After all who needs a social movement when you've got a six figure advertising budget and “access” to all the decision makers? A professional NGO is structured exactly like a corporation, down to having employee payroll and a Board of Directors. This is not an accident. Just like their for-profit cousins this structure creates an institutional self-interest which can transform an organization from being a catalyst for social change into being a limit. NGOism views change in reference to the status quo power relations by accepting a set of rules written by the powerful to insure the status quo. These rules have already been stacked against social change. NGOism represents institutional confusion about the different types of power and become overly dependant on strategies that speak exclusively to the existing

powers – funding sources, the media, decision makers. As a consequence strategies get locked in the regulatory and concessionary arenas – focused on “pressure” – and attempt to re-direct existing power rather than focusing on confronting illegitimate authority and revealing systemic flaws. Frequently political pragmatism is used as an excuse for a lack of vision.

A2: Classic Double Bind

The perm is different from the status quo – it’s a single political strategy that combines the alt with the bad parts of the aff that the links have isolated. This co-opts alt solvency because we can’t create effective change if we incorporate bad logic with it.

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The alt opens up space for change to solve the status quo – the perm kills the credibility of the alt, meaning future problems can’t be solved

I’ll give an example: the Civil Rights movement was effective because it unambiguously rejected racist logic. If the people in the Civil Rights movement had made an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan, their message wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

A2: No Route Cause Claims

1. Its falsifiable- we have specific authors like George who detail why realism is the root cause of all impacts and reifies security discourse. You can read ev against us, but you have to prove your knowledge claims are true first.

2. Prefer our claims- without challenging the current systems, securitizing mindset like that of the aff prevents any inquiry to the root of social violence, and not even all of it- only a risk that we solve.

AT: Threats are realThe threats are not real; the Aff is just another example of how they are affected by realism, they accept these threats are real because they are afraid of them happening,

The 1AC uses threat construction which is a type of national “insecurity” that nations use to justify several attacks Béland ‘07Béland, Daniel, Department of Sociology University of Calgary, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2007, pp. 317-340 (Article) http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/Beland.pdf VB

Before sketching a theoretical framework for the construction of collective insecurity, one must clarify the meaning of this concept. Insecurity refers both to the subjective feeling of anxiety and to the concrete lack of protection. The starting point of this analysis is that collective insecurity is a social and political construction. Far from meaning that people live in a world of pure illusions, the idea of social and political construction of reality refers to the manner in which actors collectively make sense of the world in which they live. Although individuals experience fear and anxiety in everyday life collective insecurity involves transforming personal or environmental matters into social and political issues. As the psychological literature on “risk amplification” suggests, collective insecurity is “the product of processes by which groups and individuals learn to acquire or create interpretations of risk. These interpretations provide rules for selecting, ordering, and explaining signals emanating from [the environment]” (Kasperson et al. 2003: 15). Once perceived sources of insecurity are defined as collective problems affecting a significant segment of the population, they can enter the policy agenda. The analytical framework sketched below focuses on agenda setting and how political leaders both construct and respond to the forms of collective insecurity that move in and out of the policy agenda. Although recognizing that collective insecurity is a social construction, the sociological and political analysis of insecurity must pay serious attention to the structural characteristics of the collective threats featured in the politics of insecurity. This means that there is a “threat infrastructure” to the politics of insecurity because the nature of collective threats creates constraints and opportunities for political leaders. “Threat infrastructure” can be defined as the nature of the risks that characterize a policy area, and, by extension, the basic political conditions that are likely to stem from such risks.10 Consequently, each domain of state protection exhibits a distinct set of political opportunities and constraints related to the nature of the threat under consideration. For example, highly episodic threats such as terrorism are more likely to generate panic waves than more structural sources of insecurity like unemployment or, as in the United States, the lack of health care coverage. Episodic and dramatic threats may stimulate more sweeping legislative actions than low profile risks like environmental hazards that have yet to be publicly defined as a major danger to human life. Because particular threats, such as unemployment, are closer to the everyday life of citizens, the potential level of political manipulation surrounding their social and political definition may be reduced. The constructivist analysis of collective insecurity must include an examination of the “threat infrastructure” specific to the policy area under consideration, which does not mean that this infrastructure entirely determines the shape that collective insecurity will take. Amidst structural constraints, it is clear that political leaders often play a major role in shaping the perception of collective threats (Béland, 2007). The concept of “threat infrastructure” helps draw an analytical line between the structural and the constructed aspects of the threats citizens face and points to the concrete characteristics of each collective threat and policy

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area. These characteristics include threat stability (episodic versus constant threats), distance (immediate versus remote threats), visibility (prominent versus low-profile threats), and origin (human-made, natural, or hybrid threats). Consequently, the concept of “threat infrastructure” points to the structural elements that actors involved in the construction of insecurity generally take into account. Yet, even these structural elements are subject to the framing processes that affect the perception of collective threats. This is why we can say that the concrete nature of threat does not fully determine the political dynamic

The 1AC advantages are made up – solvency is a rigged game and they result in error replicationDillon and Reid, 2k – (Michael Dillon and Julian Reid Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency. By: Dillon, Michael, Reid, Julian, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 03043754, Jan-Mar2000, Vol. 25, Issue 1)

More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy " client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want . Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their

2. Once the Aff says that threats are real they automatically link to the K because they are trying to tell you what is “true” and scare you into thinking that this threat exists. As soon as they mention that they must stabilize hegemony because of ______________________________________ reason than that is a way form of threat construction

Representation of American hegemony creates racial hierarchies – they demonize all others as threats to the liberal order.Campbell, 7 [Luiza Bialasiewicz , David Campbell , Stuart Elden , Stephen Graham , Alex Jeffrey , Alison J. William 2007 “Performing security: The imaginative geographies of current US strategy” http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/campbell-et-al-performing-security-pol-geog-2007.pdf]

Again, it is essential that we conceptualize these strategies as both containing and making imaginative geographies; specifying the ways ‘‘the world is’’ and, in so doing, actively (re)making that same world. This goes beyond merely the military action or aid programmes that governments follow, but indicates a wider concern with the production of

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ways of seeing the world, which percolate through media, popular imaginations as well as political strategy. These performative imaginative geographies are at the heart of this paper and will re-occur throughout it. Our concern lies specifically with the ways in which the US portrays e and over the past decade has portrayed e certain parts of the world as requiring involvement, as threats, as zones of instability, as rogue states, ‘‘states of concern’’, as ‘‘global hotspots’’, as well as the associated suggestion that by bringing these within the ‘‘integrated’’ zones of democratic peace, US security e both economically and militarily e can be preserved. Of course, the translation of such imaginations into actual practice (and certainly results) is never as simple as some might like to suggest. Nonetheless, what we wish to highlight here is how these strategies, in essence, produce the effect they name. This, again, is nothing new: the United States has long constituted its identity at least in part through discourses of danger that materialize others as a threat (see Campbell, 1992). Equally, much has been written about the new set of threats and enemies that emerged to fill the post-Soviet void e from radical Islam through the war on drugs to ‘‘rogue states’’ (for a critical analyses see, among others, Benjamin & Simon, 2003; Stokes, 2005; on the genealogies of the idea of ‘‘rogue states’’ see Blum, 2002; Litwak, 2000). What is crucial in the rendering of these strategies, rather, is how those perceived threats are to be dealt with. PNAC, for instance, urged Clinton to take a more hawkish line on Iraq in a 1998 letter (signed by many who would later populate the Bush administration), which concluded with an exhortation: ‘‘We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk’’ (PNAC, 1998). Yet another of PNAC’s co-founders chose to remain on the ‘outside’, howevere and it is to his work that we now turn.

3. Accept the Alt because we should reconsider what is true and what is not, and “this truth” should not be based off of threat construction

***2NC CARDS***

AT: Framework

The k leaves room for rational judgement. Chilton No Date[Paul Chilton,][ Department of Linguistics and the English Language, Lancaster University, UK]http://sfl.tjcu.edu.cn/tian/en/publications/journals/Chilton__Tian__Wodak.pdf VB

The term “critical” is associated with currents of thought whose recent sources are in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment but whose roots are in ancient Greek philosophy. Etymologically, the verb “criticize” derives from a Greek word krinein “to separate, decide”, in the sense of making a judgement or a distinction. In the European philosophical tradition of the eighteenth century, “critique” further implies not accepting arguments or states of affairs as given and unchangeable but analyzing them on the basis of rational judgement. Criticism in this sense is assumed to be value-free, except in so far as high value is given to rationality itself. More specifically, to be critical in the European Enlightenment meant, in many cases, rejecting metaphysics, denouncing religion and challenging political abuse. In the work of Immanuel Kant, “critique” (Kritik) has an anti-metaphysical meaning to some degree, but not a denunciatory meaning. Rather “Kantian critique” has to do with the use of rational analysis to explore the bounds of concepts and theories, including, the human use of reason itself and its relationship to the physical structure of the world.

AT: Threats are Real

The mindset of endless threats is a self-fulfilling prophecy leading to the constant creation of more threats.Lipschutz 1998 [Ronnie, Director – Politics PhD Program, UC Santa Cruz,. “On Security” 1998 p. 8]

Security is, to put Wæver's argument in other words, a socially constructed concept: It has a specific meaning only within a specific social context.18 It emerges and changes as a result of discourses and discursive actions intended to reproduce historical structures and subjects within states and among them.19 To be sure, policymakers define security on the basis of a set of assumptions regarding vital interests, plausible enemies, and possible scenarios, all of which grow, to a not-insignificant extent, out of the specific historical and social context of a particular country and some understanding of what is "out there."20 But, while these interests, enemies, and scenarios have a material existence and, presumably, a real import for state security, they cannot be regarded simply as having some sort of "objective" reality independent of these constructions.21 That security is socially constructed does

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not mean that there are not to be found real, material conditions that help to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such conditions are irrelevant to either the creation or undermining of the assumptions underlying security policy. Enemies, in part, "create" each other, via the projections of their worst fears onto the other; in this respect, their relationship is intersubjective. To the extent that they act on these projections, threats to each other acquire a material character. In other words, nuclear-tipped ICBMs are not mere figments of our imagination, but their targeting is a function of what we imagine the possessors of other missiles might do to us with theirs.

The sovereign views anything not in accordance with global governance as a threat making them “the other.”Duffield 2004 [Mark, Department of Politics and IR - University of Lancaster, 2004. http://www.diis.dk/sw8141.asp]

Although the ending of the Cold War raised hopes of a ‘peace dividend’, the diagrammatic form of bio-power was to be re-inscribed in the ‘new wars’ of the 1990s and confirmed with the declaration of war on terrorism. This re-inscription has taken in its stride the shift in the locus of threat from the Soviet Union, one of the world’s largest and most centralized war economies, to its very opposite, that is, the new security cartography of failed states, shadow economies and terrorist networks. However, as the Guardian columnist quoted above has grasped, despite this radical re-ordering the bio-political principle of state power has remained the same: in order to carry on living one has to carry on killing (Ibid). As well as departing from a realist conception of power , the idea of global governance as a design of bio-power also breaks with the conventional view of what global governance is . That is, as an essentially benign undertaking involving state and non-state actors in a collective pursuit of global security , an open and inclusive economic system, effective legal and political instutions, global welfare and development, and a shared commitment to conflict resolution (Biscop 2004). From this perspective, security threats are usually seen as emerging independently of global governance and, indeed, despite its best intentions. It becomes an ethico-political response to pre-existing or externally motivated threats. Global governance as a design of bio-power, however, rather than responding ‘out of the blue’ to external threats, directly fabricates its own security environment. In distinguishing between valid and invalid global life, it creates its own ‘other’ – with all its specific deviancies, singular threats and instances of mal-development – to which it then responds and tries to change. Consequently, it also shapes the terrain over which the bio-political logic of living through killing must operate . It is in relation to this constitutive function of global governance that the place of sovereignty within it can now be examined

Focus on the moment of crisis is in favor of security – we need to investigate the discourse that make their scenario appear natural. McDonald, 8 [Matt McDonald, Senior Lecturer in International Relations @ Queensland, 2008, “Securitization and the Construction of Security,” (http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/14/4/563, European Journal of International Relations, International Relations 18 (1)]

In the securitization framework, issues become security issues at a particular moment. When this moment is

may be up for question and based on particular readings of the Copenhagen School literature itself: it may be at the point when an issue is defined as a security issue (the speech act), at the point where an audience ‘backs up’ or acquiesces to that designation of threat , or at the point at which extraordinary measures are implemented. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s securitization of Saddam Hussein’s ‘WMD programme’ for the British public in the lead-

up to the 2003 invasion is a useful case study here. Depending on our reading of the Copenhagen School, the ‘securitization’ of Saddam and his ‘WMD programme’ may have occurred exclusively through public representations depicting the regime and its WMD programme as imminently threatening, through the vote in Parliament legitimizing Blair’s deployment of troops, or even at the point of invasion itself. While the latter might seem the least likely reading, in Regions and Powers Buzan and Wæver (2003: 73) look for examples of securitization in the execution of emergency measures themselves rather than in the discursive by guest on construction of threat or societal acquiescence to these

speech acts. The potential tensions between a focus on speech, acceptance or emergency measures maps on to an earlier point about the problematic relationship between speaker, audience and action. The important point to note here, however, is that the moment of securitization is relatively specifically defined: issues become security threats at particular instances. Such an explicit or ‘decisionistic’ (Williams, 2003: 521) approach to the

point at which threats are designated is not without its appeal. At times, radical changes in articulations of security and threat occur in global politics, as responses to perceived moments of political crisis for example.16Yet f ocusing on the moment at which an issue becomes a security issue is analytically problematic 9 point, f ocusing on the moment of intervention does not help us understand how or why that particular intervention became possible at that moment. Why then, and in that context, did a particular actor represent an issue as an existential threat, and more importantly why

was that actor supported in that securitization by a particular con- stituency?17Lipschutz (1995: 8), for example, defines

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discourses of security and threat as ‘the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power within states, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them’ . By contrast, for the Copenhagen School we can apply and understand a particular instance of securitization without exploring fundamentally the contexts within which these interventions were possible in the first place. This would seem incon- sistent with a broader understanding of the (inter-subjective) processes through which security is

constructed in different contexts. Finally, a focus on the ‘moment’ at which an issue becomes a security issue and enters the realm of ‘panic politics’ is problematic because of the dichotomies it represents between security and politics. As Rita Abrahamsen (2005: 59) has argued, focusing on a moment at which an issue ceases to be by Securitization and the Construction of Security a political issue and becomes a security one suggests an either/or

approach to politics in which there are no gradations or continuums of issue/problem/threat. Issues may be viewed as risks, for example, before being depicted as threats. Such a conceptualization suggests a particular way of approaching that issue,18but for the securitization framework the only fundamental difference is between an issue that is a political issue and one

that is a security threat. A focus on the ‘moment’ here contributes to this narrow vision of political prioritization and a problematic dichotomy between politics and security . This dichotomy might look even more problematic if taken outside the realm of liberal democratic Western states, which has provided the site for the development of the framework and is the overwhelming focus of its application.19

AT: Empirics

Their empiricism argument is backwards—discursive representations PRODUCE empirical results.Weldes, 99 – Senior Lecturer at Bristol University, Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Minnesota, Former Assistant Professor at Kent State University (Jutta, Cultures of Insecurity, Chapter 1, p. 17-18)

Constructions of reality and the codes of intelligibility out of which they are produced provide both conditions of possibility and limits on possibility; that is, they make it possible to act in the world while simultaneously defining the "horizon of the taken-for-granted". (Hall, 1988: 44) that marks the boundaries of common sense and accepted knowledge. Such codes and the constructions they generate become common sense or accepted knowledge when they have successfully defined the relationship of particular constructions to reality as one of correspondence; that is, they are successful to the extent that they are treated as if they naturally or transparently reflect reality. In this way, social constructions are reified or naturalized, and both their constructed nature and their particular social origins are obscured. The creation of common sense and accepted knowledge is thus what Stuart Hall has called "the moment of extreme ideological closure" (1985: 105). In essence, the creation of common sense and accepted knowledge depends on the explicit invocation of an empiricist epistemology—such as underpins conventional security studies and "rationalist" (Keohane, 1988) international relations theory in general. It depends on the implicit or explicit invocation of a correspondence theory of language and meaning in which words and concepts are thought to point to their ostensible empirical referents. By authoritatively defining "the real," dominant representations of insecurity remove from critical analysis and political debate what are in fact particular, interested constructions, thus endowing those particular representations with "common sense" and "reality." Conversely, anything outside of the discourse—statements expressing other possible worlds or forms of life, for example—is represented as implausible, ideological, or spurious and so often consigned to the realms of fiction, fantasy, or nonsense. A corollary of this argument is that discourses are sites of social power in at least two important ways. First, some discourses are more powerful than others because they are located in and partake of institutional power. Statist discourses are a prominent example. All things being equal, the representations of state officials have immediate prima facie plausibility to the extent that these officials can be constructed as representatives who speak for "us." Such representations are likely to be so regarded not because they tell-us what the world "really" is like but because they issue from the institutional power matrix that is the state. In their representations of insecurity, for example, state officials can claim access to information produced by the state and denied to most outsiders. They also have privileged access to the media (Herman and Chomsky, 1989). And, an important point not to be overlooked, their representations have constitutional legitimacy, especially in the construction of insecurity. After all, "national security" is generally understood to be quintessentially the business of the state and the identification of insecurities is thus a task thought rightly to belong to its officials. Dominant discourses, especially those of the state, thus become and remain dominant in part because of the power relations sustaining them. In extreme cases, when there is little or no challenge to the legitimacy of such dominant discourses, their representations of insecurity become hegemonic—that is, they receive assent from most, if not all, of their publics and competing representations are easily dismissed as at best naive, and at worst

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treasonous. Discourses are implicated in power relations in another important way as well. Because discourses bring with them the power to define and thus to constitute the world, these representations of insecurity are themselves important sources of power. As Foucaulr argued, "power and knowledge directly imply one another;... there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations" (1979: 17). As a result, they themselves become sites of contestation.

AT: Securitization Inevitable

Securitization is only inevitable when the government steps in and creates false threats, during the cold war, the US constructed the Soviet Union as a threat, which made the people freak out Sage, 08 (Daniel, Institute of Geography and Earth Science, Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space, JG)

By virtue of its success in this regard, Bonestell’s astronomical art helped provide a catalyst for a public mood shift from cautious skepticism and anxiety towards a more composed optimism based around this distinctively American ‘frontier’ paradigm of space travel. Beneath the serene romanticism felt towards outer space, stoked by such frontier analogies, was a growing expectation that America’s destiny was bound up with this new frontier. On 4 October 1957, these hopes were passionately exposed when the USSR successfully sent a 184 pound satellite into low earth orbit. The satellite called ‘Sputnik’, Russian for ‘travelling companion’ (of the earth), was not surprisingly reported across the American news media to suggest a defeat, comparable to Pearl Harbor, of not just American technological prowess but also political ideology and American society.66 Sputnik tapped into the growing, post nuclear-age anxiety that American freedom was under external threat. Moreover, because it emerged as a threat to the ‘Magisterial Gaze’ extended into space by Bonestell and von Braun, the intangible menace of Sputnik’s power was necessarily organised as panoptic and omniscient. As space writer Paul Dickson describes it: “There it was overhead – visible to the naked eye and audible to anyone with a shortwave receiver. America had fought two world wars protected by the breadth of oceans and the comfort of a strong Navy. A certain sense of invulnerability seemed to be an American birthright.”67 Meanwhile some members of the American public were even reported as speaking in hushed tones or blacking out windows to avoid the watchful eyes and ears of Sputnik.

AT: Perm Do Both

Net benefits and initial framing kill critique Bleiker, 1 (Professor of IR at University of Queensland (The Zen of International Relations, “Forget IR Theory,” p. 37-39)

Stories, so we are told by prevailing social science wisdom, are not part of international relations (IR) scholarship. Stories belong to the realm of fiction, not the deomain of fact. And yet, stories freely whiz in and out of IR. Indeed, if we look more carefully, IR appears as nothing but a set of narratives that provide us with meaning and coherence. Consider how critical scholars increasingly portray the locus classicus of IR – the state, that is – not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a series of stories. These stories, Michael Shapiro points out, are part of a legitimization process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an insider and an outside, between a people and its Others. But by virtue of what they are and do, state-stories also exclude, for they seek “to repress or delegitimise other stories and practices of identity and space they reflect.”3 Of course, the prevailing IR stories have not gone unchallenged. Since the early 1980s, IR has come under harsh criticism. We have heard not only of state-centrism, but also of masculine values, structural determinism, ethnocentrism, positivism, and indeed, of the refusal to engage altogether in epistemological debates.4 And yet, orthodox approaches to IR appear surprisingly resilient, or so at least they present themselves. Many IR scholars who occupy key positions in the Western academy, particularly in North America, unwaveringly pursue the same research agendas. They reaffirm the realist dilemmas that allegedly arise from the anarchical character of the international system, contemplate the role of regimes and international institutions, or revisit one more time the issue of absolute versus relative gains.5 What accounts for this surprising resilience of entrenched IR stories? Are prevalent realist and liberal stories simply more convincing than others? The power to tell stories is the power to define common sense. Prevalent IR stories have been told for so long that they no longer appear as stories. They are accepted as fact, for their metaphorical dimensions have vanished from our collective memories. We have become accustomed to our distorting IR metaphors until we come to lie, as Nietzsche would say, ‘herd-like in a style obligatory for all’.6 As a result, dominant IR stories have successfully transformed one specific interpretation of world political realities, the realist one, into reality per se.7 Realist perceptions of the international have gradually become accepted as

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common sense, to the point that any critique against them has to be evaluated in terms of an already existing and objectivised world view. There are powerful mechanisms of control precisely in this ability to determine meaning and rationality. ‘Defining common sense’, Steve Smith argues, ‘is the ultimate act of political power.’8 It separates the possible from the impossible and directs the theory and practice of international relations on a particular path. The prime objective of this essay is to challenge prevalent IR stories. The most effective way of doing so, the chapter argues, is not to critique these stories, but to forget them, to tell new stories about world politics – stories that are not constrained by the boundaries of established and objectified IR narratives. Such an approach diverges from many critical engagements with world politics. Most challenges against dominant IR stories have been advanced in the form of critiques. While critiquing orthodox IR stories remains an important task, it is not sufficient. Exploring the origin of problems, in this case discourses of power politics and their positivist framing of political practice, cannot overcome all the existing theoretical and practical dilemmas. By articulating critique in relation to arguments advanced by orthodox IR theory, the impact of critical voices remains confined within the larger discursive boundaries that have been established through the initial framing of debates. A successful challenge of orthodox IR stories must do more than merely critique their narrow and problematic nature. To be effective, critique must be supplemented with a process of forgetting the object of critique, of theorizing world politics beyond the agendas, issues and terminologies that are preset by orthodox debates. Indeed, the most powerful potential of critical scholarship may well lie in the attempt to tell different stories about IR, for once these stories have become validated, they may well open up spaces for a more inclusive and less violence-prone practice of world politics.

Perm doesn’t solve: accepting the tenants of realist discourse makes critique impossibleDer Derian and Shapiro, 89 Professor of Political Science at Brown University, Professor of Political Science at University of Hawaii at Manoa (James, Michael, “International/Intertextual Relations”, pg. 208-209, JPW)

Here is the problem in national security affairs. The activities that Smoke describes, as well as the discursive conventions that he adopts, usually are accepted unconsciously at face value. If we stop here, contained by the existing theory and prevailing practice of national security analysis, then we are left, like Smoke and countless others, with the task of treating seriously all of it on these terms. The arcane in theories of deterrence or plans for using nuclear weapons, then, also must be regarded as representing the real psychic states and true moral intentions of their creators or users. By accepting the obvious conventions of understanding projected upon the “technical and situational context” of the Soviet—U.S. competition for global hegemony, one slips into the same rut Smoke decries, namely, an unconcern for or neglect of “general conclusions” or “developing theory.” We become trapped on the discursive planes of ordinary policy analysis—sorting out the meaning of security problems, determining the validity of given policies and programs for addressing these problems, and debating the representativeness of political processes for discharging policies and programs in the hermetic discourses about nuclear security conducted by “the counsels of war” or “the wizards of Armageddon.” There are no grounds for privileging one mode of discourse over another in the interpretation of nuclear strategy. The awareness of Clemenceau and de Gaulle, as Aron recalls, that “war is too serious a matter to be left to the generals” and “politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians” affirms the contested quality of these discourses. It marks the awareness among all concerned that national security policies are too serious a matter to be left to the defense intellectuals. If the issues involved are too important to be left to generals, politicians, and defense intellectuals, then their established modes of reasoning, discourse, and analysis also cannot go unchallenged. Actually, the larger questions of peace and war in the nuclear era are answered in a mosaic of discourses, produced by multiple producers from many sources for a diverse array of consumers. Speaking and thinking about “national security affairs” as a “class of policy problems” and as “a field of study,” therefore, should be approached as “discourse” or a “social text”. Here, we might look beyond, beneath, and behind the face value of its conceptual currencies, seeking the ironies, unintended consequences, and suppressed alternative visions of how the United States and Soviet Union produce national security. By taking this approach, one can explore some latent logics in the post-1945 technical and situational context of superpower nuclear deterrence. Rather than accepting the theoretical and practical conventions of national security affairs as being meaningful as such, this perspective examines their interactive social production and consumption, seeking another account of how and why they are regarded as meaningful by those who practice and theorize about them in the post-1945 deterrence regime.

Only a conscious disengagement from the securitized mindset before action can prevent cooptionCampbell, 98 [David Campbell, professor of international politics at the university of Newcastle, Writing Security, 1998, pg. 202 ]

Furthermore, Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century onward, security becomes the central dynamic in governmental rationality, so that (as discussed in chapter 6) we live today , not in a narrowly defined and overtly repressive disciplinary society, but in a “society of security,” in which practices of national security and practices of social security structure intensive and extensive power relations, and constitute the ethical boundaries and territorial borders of inside! outside, normal/pathological, civilized/barbaric, and so on23 The theory of

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police and the shift from a sovereign’s war to a popula tion’s war thus not only changed the nature of “man” and war, it constituted the identity of “man” in the idea of the population, and articulated the dangers that might pose a threat to security. The major implication of this argument is that the state is understood as having no essence, no ontological status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, “the state” is “the mobile effect of a multiple regime of governmentality,” of which the practices of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.34 Rethinking security and government in these terms is one of the preconditions necessary to suggest some of the political implications of this study. Specifically, it has been the purpose of this book to argue that we can interpret the cold war as an important moment in the production and reproduction of American identity in ways consonant with the logic of a “society of security” To this end, the analysis of the texts of Foreign Policy in chapter 1, the consideration of Eisenhower’s security policies in chapter 6, and the examination of the interpretation of danger surrounding “the war on drugs” in chapter 7, demonstrated that even when these issues are represented in terms of national security and territorial boundaries, and even when these issues are written in the depoliticizing mode of policy discourse, they all constitute “the ensemble of the population” in terms of social security and ethical borders. Likewise, Foucault’s argument underpins the fact that these developments are not peculiar to the post—World War II period.

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AT: Random Perms

Net benefits and initial framing kill critique Bleiker 1 – Professor of IR at University of Queensland (The Zen of International Relations, “Forget IR Theory,” p. 37-39)

Stories, so we are told by prevailing social science wisdom, are not part of international relations (IR) scholarship. Stories belong to the realm of fiction, not the deomain of fact. And yet, stories freely whiz in and out of IR. Indeed, if we look more carefully, IR appears as nothing but a set of narratives that provide us with meaning and coherence. Consider how critical scholars increasingly portray the locus classicus of IR – the state, that is – not only as an institution, but also, and primarily, as a series of stories. These stories, Michael Shapiro points out, are part of a legitimization process that highlights, promotes and naturalises certain political practices and the territorial context within which they take place. Taken together, these stories provide the state with a sense of identity, coherence and unity. They create boundaries between an insider and an outside, between a people and its Others. But by virtue of what they are and do, state-stories also exclude, for they seek “to repress or delegitimise other stories and practices of identity and space they reflect.”3 Of course, the prevailing IR stories have not gone unchallenged. Since the early 1980s, IR has come under harsh criticism. We have heard not only of state-centrism, but also of masculine values, structural determinism, ethnocentrism, positivism, and indeed, of the refusal to engage altogether in epistemological debates.4 And yet, orthodox approaches to IR appear surprisingly resilient, or so at least they present themselves. Many IR scholars who occupy key positions in the Western academy, particularly in North America, unwaveringly pursue the same research agendas. They reaffirm the realist dilemmas that allegedly arise from the anarchical character of the international system, contemplate the role of regimes and international institutions, or revisit one more time the issue of absolute versus relative gains.5 What accounts for this surprising resilience of entrenched IR stories? Are prevalent realist and liberal stories simply more convincing than others? The power to tell stories is the power to define common sense. Prevalent IR stories have been told for so long that they no longer appear as stories. They are accepted as fact, for their metaphorical dimensions have vanished from our collective memories. We have become accustomed to our distorting IR metaphors until we come to lie, as Nietzsche would say, ‘herd-like in a style obligatory for all’.6 As a result, dominant IR stories have successfully transformed one specific interpretation of world political realities, the realist one, into reality per se.7 Realist perceptions of the international have gradually become accepted as common sense, to the point that any critique against them has to be evaluated in terms of an already existing and objectivised world view. There are powerful mechanisms of control precisely in this ability to determine meaning and rationality. ‘Defining common sense’, Steve Smith argues, ‘is the ultimate act of political power.’8 It separates the possible from the impossible and directs the theory and practice of international relations on a particular path. The prime objective of this essay is to challenge prevalent IR stories. The most effective way of doing so, the chapter argues, is not to critique these stories, but to forget them, to tell new stories about world politics – stories that are not constrained by the boundaries of established and objectified IR narratives. Such an approach diverges from many critical engagements with world politics. Most challenges against dominant IR stories have been advanced in the form of critiques. While critiquing orthodox IR stories remains an important task, it is not sufficient. Exploring the origin of problems, in this case discourses of power politics and their positivist framing of political practice, cannot overcome all the existing theoretical and practical dilemmas. By articulating critique in relation to arguments advanced by orthodox IR theory, the impact of critical voices remains confined within the larger discursive boundaries that have been established through the initial framing of debates. A successful challenge of orthodox IR stories must do more than merely critique their narrow and problematic nature. To be effective, critique must be supplemented with a process of forgetting the object of critique, of theorizing world politics beyond the agendas, issues and terminologies that are preset by orthodox debates. Indeed, the most powerful potential of critical scholarship may well lie in the attempt to tell different stories about IR, for once these stories have become validated, they may well open up spaces for a more inclusive and less violence-prone practice of world politics.

Perm doesn’t solve: accepting the tenants of realist discourse makes critique impossibleDer Derian and Shapiro, 89 Professor of Political Science at Brown University, Professor of Political Science at University of Hawaii at Manoa (James, Michael, “International/Intertextual Relations”, pg. 208-209)

Here is the problem in national security affairs. The activities that Smoke describes, as well as the discursive conventions that he adopts, usually are accepted unconsciously at face value. If we stop here, contained by the existing theory and prevailing practice of national security analysis, then we are left, like Smoke and countless others, with the task of treating seriously all of it on these terms. The arcane in theories of deterrence or plans for using nuclear weapons, then, also must be regarded as representing the real psychic states and true moral intentions of their creators or users. By accepting the obvious conventions of understanding projected upon the “technical and situational context” of the Soviet—U.S. competition for global hegemony, one slips into the same rut Smoke decries, namely, an unconcern for or neglect of “general conclusions” or “developing theory.” We become trapped on the discursive planes of ordinary policy analysis—sorting out the meaning of security problems, determining the validity of given policies and programs for addressing these problems, and debating the representativeness of political processes for discharging policies and programs in the hermetic discourses about nuclear security conducted by “the counsels of

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war” or “the wizards of Armageddon.” There are no grounds for privileging one mode of discourse over another in the interpretation of nuclear strategy. The awareness of Clemenceau and de Gaulle, as Aron recalls, that “war is too serious a matter to be left to the generals” and “politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians” affirms the contested quality of these discourses. It marks the awareness among all concerned that national security policies are too serious a matter to be left to the defense intellectuals. If the issues involved are too important to be left to generals, politicians, and defense intellectuals, then their established modes of reasoning, discourse, and analysis also cannot go unchallenged. Actually, the larger questions of peace and war in the nuclear era are answered in a mosaic of discourses, produced by multiple producers from many sources for a diverse array of consumers. Speaking and thinking about “national security affairs” as a “class of policy problems” and as “a field of study,” therefore, should be approached as “discourse” or a “social text”. Here, we might look beyond, beneath, and behind the face value of its conceptual currencies, seeking the ironies, unintended consequences, and suppressed alternative visions of how the United States and Soviet Union produce national security. By taking this approach, one can explore some latent logics in the post-1945 technical and situational context of superpower nuclear deterrence. Rather than accepting the theoretical and practical conventions of national security affairs as being meaningful as such, this perspective examines their interactive social production and consumption, seeking another account of how and why they are regarded as meaningful by those who practice and theorize about them in the post-1945 deterrence regime.

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AT: Perm - We Can Kick Our Reps

It’s impossible to make sense of reality without examining reps. The aff doesn’t get plan based offense prior to winning their worldview is productiveJourde, 06 (Cedric, * Ph.D., Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 2002 * M.A., Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, 1996 * B.Sc., Political Science, Université de Montréal, Montréal, 1995 Hegemony or Empire?: The redefinition of US Power under George W Bush Ed. David and Grondin p. 182-3 2006

Relations between states are, at least in part, constructed upon representations. Representations are interpretative prisms through which decision-makers make sense of a political reality , through which they define and assign a subjective value to the other states and non-state actors of the international system, and through which they determine what are significant international political issues .2 For instance, officials of a given state will represent other states as 'allies', 'rivals', or simply 'insignificant', thus assigning a subjective value to these states. Such subjective categorizations often derive from representations of these states' domestic politics, which can for instance be perceived as 'unstable*, 'prosperous', or 'ethnically divided'. It must be clear that representations are not objective or truthful depictions of reality; rather they are subjective and political ways of seeing the world, making certain things 'seen' by and significant for an actor while making other things 'unseen' and 'insignificant'.3 In other words, they are founded on each actor's and group of actors' cognitive, cultural-social, and emotional standpoints. Being fundamentally political, representations are the object of tense struggles and tensions, as some actors or groups of actors can impose on others their own representations of the world, of what they consider to be appropriate political orders, or appropriate economic relations, while others may in turn accept, subvert or contest these representations. Representations of a foreign political reality influence how decision-making actors will act upon that reality. In other words, as subjective and politically infused interpretations of reality, representations constrain and enable the policies that decision-makers will adopt vis-a-vis other states ; they limit the courses of action that are politically thinkable and imaginable, making certain policies conceivable while relegating other policies to the realm of the unthinkable.4 Accordingly, identifying how a state represents another state or non-state actor helps to understand how and why certain foreign policies have been adopted while other policies have been excluded. To take a now famous example, if a transnational organization is represented as a group of 'freedom fighters', such as the multi-national mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then military cooperation is conceivable with that organization; if on the other hand the same organization is represented as a 'terrorist network', such as Al-Qaida, then military cooperation as a policy is simply not an option. In sum. the way in which one sees, interprets and imagines the 'other* delineates the course of action one will adopt in order to deal with this 'other'.

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AT: No Spillover – Other Reps Inevitable

They misunderstand their own argument – we must engage in the political and reject bad representations in every instance, to demystify ourselves, so that we can reassess IRBleiker, 9 (Roland, October 11, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2001. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 30, No. 3, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” pp. 525-26)

Aesthetic insight is one of the tools we can employ against such forms of numbing regularity and complacency. Confronting the massive tragedy of the Bosnian War, Ignatieff looks for help in the example of Goya's Horrors of War and Picasso's Guernica, 'which confront [the] desire to evade the testimony of our own eyes by grounding horror in aesthetic forms that force the spectator to see if as for the first time'.66 Furthermore, high art is not the only location of such aesthetic encounters with the political. John Docker, for instance, suggests that significant critical potential is hidden in the seemingly homogenising and suffocating forces of popular culture, where he detects, carnivalesque challenges to the narrow and single representation of reason in the pubic sphere.67 Direct aesthetic encounters with the political can contribute to a more inclusive and just world order, for they challenge our very notion of common sense by allowing us to see what may be obvious but has not been noted before. This is why we have a responsibility, both as numbed spectators of televised realities and as scholars wedded to social scientific conventions, to engage our representational habits and search for ways of heeding to forms of thought that can reassess the realities of world politics.

AT: Cedes the Political

We are the best form of political activity – the best politics are found in individual ontologies, not policy arguments.Kay 2003 [Sarah; Professor of French and Occitan Literature at the University of Cambridge; Žižek: A Critical Introduction; Cambridge: Polity; 2003; p. 152-155]

As I said when discussing Badiou's concept of the 'event' (in chapter 5), it is not self-evident what constitutes an 'event' (or an 'act'). Examples of what Žižek calls 'acts' vary widely in scope and impact. At the lowest level of agape there is a kind of Pollyanna-ish 'saying "Yes!" to life in its mysterious synchronic multitude' (Fragile Absolute, 103; also Fright, 172; cf. Ticklish Subject, 150). Then there is the fait divers of Mary Kay Letourneau's affair with a boy under the age of consent. Some characters in works of literature or film perform an 'act' when they sacrifice what they hold dearest, committing what Žižek calls 'a strike against the self'. An example is Kevin Spacey's shooting of his own wife and daughter, who are being held hostage by rival gangsters, in The Usual Suspects (Fragile Absolute, 149-50). Others literary characters, like Antigone and Sygne, or Sophie in Sophie's Choice (Enjoy!, 70ff), act in such a way as to kill themselves, whether physically, symbolically or both. When we move to the political dimension, and the act is no longer the affair just of an individual, there is a marked raising of the stakes. Talk is no longer about renunciation or suicide, but terror. The historical Terror of the French Revolution is a constant reference point, and we learn that ' there is something inherently terroristic in every authentic act' (Ticklish Subject, 377). The 'political act par excellence' (ibid.) would be revolution, even though that seems not to be an option today. On the other hand, Nazism and Stalinism fail to qualify as events (or acts), because (says Žižek) they don't emerge ex nihilo, and nor do they institute a paradigm change; instead, they rely on appeal to some 'global order of being' (Ticklish Subject, 132 - the wrong kind of universal?).16 He reaches the same conclusion vis-a-vis the events of September 11, 2001, which, one might have thought, have some claim to be read as an act, since they involved multiple suicide, declarations that the world would never be the same again, and the forging of a new universal movement against terrorism." Yet Žižek stresses instead how the bombings were already internal to American fantasy, and how what seemed like an external irruption against the USA was in fact 'a distilled version of our own essence', the reversion upon us of centuries of Western violence. So far, in his view, the new is yet to emerge from these events. He exhorts us not to be deterred by such pseudo-acts, but to 'search even more stringently for the "good terror"' (Ticklish Subject, 378). The problem is that the 'good terror' is as elusive as the 'good universal'. It is a blow for change that Žižek recognizes as coming from the Left - that is, from where he positions himself - but that is impossible to anchor in any other way. Saying 'Yes!' to life could be more of an act than bombing the World Trade Centre. As Grigg puts it, 'there is no objective criterion and there can clearly be no appeal to any subjective features to distinguish an act of absolute freedom from a gratuitous act' ('Absolute Freedom', 123).18 Of course, Grigg's critique doesn't say anything Žižek would not agree with. The whole point of the act, for Žižek, is that the subject surrenders all guarantees and gives up its objet a [fantasy-object] as a hostage to fortune . The act is perilous, but it has to be: the purgative force of the death drive is the only force adequate to cauterize the wound of civilization, whether it be individual 'castration' or political subjection. As another of Zizek's favourite quotations has it, 'the wound can only be healed by the spear that smote you':19 it is only by momentarily suspending symbolization that its terms can be altered. Hope, freedom and agency can come only through madness. Such a concept of the act is incompatible with political calculation. This is not to say that Žižek does not believe in political activity. But activity does not have the capacity for radical change that is born with the act." The choice , as he repeatedly says, is between bad and worse: worse is better than bad if good will follow. There is a striking combination of optimism and pessimism in this view: pessimism about the situation as it is, optimism that it could be transformed. What is the therapeutic basis for this optimism? Žižek's theorization of the act varies in this regard. Broadly speaking, he remains within the framework of Lacan’s definition according to

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which 'an act [acte], a true act, always has an element of structure, by the fact of concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it' (Seminar XI, 50). In Lacan, the acte is distinct from hysterical 'acting out', and also from the passage a l'acte, a psychotic impulse in which the subject's relation to the symbolic order is suspended, and the subject as such therefore ceases to exist, but is instead objectified." The true act - like a praxis, as he defines it at the beginning of Seminar XI when defining psychoanalysis itself - is a way to 'treat the real by [means of] the symbolic' (15). This phrase is echoed in Contingency when Žižek says: Precisely because of this internality of the Real to the Symbolic, it is possible to touch the Real through the Symbolic - that is the whole point of Lacan’s notion of psychoanalytic treatment; this is what the Lacanian notion of the psychoanalytic act is about - the act as a gesture which, by definition, touches the dimension of some impossible Real. (Contingency, 121) In Enjoy! Žižek nevertheless seems to inflect the term in the direction of Lacan's passage a l'acte. In the second chapter he uses examples of suicidal behaviour from Rosselini’s films that recall Freud's case study of the young homosexual woman who tried to kill herself in an act of desperate self-abdication - the case which, for Lacan, typifies the passage a l'acte. For example, when the character Edmund in Rosselini's Germany, Year Zero commits suicide, Žižek says that 'he passes over to the act' (Enjoy!, 35). This bent continues at least to The Ticklish Subject, where, in the course of an argument with Badiou, Žižek criticizes him for opposing the 'full revolutionary passage a l'acte' (Enjoy!, 166). More recent writings have refocused his understanding of the act. An important passage in On Belief (81-5) picks up but modifies a note in Enjoy! where Žižek plots the concept of act through the registers of symbolic, imaginary and real." The act, he now says explicitly, is not the hysterical 'acting out' (of the imaginary), nor an act/edict (of the symbolic), nor yet again the psychotic passage a l'acte (of the real). 'The act proper is the only one which restructures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the agent's situation: it is an intervention in the course of which the agent's identity itself is radically changed' (On Belief, 85). This passage continues with a comparison between the act and belief. This shift towards symbolic responsibility is evident too in the roughly contemporary Contingency,Hegemony, Universality (121-2): So when we are reproached by an opponent for doing something unacceptable, an act occurs when we no longer defend ourselves by accepting the underlying premiss that we hitherto shared with the opponent; in contrast, we fully accept the reproach, changing the very terrain that made it unacceptable - an act occurs when our answer to the reproach is 'Yes, that is precisely what I am doing'. It seems to me that the licence Žižek gives himself vis-a-vis Lacan serves two purposes. First, it enables him both to keep and to reverse Lacan's formula whereby, via the act, we can 'treat the real by means of the symbolic'. The act, as Žižek understands it, will also 'treat the symbolic by means of the real' - that is, allow us to reboot in the real so as to start up our relationship with the symbolic afresh. Second, it means that he effects a convergence between Lacan's acte, which belongs on the side of the analyst, and Lacan's passage a l'acte, which belongs on the side of the patient. In so doing, Žižek has brought together the two halves of the analytic scene in a way which I signalled in my Introduction a propos the anecdote of his therapy with Miller, where Žižek scripts himself as both analyst and patient. [The psychoanalytic term object a, which designates the object of fantasy, has been translated in brackets to “fantasy object” for coherence – FMK]

Reps Come First

Representations must precede policy discussionCrawford 2,(Neta, PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ. Argument and Change in World Politics, 2002 p. 19-21)

Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta- arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case . An actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality” through exaggeration , analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively represent situations in a way that makes sense . “mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic argumentation of the real.’ Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a “constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective privileging of representations, “it may not

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matter whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representation- how frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an actor’s arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument.

Floating PIK

The k solves the case by rethinking our relationship to space through data as opposed to constructs. MacDonald, no date [Fraser MacDonald Lecturer in Human Geography Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/rmg/geography/papers/anti-outerspace.pdf] KZ

Lastly, a critical geography must not be overly pessimistic, nor must it relinquish an engagement with space technology on the grounds that this has, to date, been driven largely by military agendas. The means of our critique may require us to adopt such technologies, or, at least to ask what opportunities they present for radical praxis. One thinks here of various forms of playful and subversive activism, experiment and art-event that have deliberately toyed with space hardware (Triscott and la Frenais, 2005; Spacearts, 2006). GPS receivers can help us think reflexively about position (Parks 2001); remote sensing can be used to explore political conditions in the world (Parks and Biemann, 2o03); amateur radio-telescopy can help us re-conceptualize space by attuning us to the sonorous qualities of its scientific ‘data’ (Radioqualia, 2003); even rocket science can still carry utopian freight (Chalcraft, 2006). Through such means, can space be given a truly human geography.

***AFF ANSWERS***

Framework- Threats Come First

The us should focus on threats- ensures safety.[Christopher A. Ford][ Fellow and Director of the Center for Technology and Global Security at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.] [Saturday, July 02] online: http://www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/?p=56] VB\

We should also spend more time and effort in preparing ourselves for the kind of space-denial efforts that could be expected from not-yet-our-peer competitors such as China in a possible future conflict. Recent Air Force war gaming, for instance, is rumored to have made it disturbingly clear not only that the U.S. is extraordinarily vulnerable to space-denial attacks (which, after all, is not news) but that in wartime scenarios it might be quite worthwhile for our opponents to create circumstances hostile to all uses of space. While our adversaries’ operations would be impeded as well, the theory goes, we would be far more relatively disadvantaged – especially in “expeditionary” overseas scenarios in which we would depend hugely upon space-based communications, surveillance, targeting, and other types of combat support, while our opponents would be fighting in their own neighborhood (and likely with less space-dependent systems). At least under present circumstances of U.S. spacefaring and military-technological dominance, space-preclusion is a sharply asymmetric form of warfare … with us on the losing end.

We must start development now, space weapons are a necessity Dolman ’05 [Everett C. Dolman] [Associate Professor of Comparative Military Studies US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies] [September 2005] http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v026/26.1dolman.html VB

Space weaponization is a critical and necessary component in the process of transformation well under way, a process that cannot be reversed. Now U.S. Military Transformation and Weapons in Space that America has demonstrated the capacity to strike precisely, it would not return to the kind of indiscriminant targeting and heavy collateral damage that characterized pre-space warfare unless it were engaged in a war of national survival. Moreover, any technological, economic or social benefits to be derived from developing and deploying weapons certainly would not come from increasing the stock of current systems. They would come, if at all, only from the development of

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Catastrophic risks require assessment of probability and magnitude to make sense. Posner 5 (Richard A., Judge on US Court of Appeals for the 7th circuit, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, 2004, pg. 139-140)

To deal in a systematic way with the catastrophic risks identified in chapter 1 requires first assessing them and then devising and implementing sensible responses. Assessment involves first of all collecting the technical data necessary to gauge, so far as that may be possible, the probability of particular risks, the purely physical consequences if the risks materialize (questions of value are for later), and the feasibility of various measure for reducing either the risks or the magnitude of the consequences by various amounts. The next step in the assessment stage is to embed the data in a cost-benefit analysis of the alternative responses to the risk. I am not proposing that cost-benefit analysis, at least as it is understood by economists, should be the decision procedure for resopnsing to the catastrophic risks. But it is an indispensable step in rational decision making in this as in other areas of government regulation. Effective responses to most catastrophic risks are likely to be extremely costly, and it would be mad to adopt such responses without an effor to estimate the costs and benefits. No government is going to deploy a system of surveillance and attack for preventing asteroid collisions without a sense of what the system is likely to cost and what the expected benefits (roughly, the costs of asteroid collisions that the system would prevent multiplied by the probabilities of such collisions) are likely to be relative to the costs and benefits both of alternative systems and of doing nothing.l The "precautionary principle" ("better safe than sorry") popular in Europe and among Greens generally2 is not a satisfactory alternative to cost-benefit analysis,3 if only because of its sponginess-if it is an alternative at all. In its more tempered versions, the principle is indistinguishable from cost-benefit analysis with risk aversion assumed.4 Risk aversion, as we know, entails that extra weight be given the downside of uncertain prospects. In effect it magnifies certain costs, but it does not thereby overthrow cost-benefit analysis, as some advocates of the precautionary principle may believe.

Framework- Policymaking

Debates about security threats in academia result in better policymaking – real threats can be confronted and risks can be weighed Walt, 1991 (Stephen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, International Studies Quarterly, p. 229-230)

A RECURRING THEME OF THIS ESSAY HAS BEEN the twin dangers of separating the study of security affairs from the academic world or of shifting the focus of academic scholarship too far from real-world issues. The danger of war will be with us for some time to come, and states will continue to acquire military forces for a variety of purposes. Unless one believes that ignorance is preferable to expertise, the value of independent national security scholars should be apparent. INDEED, history suggests that countries that suppress debate on national security matters are more likely to blunder into disaster, because misguided policies cannot be evaluated and stopped in time. AS IN OTHER AREAS OF PUBLIC POLICY, academic experts in security studies can help in several ways. IN THE SHORT TERM, academics are well placed to evaluate current programs, BECAUSE THEY FACE LESS PRESSURE TO SUPPORT OFFICIAL POLICY. The long-term effects OF ACADEMIC INVOLVEMENT may be even more significant: academic research can help states learn from past mistakes and can provide the theoretical innovations the produce better policy choices in the future. FURTHERMORE, their role in training the new generation of experts gives academics an additional avenue of influence.

Current policymakers think in terms of potential threats – their critique is not responsive to any of our impact claimsSpanier, 1990 (John, Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, Games Nations Play, p. 115)

Whether the observer personally approves of the "logic of behavior" that a particular framework seems to suggest is not the point. IT IS ONE THING TO SAY, AS DONE HERE, THAT THE STATE SYSTEM CONDEMNS EACH STATE TO BE CONTINUALLY CONCERNED WITH ITS POWER RELATIVE TO THAT OF OTHER STATES, WHICH, IN AN ANARCHICAL SYSTEM, IT REGARDS AS POTENTIAL AGGRESSORS. IT IS QUITE ANOTHER THING TO APPROVE MORALLY OF POWER POLITICS. THE UTILITY OF THE STATE-SYSTEM FRAMEWORK IS SIMPLY THAT IS POINTS TO THE "ESSENCE" OF STATE BEHAVIOR. IT DOES NOT PRETEND TO ACCOUNT FOR ALL FACTORS, SUCH AS MORAL NORMS, THAT MOTIVATE STATES. AS A NECESSARILY SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF REALITY, IT CLARIFIES WHAT MOST BASICALLY CONCERNS AND DRIVES STATES AND WHAT KINDS OF BEHAVIOR CAN BE EXPECTED. We. as observers, may deplore that behavior and the anarchical system that produces it and we may wish that international politics were not as conflictual and violent AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY HAS ALREADY AMPLY DEMONSTRATED. We may prefer a system other that one in which states are so committed to advancing their own national interests and protecting their sovereignty. Nevertheless, however much we may deplore the current system AND PREFER A MORE PEACEFUL AND HARMONIOUS WORLD, we must first understand the contemporary one if we are to learn how to "manage" it and avoid the catastrophe of a nuclear war.

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Perm Do Both

Perm embrace the plan and all parts of the alternative that don’t consist of rejecting the plan. The permutation solves and their alternative fails - "rejection" or "forgetting" of current IR frameworks only shields the status quo from criticismDarby, 1997 (Phillip, Reader in International Relations @ U of Melbourne and Co-Director of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Australia, At the Edge of International Relations: Postcolonialism, Gender and Dependency. P. 242-3)

There is one final thought which relates back to the title of the book, Why, it might be asked by those working In the new discourses or basically engaged With the Third World attempt to bring disciplinary international relations into the picture Would it not be better all round to leave international relations to its own concerns? After all, its evident commitment to disciplinary boundaries and its lack of receptivity, even hostility, to many of the approaches favoured by the new discourses hardly augurs well for productive exchange. Moreover, its links with established power compound the constraints of disciplinary orthodoxy and give international relations' politics a very different leaning from, say, post-colonialism or cultural studies. There is also a feeling that international relations' capacity to co-opt, to appropriate contending perspectives to its own design, could blunt the edge of alternative approaches to the situation of the Third World in global politics. Such, it might provocatively be claimed, has been the fate of feminism, which has been domesticated within the discipline and has come increasingly to concern itself with established reference points such as the state and security. The realist chorus seems to run 'We are all good feminists now.' Such claims may well be overstated but they are not without truth. Yet it is precisely international relations influence and its assurance thaf it holds the keys to understanding global politics which makes dialogue so necessary. Whatever its shortcomings, the discipline has highlighted Many of the major impediments to the to the processes of global change, and they need to be addressed if the radicalism of the new discourses is to bear directly on the problems of the third world. In this respect, being at the edge should not constitute an end in itself, for such a position is surely destined for continued marginalization and ineffectiveness. Rather, the edge needs to engage the centre and draw it out it needs to inscribe its perspectives and insights as no longer marginal to the prospects for social change and global transformation. Merely ignoring the centre and the mainstream will continue to shield people and experiences at the edge from view.

Perm do both - all of their threat construction and self-fulfilling prophecy arguments bolsters our Affirmative. Aggressive U.S. actions in the status-quo feed into China threat discourse and create a self-fulfilling prophecy of nationalist aggressionPan, 2004 (Chengxin, Australian National University, Discourses of ‘China’ in International Relations: A Study in Western Theory as (IR) Practice, Doctoral Thesis, p. 28)

The issue of the ‘China threat’ discourse as a self-fulfilling prophecy will receive more detailed analysis in Chapter 7, where I will draw almost exclusively on Chinese discourses from within China to illustrate how Chinese nationalism, realpolitik thinking, and a hardline worldview—themselves major symptoms of the ‘China threat’—have been brought to the fore. This process has recently seen, for example, the emergence of the ‘China Can Say No’ sentiment and the upsurge of popular nationalism in response to Western, and particularly U.S., aggressive containment strategies, most notably America’s show of force in the Taiwan Strait in 1996 and its ‘accidental’ bombing of the Chinese Embassy in 1999. Similar reactions to these incidents have also led a growing number of Chinese IR scholars to question China’s official worldview in terms of ‘peace and development,’ and to categorise the government’s dependence on international institutions as ‘one-sided wishful thinking.’ This has provoked a renewed call to reinvoke the so-called ‘old thinking’ centred on national interests, sovereignty, power politics, tit-for-tat strategies, and nuclear deterrence.101 Viewed in this context, there is more than a grain of truth in the (neo)realist representation of a ‘China threat’ but, I argue, Western realist scholars and practitioners have contributed to its emergence, by creating an intimate enemy which in many ways resembles the realist Western self.

Threats are real

Threats are real – their authors ignore the reality of human nature and the international systemMurray, 1997 (Alastair J.H, Prof Political Theory, U Edinburgh, Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitian Ethics, p. 180)

Yet, with this point, Wendt’s discussion of realism has become detached from its reality. Realism does not hold to a Hobbesian image of [hu]man[s] possessed by an inherent lust for power or glory …’.13 Its account of human nature juxtaposes co-operative and conflictual elements. Futhermore, even in terms of the conflictual elements, it does

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not hold all individuals to be inherently predatory power maximisers, but regards them to be sometimes predatory, power maintainer/maximisers. 14 The difference is crucial. The former assumes persistently predatory actors, destined to perpetual conflict. The later assumes actors animated primarily by a will to survive but liable, at times, to slip into a self-contained lust for power. Such actors will merely tend to conlfict, perpetuating acts of predation which are occasional, in that they are non-pervasive, and yet inevitable, in that giving multiple actors and infinite time span, such acts are an unavoidable element of the human condition. Ultimately, realism allows us to take account of the fact that actors are capable of both cooperation and self regard, as are capable of defining this self regard in both status quo and revisionist ways. As such, Wendt’s attempt to attribute it ‘a relentless pessimism’ proves untenable.

Self-fulfilling prophecy is backwards – failure to express our fears causes them to occurMacy 95 [Joanna Macy, General Systems Scholar and Deep Ecologist, 1995, Ecopsychology]

There is also the superstition that negative thoughts are self-fulfilling. This is of a piece with the notion , popular in New Age circles, that we create our own reality I have had people tell me that “to speak of catastrophe will just make it more likely to happen.” Actually, the contrary is nearer to the truth. Psychoanalytic theory and personal experience show us that it is precisely what we repress that eludes our conscious control and tends to erupt into behavior. As Carl Jung observed, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” But ironically, in our current situation, the person who gives warning of a likely ecological holocaust is often made to feel guilty of contributing to that very fate.

Status quo systemic killing proves threats are real.Duvall and Havercroft ’06 [Raymond Duvall University of Minnesota, U.S. Army Special Agent at Fort Huachuca, Arizona in September 1989 and have remained in the same specialty for 20 years] [Jonathan Havercroft University of British Columbia Ph.D. Minnesota) specializes in political theory. His primary research focus is on the historical transformation of sovereignty in the discourses of political philosophy from the 17th century to the present,] [October 2006] VBhttp://www.ligi.ubc.ca/sites/liu/files/Publications/Havercroft_paper.pdf

So, too, does the seemingly unrelated concern with the putatively profoundly destabilizing effects of modes of political killing that intentionally target ‘civilians’ or ‘non-combatants’, one such mode frequently labeled terrorism, and another— if carried out by socially legitimate authorities—deemed illegal under the terms of established international humanitarian law.11 All of these lines of thought, and others, rest on the assumption that the dynamics of political interaction and even systemic structure of international relations are causally affected by the availability and use of technologies of violence. Effects can be in terms of constitutive processes, as well. That is, technologies of destruction and economies/cartographies of violence are, in part, constitutive of what political society is; modes of political killing are productive of political subjects . Research by Charles Tilly13 and others14 on the development of the modern states-system rests on and expresses this point. In this highly influential interpretation, the modern, territorial state became—it was socially constituted and produced as—the dominant form of political society in relationship to and through newly emerging technologies of destruction and economies/cartographies of violence (in conjunction, of course, with other processes) That tradition, initiated by Hans Morgenthau and especially John Herz early in the nuclear era, offered an incisive argument about nuclear weapons’ deterritorializing effects on states.20 Herz begins with the assumption that “Throughout history, that unit which affords protection and security to human beings has tended to become the basic political unit; people, in the long run, will recognize that authority, any authority, which possesses the power of protection”.21 In his view, the power of protection, on which the constitution of the sovereign authority of the modern territorial state is founded, is completely eroded by nuclear weapons.

Threats are real –Nothing is inevitableDolman ’10 Dr. Everett Carl Dolman, [Professor of Comparative Military Studies at the US Air Force?s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS). His focus is on international relations and theory, and he has been identified as Air University?s first space theorist. Dr. Dolman began his career as an intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, and moved to the United States Space Command in 1986]. [September 2010] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1676919 VB

Such determinist theory is quickly countered by those who find its implications abhorrent. Inevitability is a crass and unsubtle divination. Because a thing has always happened does not mean that it always will. Nor does the reverse hold—because a thing has never happened does not mean that it cannot be so. The realist paradigm of power politics does not have to hold sway. The cruelly consistent narrative of history need not be eternally retold. Nothing is inevitable, counter the idealists. The world can be made different, the world today is different.

Ending our own securitization doesn’t affect other countries- they’ll just see it as an opportunity to attack. Montgomery 6, [Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, [Evan Branden, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, “Breaking out of the Security Dilema: Realism, Reassurance, and the Problem of Uncertainty,” International Security, 151-2]

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Defensive realism's main observations indicate that hard-line policies often lead to self-defeating and avoidable consequences. If so, then conciliatory policies should have the opposite effect. Several scholars have elaborated this intuitive logic. Drawing on rational-choice deterrence theory, 3 cooperation theory, 4 and Charles Osgood's GRIT strategy, 5 they argue that benign states can reveal their motives, reassure potential adversaries, and avoid unnecessary conflict with costly signals—actions that greedy actors would be unwilling to take. In particular, by engaging in arms control agreements or unilateral force reductions, a security seeker can adopt a more defensive military posture and demonstrate its preference for maintaining rather than challenging the status quo. This argument generates an obvious puzzle, however: If states can reduce uncertainty by altering their military posture, why has this form of reassurance been both uncommon and unsuccessful? Few states, for example, have adopted defensive weapons to de-escalate an arms race or demonstrate their intentions, 7 and repeated efforts to restrain the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union either failed or produced strategically negligible agreements that, at least until its final years, "proved incapable of moderating the superpower rivalry in any deep or permanent way." How can scholars and policymakers understand why states often avoid military reassurance, when they choose to undertake it, why it fails, and when it can succeed? In 1906 Britain tried to prevent a further escalation of its naval race with Germany by decreasing the number of battleships it planned to construct, but this gesture was unreciprocated and the competition continued. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union substantially reduced its conventional forces, yet the United States did not view these reductions as proof of benign motives.

Self-fulfilling prophecy arguments are wrong – failure to anticipate and react to potential dangers is what causes them to occur, not the reverseMacy, 1995 (Joanna, Ecopsychology)

FEAR OF PROVOKING DISASTER There is also the superstition that negative thoughts are self-fulfilling. This is of a piece with notion, POPULAR IN NEW AGE CIRCLES, that we create our own reality. I have had people tell me that “to speak of catastrophe will just make it more likely to happen.” Actually the contrary is nearer to the truth. Psychoanalytic theory and personal experience show us that it is precisely what we repress that eludes our conscious control and tends to erupt into behavior. AS CARL JUNG OBSERVED, “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” BUT IRONICALLY, IN OUR CURRENT SITUATION, THE PERSON WHO GIVES WARNING OF A LIKELY ECOLOGICAL HOLOCAUST IS OFTEN MADE TO FEEL GUILTY OF CONTRIBUTING TO THAT VERY FATE.

Threats are real, even if discussing them necessarily involves interpretation. Specificity is key - and they have no responsive evidence to the specificity of our argumentsCampbell, 1992 (David, Assistance Political Science Pf- Johns Hopkins, WRITING SECURITY: UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY, p. 2)

This understanding of the necessarily interpretive basis of risk HAS IMPORTANT IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. IT does not deny that there are 'real' dangers in the world; infectious diseases, accidents, and political violence (among other factors) have consequences that can literally "Be understood in terms of life and death. BUT NOT ALL RISKS ARE EQUAL, AND NOT ALL RISKS ARE INTERPRETED AS DANGERS. Modern society contains within it a veritable cornucopia of danger; indeed, there is such an abundance of risk that it is impossible to objectively know all that threatens us. THOSE EVENTS OR FACTORS WHICH WE IDENTIFY AS DANGEROUS THEREFORE COME TO BE ASCRIBED AS SUCH ONLY THROUGH AN INTERPRETATION OF THEIR VARIOUS DIMENSIONS OF DANGER-OUSNESS. MOREOVER, THAT PROCESS OF INTERPRETATION DOES NOT DEPEND UPON THE INCIDENCE OF 'OBJECTIVE1 FACTORS FOR ITS VERACITY. FOR EXAMPLE, HIV INFECTION IS CONSIDERED BY MANY TO BE AMERICA'S MAJOR PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE, YET PNEUMONIA AND INFLUENZA, DIABETES, SUICIDE, AND CHRONIC LIVER DISEASE WERE ALL (IN 1987) INDIVIDUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MANY MORE DEATHS.4 EQUALLY, AN , INTERPRETATION OF DANGER HAS LICENSED A "WAR ON (ILLEGAL) DRUGS' IN THE UNITED STATES DESPITE DIE FACT THAT BOTH THE CONSUMPTION LEVEL OF, AND DIE NUMBER OF DEATHS WHICH RESULT FROM, LICIT DRUGS EXCEEDS BY A CONSIDERABLE ORDER OF MAGNITUDE THAT ASSOCIATED WITH ILLICIT DRUGS. AND' 'TERRORISM1 IS OFTEN CITED AS A MAJOR THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY EVEN THOUGH ITS OCCURRENCE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES IS MINIMAL (SEVEN INCIDENTS WITHOUT FATALITIES IN 1985 ACCORDING TO THE FBI) AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO INTERNATIONAL CARNAGE MINOR.

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Threats have already been constructed – ignoring existing threats guarantees conflict and warGuzzini, 1998 (Stefano, Prof - Central European U, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy, p. 22)

Third, this last chapter has argued that although the evolution of realism has been mainly a disappointment as a general causal theory, we have to deal with it. On the one hand, realist assumptions and insights are used and merged in nearly all frameworks of analysis offered in International Relations or International Political Economy. One of the book's purposes was to show realism as a varied and variably rich theory, so heterogeneous mat it would be better to refer to it only in plural terms. On the other hand, to dispose of realism because some of its versions have beeq proven empirically wrong, ahistorical, or logically incoherent, does not necessarily touch its role in the shared understandings of observers and practitioners of international affairs. Realist theories have a persisting power for constructing our understanding of the present. Their assumptions, both as theoretical constructs, and as particular lessons of the past translated from one generation of decision-makers to another, help mobilizing certain understandings and dispositions to action. They also provide mem with legitimacy. Despite realism's several deaths as a general causal theory, it can still powerfully enframe action. It exists in the minds an is hence reflected in. the actions, of many practitioners. Whether or not the world realism depicts is out there, realism is. Realism is no a causal that explains International Relations, but as long as realism continues to be a powerful mind-set, we need to understand realism to make sense of International Relations. In other words, realism is a still necessary hemeneutical bridge to the understanding of world politics. Getting rid of realism without having a deep understanding of it, not only risks unwarranted dismissal of some valuable theorethical insights that I have tried to gather in this book; it would be futile. Indeed, it might be the best way to tacitly and uncritically reproduce it.

Their argument misses the point – it is precisely because political actors manipulate threat perceptions that our impacts are trueTuathail, 1996 (Gearoid, Associate Geography Pf— Virginia Tech, POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY, vl 5, n6/7, p. 651-652)

Committed to a Foucaultian 'strategy without a knowing strategist' notion of power (p. 70), dissident IR can disable readings of history that identify certain social institutions, actors and classes acting instrumentally to secure certain ends (E.G. WINNING AN ELECTION, STRENGTHENING ONE'S POWER, ACCUMULATING MORE CAPITAL, ETC.). RATHER POWER IS DISCUSSED IN GENERALIZED, NON-INSTRUMENTALIST TERMS: IT IS ABOUT THE PROCESSES OF IDENTITY FORMATION, PROCESSES WHICH MAKE PEOPLE RATHER THAN THEY MAKING THEMSELVES. WHAT this narrative tends to downplay is the deliberate and conscious manipulation of identities bv certain social actors (presidential candidates, political parties, state bureaucracies and business groups, for example) to advance their own perceived ends. FOR EXAMPLE. CAMPBELL'S READING OF GEO-ECONOMIC DISCOURSES ON JAPAN AS "ONE AMONG MANY PRACTICES DESIGNED TO SUSTAIN AND SECURE THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE UNITED STATES AND CONTAIN CHALLENGES TO THE BOUNDARIES OF AMERICAN IDENTITY" (P. 236) COMPLETELY MISSES THE OVERRIDING ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE DISCOURSES IN HELPING CERTAIN DOMESTIC INTEREST GROUPS (E.G. THE BIG THREE U.S. AUTO PRODUCERS) INSTRUMENTALIZE THE U.S. STATE FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES (O TUATHAIL, 1993).

Threat construction is a self-denying prophecyReiter, 1995 (Dan, postdoctoral fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University: International Security. Vol 20. No. 2, Fall p. 34.)

These empirical findings have important implications for current policy questions. They indicate that it takes a lot to provoke a state to preempt, meaning that states can probably get away with more in the way of military mobilization during a crisis without sparking preemption. If the traditional dilemma in crisis management is between doing too little militarily risking war from deterrence breakdown, and too much, risking war via preemption, these results would prescribe making more military preparations to avoid deterrence breakdown, because the risks of preemption via an escalation spiral are quite low. Further, these results indicate that fears of preemptive strikes against nuclear forces of new nuclear states in international crises might be exaggerated. Lastly, peace can be protected by stressing to crisis partipants the unacceptability of striking first, especially if real costs (such as withholding military aid) are imposed on surprise attackers. Further, emphasing the dangers of preemption might reinforce the self-denying prophecy effect. Though genuinely aggressive states willing to accept international censure may be immune to such efforts, such actions could help preserve peace in some crises, especially when the adversaries prefer a peaceful solution or are vulnerable to outside pressure.

The future Space Race against China is just another reason why the threats are realMoore ‘06Mike Moore is contributing editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a peace-andsecurity magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project in 1945 (www.thebulletin.org). He is writing a book called Space Cop: America’s coming war with its own values Moore, Mike. SAIS Review, Volume 26, Number 1, pp. 175-188 (Article) Winter-Spring 2006] VB

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If any nation, even a friendly nation, announced such plans, Americans would demand that Washington lean on the offender as hard as needed to force a recantation. Meanwhile, the United States would call upon the international community to impose draconian economic and political sanctions until the state’s policies were reversed. But if such measures failed, the world would have a new space race. Military dominance of near-Earth space rather than sending men and women to the moon or possibly to Mars would be the goal.

The U.S needs to be the one to win the space race to MarsMoore ‘06Mike Moore is contributing editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a peace-andsecurity magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project in 1945 (www.thebulletin.org). He is writing a book called Space Cop: America’s coming war with its own values Moore, Mike. SAIS Review, Volume 26, Number 1, pp. 175-188 (Article) Winter-Spring 2006

But let the race begin. The United States should not and would not let another country develop a comprehensive and demonstrated ability to control space. Reasonable people in Boston or Chicago or Seattle do not fret over Chinese or Russian satellites sliding overhead. Whatever the purpose of these satellites may be—and they have many functions—they are not weapons. The mere idea that another nation someday might develop and deploy a substantial and systematic capability to disrupt, disable, damage, or destroy a significant number of U.S. satellites with space-based weapons—or even land-, sea-, or air-based weapons—would be intolerable. Even worse, what if another country deployed space-based weapons a decade or two down the road capable of hitting earthly targets? The mere prospect of such hardware overhead would impel the United States to take immediate and decisive action.

Anyone can be a threat – we cannot take any chances, people will attack when they have the chance tooMoore ‘06Mike Moore is contributing editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a peace-andsecurity magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project in 1945 (www.thebulletin.org). He is writing a book called Space Cop: America’s coming war with its own values Moore, Mike. SAIS Review, Volume 26, Number 1, pp. 175-188 (Article) Winter-Spring 2006

Any U.S. president who failed to act with martial vigor in the face of hard evidence that another nation was about to place weapons in space would court impeachment. To be sure, the other country would argue forcefully and with apparent sincerity that its intentions were wholly peaceful. It would say that it would not exercise such extraordinary capabilities unless greatly provoked—and then it would act only in self-defense. But what U.S. president would risk the nation’s security on mere promises of good intentions? A nation, even a friendly nation, that had demonstrated the capability to deploy comprehensive space-control systems or to place weapons in space would be defined as a potential threat to the United States by the president, the Congress, and the American people. So much for hypothetical scenarios. The United States is the only nation that speaks of achieving dominance of space. The common refrain is that U.S. superiority in space would be good for America and good for the world. If the United States definitively chooses to deploy a comprehensive space-control capability, it would so with the best of intentions. The United States would never deny access to space to another country except in extreme circumstances. America would not dream of using its space-control capability to shatter the satellites of other nations or to demolish buildings with devices launched from orbit unless a war were in progress—or imminent. Achieving a comprehensive space-control capability is purely a matter of “anticipatory self-defense,” in Pentagon jargon.

Cede the Political

A refusal to engage politically will further the right- risks extinction. Reformism is necessaryWapner, 8 [Paul Wapner, director of the Global Environmental Politics Program in SIS. 2008 ( “the importance of critical environmental studies in the new environmentalism” project muse)]

To many readers, such questions probably sound familiar. Efforts to rid the world of war, poverty, human rights abuses and injustice in general are perennial challenges that require heightened compassion and a commitment that transcends one’s time on earth. The questions are especially relevant, however, to environmentalists. They represent the kind of challenges we constantly pose to ourselves and to those we try to convince to join us. Environmental issues are some of the gravest dangers facing humanity and all life on the planet. At their most immediate, environmental problems undermine the quality of life for the poorest and are increasingly eroding the quality

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of life of even the affluent. At the extreme, environmental challenges threaten to fracture the fundamental organic infrastructure that supports life on Earth and thus imperil life’s very survival. What to do? Environmental Studies is the academic discipline charged with trying to figure this out. Like Feminist and Race Studies, it emerged out of a political movement and thus never understood itself as value-neutral. Coming on the heels of the modern environmental movement of the 1960s, environmental studies has directed itself toward understanding the biophysical limits of the earth and how humans can live sustainably given those limits. As such, it has always seen its normative commitments not as biases that muddy its inquiry but as disciplining directives that focus scholarship in scientifically and politically relevant directions. To be sure, the discipline’s natural scientists see themselves as objective observers of the natural world and understand their work as normative only to the degree that it is shaped by the hope of helping to solve environmental problems. Most otherwise remain detached from the political conditions in which their work is assessed. The discipline’s social scientists also maintain a stance of objectivity to the degree that they respect the facts of the social world, but many of them engage the political world by offering policy prescriptions and new political visions. What is it like to research and teach Environmental Studies these days? Where does the normative dimension of the discipline fall into contemporary political affairs? Specifically, how should social thinkers within Environmental Studies understand the application of their normative commitments? Robert Cox once distinguished what he calls “problem-solving” theory from “critical theory.” The former, which aims toward social and political reform, accepts prevailing power relationships and institutions and implicitly uses these as a framework for inquiry and action. As a theoretical enterprise, problem-solving theory works within current paradigms to address particular intellectual and practical challenges. Critical theory, in contrast, questions existing power dynamics and seeks not only to reform but to transform social and political conditions.1 Critical environmental theory has come under attack in recent years. As the discipline has matured and further cross-pollinated with other fields, some of us have become enamored with continental philosophy, cultural and communication studies, high-level anthropological and sociological theory and a host of other insightful disciplines that tend to step back from contemporary events and paradigms of thought and reveal structures of power that reproduce social and political life. While such engagement has refined our ability to identify and make visible impediments to creating a greener world, it has also isolated critical Environmental Studies from the broader discipline and, seemingly, the actual world it is trying to transform. Indeed, critical environmental theory has become almost a sub-discipline to itself. It has developed a rarefied language and, increasingly, an insular audience. To many, this has rendered critical theory not more but less politically engaged as it scales the heights of thought only to be further distanced from practice. It increasingly seems, to many, to be an impotent discourse preaching radical ideas to an already initiated choir. Critical Environmental Studies is also sounding ºat these days coming off the heels of, arguably, the most anti-environmentalist decade ever. The Bush Administration’s tenure has been an all-time low for environmental protection. The Administration has installed industry-friendly administrators throughout the executive branch, rolled back decades of domestic environmental law and international environmental leadership, politicized scientific evidence and expressed outright hostility to almost any form of environmental regulation.2 1. Cox 1996. 2. Gore 2007; and Pope and Rauber 2006. With the US as the global hegemon, it is hard to overestimate the impact these actions have had on world environmental affairs. Being a politically engaged environmental scholar has been difficult during the past several years. In the US, instead of being proactive, the environmental community has adopted a type of rearguard politics in which it has tried simply to hold the line against assaults on everything from the Endangered Species Act, New Source Review and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Kyoto Protocol and international cooperative efforts to curb deforestation and loss of biological diversity. Outside the US, the environmental community has had to struggle for pronounced relevance in similar issues as it has operated in the shadow of an environmentally-irresponsible hegemon. Much of the academic world has followed suit, as it were. In the US, it has found itself needing to argue for basics like the knowledge of environmental science, the wisdom of enforcing established law, the importance of holding violators accountable and the significance of the US to remain engaged in international environmental affairs. Outside the US, the academic community has fared only marginally better. For instance, many in Europe, who have long advanced analyses of the formation and implementation of regimes, found themselves backpedaling as they wrestled with the significance of international regimes absent hegemonic participation. The result is that the space for what was considered politically-relevant scholarship has shrunk dramatically; what used to be considered problemsolving theory has become so out of touch with political possibility that it has been relegated to the margins of contemporary thought. Put differently, the realm of critical theory has grown tremendously as hitherto reasonable ideas have increasingly appeared radical and previously radical ones have been pushed even further to the hinterlands of critical thought. As we enter the final stretch of the Bush Administration and the waning years of the millennium’s first decade, the political landscape appears to be changing. In the US, a Democratic Congress, environmental action at the municipal and state levels, and a growing sense that a green foreign policy may be a way to weaken global terrorism, enhance US energy independence and reestablish US moral leadership in the world, have partially resuscitated and reenergized environmental concern.3 Worldwide, there seems to be a similar and even more profound shift as people in all walks of life are recognizing the ecological, social and economic effects of climate change, corporations are realizing that environmental action can make business sense, and environmental values in general are permeating even some of the most stubborn societies. The “perfect storm” of this combination is beginning to put environmental issues ªrmly on the world’s radar screen. It seems that a new day is arising for environmentalism and, by extension, Environmental Studies. What role should environmental scholarship

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assume in this new climate? Specifically, how wise is it to pursue critical Environmental Studies at such an opportune moment? Is it strategically useful to study the outer reaches of environmental thought and continue to reflect on the structural dimensions of environmental degradation when the political tide seems to be turning and problem-solving theorists may once again have the ear of those in power? Is now the time to run to the renewed, apparently meaningful center or to cultivate more incisive critical environmental thought? Notwithstanding the promise of the new environmental moment for asking fundamental questions, many may counsel caution toward critical Environmental Studies. The political landscape may be changing but it is unclear if critical Environmental Studies is prepared to make itself relevant. Years of being distant from political influence has intensified the insularity and arcane character of critical environmental theory, leaving the discipline rusty in its ability to make friends within policy circles. Additionally, over the past few years, the public has grown less open to radical environmental ideas, as it has been fed a steady diet of questioning even the basics of environmental issues. Indeed, that the Bush Administration enjoyed years of bulldozing over environmental concern without loud, sustained, vocal opposition should give us pause. It suggests that we should not expect too much, too soon. The world is still ensconced in an age of global terror; the “high” politics of national security and economic productivity continue to over-shadow environmental issues; and the public needs to be slowly seasoned to the insights and arguments of critical theory before it can appreciate their importance—as if it has been in the dark for years and will be temporary blinded if thrown into the daylight too soon. From this perspective, so the logic might go, scholars should restrict themselves to problemsolving theory and direct their work toward the mainstream of environmental thought. Such prudence makes sense. However, we should remember that problemsolving theory, by working within existing paradigms, at best simply smoothes bumps in the road in the reproduction of social practices. It solves certain dilemmas of contemporary life but is unable to address the structural factors that reproduce broad, intractable challenges. Problem-solving theory, to put it differently, gets at the symptoms of environmental harm rather than the root causes. As such, it might slow the pace of environmental degradation but doesn’t steer us in fundamentally new, more promising directions. No matter how politically sensitive one wants to be, such new direction is precisely what the world needs. The last few years have been lost time, in terms of fashioning a meaningful, global environmental agenda. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we were in some kind of green nirvana before the Bush Administration took power and before the world of terror politics trumped all other policy initiatives. The world has faced severe environmental challenges for decades and, while it may seem a ripe time to reinvigorate problem-solving theory in the new political climate, we must recognize that all the problem-solving theory of the world won’t get us out of the predicament we’ve been building for years. We are all familiar with the litany of environmental woes. Scientists tell us, for example, that we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction since life formed on the planet close to a billion years ago. If things don’t change, we will drive one-third to one-half of all species to extinction over the next 50 years.4 Despite this, there are no policy proposals being advanced at the national or international levels that come even close to addressing the magnitude of biodiversity loss.5 Likewise, we know that the build-up of greenhouse gases is radically changing the climate, with catastrophic dangers beginning to express themselves and greater ones waiting in the wings. The international community has embarked on signiªcant efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions but no policies are being debated that come even close to promising climate stabilization—including commitments to reduce the amount of carbon emissions per unit of GDP, as advanced by the US government, and to reduce GHG emissions globally by 5 percent below 1990 levels, as specified by the Kyoto Protocol. Scientists tell us that, to really make a difference, we need reductions on the order of 70–80 percent below 1990 levels.6 Such disconnects between high-level policy discussions and the state of the environment are legion. Whether one looks at data on ocean fisheries, fresh water scarcity or any other major environmental dilemma, the news is certainly bad as our most aggressive policies fall short of the minimum required. What is our role as scholars in the face of such a predicament? Many of us can and should focus on problem-solving theory. We need to figure out, for example, the mechanisms of cap and trade, the tightening of rules against trafficking in endangered species and the ratcheting up of regulations surrounding issues such as water distribution. We should, in other words, keep our noses to the grindstone and work out incremental routes forward. This is important not simply because we desperately need policy-level insight and want our work to be taken seriously but also because it speaks to those who are tone-deaf to more radical orientations. Most of the public in the developed world apparently doesn’t like to reflect on the deep structures of environmental affairs and certainly doesn’t like thought that recommends dramatically changing our lifestyles. Nonetheless, given the straits that we are in, a different appreciation for relevance and radical thought is due—especially one that takes seriously the normative bedrock of our discipline. Critical theory self-consciously eschews value-neutrality and, in doing so, is able to ask critical questions about the direction of current policies and orientations. If there ever were a need for critical environmental theory, it is now— when a thaw in political stubbornness is seemingly upon us and the stakes of avoiding dramatic action are so grave. The challenge is to fashion a more strategic and meaningful type of critical theory. We need to find ways of speaking that re-shift the boundary between reformist and radical ideas or, put differently, render radical insights in a language that makes clear what they really are, namely, the most realistic orientations these days. 4. Wilson 2006. 5. Meyer 2006. 6. Kolbert 2006. Realism in International Relations has always enjoyed a step-up from other schools of thought insofar as it proclaims itself immune from starry-eyed utopianism. By claiming to be realistic rather than idealistic, it has enjoyed a permanent seat at the table (indeed, it usually sits at the head). By analogy, problem-solving theory in Environmental Studies has likewise won legitimacy and appears particularly attractive as a new environmental day is, arguably, beginning to dawn. It has claimed itself to be the most reasonable and policyrelevant. But, we must ask ourselves, how realistic is problem-solving theory when the numbers of people currently suffering from environmental degradation—either as mortal victims or environmental refugees—are rising and the gathering evidence that global-scale environmental conditions are being tested as never before is becoming increasingly obvious. We must ask ourselves how realistic

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problem-solving theory is when most of our actions to date pursue only thin elements of environmental protection with little attention to the wider, deeper and longer-term dimensions. In this context, it becomes clear that our notions of realism must shift. And, the obligation to commence such a shift sits squarely on the shoulders of Environmental Studies scholars. That is, communicating the realistic relevance of environmental critical theory is our disciplinary responsibility. For too long, environmental critical theory has prided itself on its arcane language. As theoreticians, we have scaled the heights of abstraction as we have been enamored with the intricacies of sophisticated theory-building and philosophical reflection. In so doing, we have often adopted a discourse of high theory and somehow felt obligated to speak in tongues, as it were. Part of this is simply the difficulty of addressing complex issues in ordinary language. But another part has to do with feeling the scholarly obligation to pay our dues to various thinkers, philosophical orientations and so forth. Indeed, some of it comes down to the impulse to sound unqualifiedly scholarly—as if saying something important demands an intellectual artifice that only the best and brightest can understand. Such practice does little to shift the boundary between problemsolving and critical theory, as it renders critical theory incommunicative to all but the narrowest of audiences. In some ways, the key insights of environmentalism are now in place. We recognize the basic dynamic of trying to live ecologically responsible lives. We know, for example, that Homo sapiens cannot populate the earth indefinitely; we understand that our insatiable appetite for resources cannot be given full reign; we know that the earth has a limit to how much waste it can absorb and neutralize. We also understand that our economic, social and political systems are ill-fitted to respect this knowledge and thus, as social thinkers, we must research and prescribe ways of altering the contemporary world order. While we, as environmental scholars, take these truths to be essentially self-evident, it is clear that many do not. As default critical theorists, we thus need to make our job one of meaningful communicators.We need to find metaphors, analogies, poetic expressions and a host of other discursive techniques for communicating the very real and present dangers of environmental degradation. We need to do this especially in these challenging and shadowy times. Resuscitating and refining critical Environmental Studies is not simply a matter of cleaning up our language. It is also about rendering a meaningful relationship between transformational, structural analysis and reformist, policy prescription. Yes, a realistic environmental agenda must understand itself as one step removed from the day-to-day incrementalism of problem-solving theory. It must retain its ability to step back from contemporary events and analyze the structures of power at work. It must, in other words, preserve its critical edge. Nonetheless, it also must take some responsibility for fashioning a bridge to contemporary policy initiatives. It must analyze how to embed practical, contemporary policy proposals (associated with, for example, a cap-and-trade system) into transformative, political scenarios.Contemporary policies, while inadequate themselves to engage the magnitude of environmental challenges, can nevertheless be guided in a range of various directions. Critical Environmental Studies can play a “critical” role by interpreting such policies in ways that render them consonant with longer-range transformative practices or at least explain how such policies can be reformulated to address the root causes of environmental harm. This entails radicalizing incrementalism—specifying the relationship between superstructural policy reforms and structural political transformation

Governmental action is keyRaco, 3 [Mike, Ph.D Vol. 28 No. 1 March 2003, Blackwell Publishing, The Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers, p.77]

This is not to say that Foucauldian, governmental-ist approaches have been without their critics and can and should be adopted by geographers without careful reflection. One recurring criticism of govern-mentalist approaches is that in adopting, often explicit, anti-foundationalist positions, its potential to establish alternative, critical political agendas is highly circumscribed. Frankel (1997), for example, argues that the plethora of discourse analyses and textual studies that characterize much of the work of governmental writers do not get to grips with the social, political and economic structures in and through which policy debates and practices are implemented. Moreover, despite its anti-totalitarian and anti-Marxist rhetoric, governmental writers are often 'close to appearing as new structural func-tionalists in their preoccupation with order and regulation... leaving little room for emphasising alternative political processes' (Frankel 1997, 85). Others, such as Harvey (1996 2000) express similar concerns, arguing that the inherent pessimism of anti-universalist approaches has helped to create a political vacuum in which those who are punitively disciplined by existing capitalist systems are left without the hope that their circumstances can be improved. Even proponents of governmentality accept that 'despite the clear potential for linking the governmentality approach to a critical politics, by and large it has not been realised' (O'Malley et al. 1997, 503). What is required is for a change in meth-odological focus towards the empirical practices of government and government programmes and less concern with abstract theorizations.

Their criticism is a retreat from political change – disconnecting critique from policy solutions creates the Left as mere spectators talking philosophy while suffering continues. Challenging institutions is the only way to create a better world McClean, 2001 (David, New School University, "The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope," Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm)

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Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida. Deleuze. Lvotard. Jameson, and Lacan. who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this eroup. those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. .. . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations''(italics mine).*^1 Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes,.... or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is vet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not vet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

The Affirmatives retreat from politics dooms their ability to change the world – it creates atrocity and causes a vacuum that gets filled by the right Boggs, 1997 (Carl, Professor and Ph.D. in Political Science, National University, Theory and Society 26: 741-780)

The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved ^ perhaps even unrecognized ^ only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of

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infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or side- step these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites ^ an already familiar dynamic in many lesser- developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise ^ or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.75

It is a question of curriculum – their model is uniquely dangerous – it damns us to disengagement in the face of the right and the hegemonic Small, 2006 (Jonathan, Former Americorps VISTA for the Human Services Coalition, “Moving Forward”, The Journal for Civic Commitment, Spring, http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/engagement/Journal/Issue7/Small.pdf)

What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these challenges? While we cannot be sure of the exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that humankind will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the capitalists, individualism, and personal responsibility, the new century will present challenges that require collective action, unity, and enlightened self-interest. Confronting global warming, depleted natural resources, global super viruses, global crime syndicates, and multinational corporations with no conscience and no accountability will require cooperation, openness, honesty, compromise, and most of all solidarity – ideals not exactly cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life through the tiny lens of our own existence. Never in the history of the world has our collective fate been so intricately interwoven. Our very existence depends upon our ability to adapt to this new paradigm, to envision a more cohesive society. With humankind’s next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern individualism backed us into a corner. We have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation. Unlike any other crisis before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once. Global super viruses will ravage rich and poor alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming and damage to the environment will affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe. Air pollution will force gas masks on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the sun, and chemicals will invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to change our current course, to survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical solidarity we can alter the course of human events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and tolerance in schools. We need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores alone will not begin to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can we teach community in the age of rugged individualism? How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true meaning of power? These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical transformation of our conception of education. We’ll need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the potential of youth to make sense of their world. In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set before educators in the twenty-first century, this paper is a proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical climate of public K-12 education does not lend itself well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study targets a higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some possibilities for a large community college in an urban setting with a diverse student body. Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay between ideas of social justice, civic engagement, and service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As such, a simple and straightforward explanation of the three terms is helpful to direct this inquiry. Before we look at a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained therein, this paper will draw out a clear understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and how their relationship to each other affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often ascribed long, complicated, and convoluted definitions. In fact, one could fill a good-sized library with treatises on this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice to have a general characterization of the term, focusing instead on the dynamics of its interaction with civic engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community conscience that values inclusion, fairness, tolerance, and equality.

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The idea of social justice in America has been around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social contract. The Declaration of Independence is the best example of the prominence of social contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically that the government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete expressions of the spirit of social justice. Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate definitions of civic engagement and service learning, respectively. Once again, let’s not get bogged down on subtleties. Civic engagement is a measure or degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual and a community demonstrate around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some will say that today’s youth are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic engagement. Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement. And there are about a hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and today’s youth. But one thing is for sure; today’s youth no longer see government and politics as an effective or valuable tool for affecting positive change in the world. Instead of criticizing this judgment, perhaps we should come to sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.” Maybe the youth’s rejection of American politics isn’t a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new meaning for us today. In order to foster fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twenty-first century, we need to fundamentally change our systems. Therefore, part of our challenge becomes convincing the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean government and commerce, have the potential for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political meaning in this context. Service learning is a methodology and a tool for teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and deepening practical understanding of a subject. Since it is a relatively new field, at least in the structured sense, service learning is only beginning to define itself. Through service learning students learn by experiencing things firsthand and by exposing themselves to new points of view. Instead of merely reading about government, for instance, a student might experience it by working in a legislative office. Rather than just studying global warming out of a textbook, a student might volunteer time at an environmental group. If service learning develops and evolves into a discipline with the honest goal of making better citizens, teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and most importantly, exposing students to different and alternative experiences, it could be a major feature of a modern education. Service learning is the natural counterbalance to our current overemphasis on standardized testing. Social justice, civic engagement, and service learning are caught in a symbiotic cycle. The more we have of one of them; the more we have of all of them. However, until we get momentum behind them, we are stalled. Service learning may be our best chance to jumpstart our democracy. In the rest of this paper, we will look at the beginning stages of a project that seeks to do just that.

The practices in this debate round do matter – we kritik them on a fundamental level Boggs, 1997 (Carl, Professor and Ph.D. in Political Science, National University, Theory and Society 26: 741-780)

The historic goal of recovering politics IN THE ARISTOTELIAN SENSE, THERE- FORE, suggests nothing less than a revitalized citizenry prepared to occupy that immense expanse of public space. Extension of democratic control into every area of social life requires insurgency against THE CHARADE OF NORMAL POLITICS, SINCE THE PERSISTENCE OF NORMAL POLITICS IS JUST ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF anti-politics. If authentic citizenship is to be forged, then INFORMATION, skills, and attitudes vital to political efficacy need to flourish and be widely distributed THROUGHOUT THE POPULATION, without this, ``consciousness transformation'' is impossible, OR AT LEAST POLITICALLY MEANINGLESS. A DEBILITATING PROBLEM WITH THE CULTURE OF anti-politics, HOWEVER, IS THAT IT precisely devalues those VERY TYPES OF INFORMATION, skills, AND ATTITUDES.

Because politics is currently screwed up now, we need a political realm to capitalize upon its failings – they give up on that, and we save it Boggs, 1997 (Carl, Professor and Ph.D. in Political Science, National University, Theory and Society 26: 741-780)

So it follows that future attempts to revitalize the public sphere and reclaim politics for (and by) an empowered citizenry will face a Sisyphean battle, especially since corporate colonization, the global capitalist order, media myth-making, and ``post-modern'' social fragmentation are all so ¢rmly entrenched. And the main twentieth-century ideological discourses ^ nationalism, liberalism, socialism, Communism ^ can be expected to over few guideposts in a rapidly-changing, unpredictable field of social forces, popular struggles, and subjective human responses. The truth may be that such ideologies have in themselves contributed to the decline of political life since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the depoliticized culture that I am exploring in these pages is neither monolithic nor immune to powerful social contradictions generated within any highly-strained order; the system is vulnerable to change, perhaps explosive change, as American society experiences further crisis and polarization. Popular movements and organizations have survived into the 1990s, even if many of them have been fully assimilated into normal politics or have become marginalized. Whether such movements can become repoliticized - whether they can enter into and help transform the public sphere - will be the urgent question facing the United States and the world in the early twenty-first century.

Moralizing about utopian futures without concern for a political strategy is a recipe for disaster – it doesn’t awaken the system – it falls on deaf ears and alienates Issac, 2002 (Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Spring, Vol. 49 No. 2)

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Politics is about ends and means--about the values that we pursue and the methods by which we pursue them. In a perfect world, there would be a perfect congruence between ends and means: our ends would always be achievable through means that were fully consistent with them; the tension between ends and means would not exist. But then there would be no need to pursue just ends, for these would already be realized. Such a world of absolute justice lies beyond politics. The left has historically been burdened by the image of such a world. Marx's vision of the "riddle of history solved" and Engels's vision of the "withering away of the state" were two canonical expressions of the belief in an end-state in which perfect justice could be achieved once and for all. But the left has also developed a concurrent tradition of serious strategic thinking about politics. Centered around but not reducible to classical Marxism, this tradition has focused on such questions as the relations of class, party, and state; the consequences of parliamentary versus revolutionary strategies of social change; the problem of hegemony and the limits of mass politics; the role of violence in class struggle; and the relationship between class struggle and war. These questions preoccupied Karl Kautsky, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukàcs, and Antonio Gramsci--and also John Dewey, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. The history of left political thought in the twentieth century is a history of serious arguments about ends and means in politics, arguments about how to pursue the difficult work of achieving social justice in an unjust world. Many of these arguments were foolish, many of their conclusions were specious, and many of the actions followed from them were barbaric. The problem of ends and means in politics was often handled poorly, but it was nonetheless taken seriously, even if so many on the left failed to think clearly about the proper relationship between their perfectionist visions and their often Machiavellian strategies. What is striking about much of the political discussion on the left today is its failure to engage this earlier tradition of argument. The left, particularly the campus left--by which I mean "progressive" faculty and student groups, often centered around labor solidarity organizations and campus Green affiliates--has become moralistic rather than politically serious. Some of its moralizing--about Chiapas, Palestine, and Iraq--continues the third worldism that plagued the New Left in its waning years. Some of it--about globalization and sweat-shops--is new and in some ways promising (see my "Thinking About the Antisweatshop Movement," Dissent, Fall 2001). But what characterizes much campus left discourse is a substitution of moral rhetoric about evil policies or institutions for a sober consideration of what might improve or replace them, how the improvement might be achieved, and what the likely costs, as well as the benefits, are of any reasonable strategy. One consequence of this tendency is a failure to worry about methods of securing political support through democratic means or to recognize the distinctive value of democracy itself. It is not that conspiratorial or antidemocratic means are promoted. On the contrary, the means employed tend to be preeminently democratic--petitions, demonstrations, marches, boycotts, corporate campaigns, vigorous public criticism. And it is not that political democracy is derided. Projects such as the Green Party engage with electoral politics, locally and nationally, in order to win public office and achieve political objectives. But what is absent is a sober reckoning with the preoccupations and opinions of the vast majority of Americans, who are not drawn to vocal denunciations of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization and who do not believe that the discourse of "anti-imperialism" speaks to their lives. Equally absent is critical thinking about why citizens of liberal democratic states--including most workers and the poor--value liberal democracy and subscribe to what Jürgen Habermas has called "constitutional patriotism": a patriotic identification with the democratic state because of the civil, political, and social rights it defends. Vicarious identifications with Subcommandante Marcos or starving Iraqi children allow left activists to express a genuine solidarity with the oppressed elsewhere that is surely legitimate in a globalizing age. But these symbolic avowals are not an effective way of contending for political influence or power in the society in which these activists live.

Abandoning politics leaves a vacuum that gets filled by the right Grossberg, 1992 (Lawrence, Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, p. 390-391)

BUT THIS WOULD MEAN THAT the Left could not remain outside of the systems of governance. It has sometimes to work with, against and with in bureaucratic systems of governance. Consider THE CASE OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, AN IMMESELY EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION WHEN ITS MAJOR STRATEGY WAS (SIMILAR TO THAT OF THE RIGHT) EXERTING PRESSURE DIRECTLY ON THE BUREAUCRACIES OF SPECIFIC GOVERNMENTS. IN RECENT YEARS (MARKED BY THE RECENT ROCK TOUR), IT HAS APPARENTLY REDIRECTED ITS ENERGY AND RESOURCES, SEEKING NEW MEMBERS (WHO MAY NOT BE COMMITTED TO ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING; MEMEBERSHIP BECOMES LITTLE MORE THAN A STATEMENT OF IDEOLOGICAL SUPPORT FOR A POSITION THAT FEW ARE LIKELY TO OPPOSE) AND PUBLIC VISIBILITY. IN STARK CONTRAST, THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRUGGLE ON THE LEFT IN RECENT TIMES HAS BEEN THE DRAMATIC (AND, ONE HOPES CONTINUING) dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. It was accomplished by mobilizing popular pressure on the institutions and bureaucracies OF ECONOMIC and governmental institutions AND IT DEPENDED ON A HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE. The Left too often thinks that it can end racism and sexism and classism by changing people's attitudes and everyday practices (E.G. THE 1990 BALCK BOYCOTT OF KOREAN STORES IN NEW YORK). Unfortunately, WHILE such struggles MAY BE EXTREMELY VISIBLE, THEY are often less effective THAN ATTEMPTS TO MOVE THE INSTITUTIONS (E.G.,BANKS, TAXING STRUCTURES, DISTRIBUTORS) WHICH HAVE PUT THE ECONOMIC REALTIONS OF BLEACK AND IMMIGRANT POPULATIONS IN PLACE AND WHICH CONDITION PEOPLE'S EVERYDAY PRACTICES . The Left needs institutions which can operate within the system of governance, understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be challenged. THE LEFT ASSUMED FOR SOME TIME NOW THAT, SINCE IT HAS SO LITTLE ACCESS TO THE APPARATUSES OF AGENCY, ITS ONLY ALTERNATIVE IS TO SEEK A PUBLIC VOICE IN THE MEDIA THROUGH TACTICAL PROTESTS. THE LEFT DOES IN FACT NEED MORE VISIBILITY, BUT IT ALSO NEEDS GREATER ACCESS TO THE ENTIRE RANGE OF APPARATUSES OF DECISION MAKING POWER. Otherwise

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the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. IT IS NOT INDIVIDUALS WHO HAVE PRODUCED STARVATION AND THE OTHER SOCIAL DISGRACES OF OUR WORLD, ALTHOUGH IT IS INDIVIDUALS WHO MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ELIMINATING THEM. BUT TO DO SO, THEY MUST ACT WITH ORGANIZATIONS, AND WITHIN THE SYSTEMS OF ORGANIZATIONS WHICH IN FACT HAVE THE CAPACITY (AS WELL AS RESPONSIBILITY) TO FIGHT THEM.

They say, “not our anti-politics” – but this is wrong – our thesis applies to their argument Boggs, 1997 (Carl, Professor and Ph.D. in Political Science, National University, Theory and Society 26: 741-780)

Well-intentioned as advocates of such metaphysical politics might be, their agenda marks a profound withdrawal from the public sphere, whatever their self-de¢ned status as architects of a ``new'' (and more radical) politics. One find a turning-away from political methods and strategies, a lack of interest in any discourse that addresses the reality of broad social forces and political power. The solution to worldly problems is left to the (ALWAYS VAGUELY-OUTLINED) intervention of transcendental agents. IT IS SURELY NO ACCIDENT THAT, IN THE UNITED STATES AT LEAST, THE POPULARITY OF NEW-AGE CURRENTS ROSE JUST AS THE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS BEGAN TO LOSE THEIR MOMENTUM. AS THEODOR ADORNO FOUND FROM STUDYING THE MASS APPEALS OF ASTROL- OGY IN THE 1950S, THE £IGHT INTO METAPHYSICS CAN BE COMPELLING FOR PEOPLE LONGING FOR A SENSE OF COMFORT AND STABILITY IN AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE THE ``ANONYMOUS TOTALITY OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS'' IS SO OVERPOWER- ING THAT THE VERY IDEA OF CHANGING THE WORLD BY POLITICAL MEANS APPEARS TERRIBLY SELF-DEFEATING, A WASTE OF TIME AND RESOURCES. BUT METAPHYSICAL ESCAPE FROM PRESSING EVERYDAY CONCERNS, HARDLY UNIQUE TO THE MODERN PERIOD, CAN HELP PEOPLE ADAPT MORE PAINLESSLY TO THE EXISTING ORDER OF THINGS. IN THE CASE OF ASTROLOGY, THERE IS THE FAMILIAR IMPULSE TO SEEK OUT HIGHER SOURCES OF AUTHORITY, HOPING TO ¢ND HARMONIOUS UNITY IN THE STARS WHILE KNOWING THAT HUMAN WILL CANNOT POSSIBLY CREATE ORDER WITHIN EXISTING EARTHLY CON¢NES.25 AS ADORNO SUGGESTS, ``IT MEANS PRIMARILY SUBMISSION TO UNBRIDLED STRENGTH OF THE ABSOLUTE POWER'' ^ A POWER THAT IS NO LONGER HUMAN BUT IS SECURE IN ITS REMOTE, SEEMINGLY UNIVERSAL AND ¢XED CHARACTER. IN THIS WAY, EXTERNAL AUTHORITY COMPENSATES FOR THE INDIVIDUAL'S OWN SENSE OF WEAKNESS AND FUTILITY, A FEELING OF POWER- LESSNESS IN THE FACE OF INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES.26 ADORNO FURTHER OBSERVES THAT ESCAPISM ALONG THESE LINES HAS STRONGER ATTRACTION WHERE LIBERAL IDEALS OF FREEDOM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND RIGHTS ARE NO LONGER COM- PATIBLE WITH THE HIERARCHICAL DEMANDS OF LARGE-SCALE ORGANIZATION. WHAT ADORNO DETECTED IN THE 1950S SEEMS EVEN MORE RELEVANT TO THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LANDSCAPE.

Bad Reps Inevitable

Rejection only insulates security from effective criticism – the permutation solves bestWaever, 1995 (Ole, Senior Researcher, Center for Peace & Conflict Research , On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, pg. 56-7)

An agenda of minimizing security in this sense cannot be based on a classical critical approach to security, whereby the concept is critiqued and then thrown away or redefined according to the wishes of the analyst. The essential operation can only be touched by faithfully working with the classical meaning of the concept and what is already inherent in it. THE LANGUAGE GAME OF SECURITY IS, IN OTHER WORDS, A JUS NECESSITATIS FOR THREATENED ELITES, AND THIS IT MUST REMAIN. Such an affirmative reading, not at all aimed at rejecting the concept, may be a more serious challenge to the established discourse than a critical one, for it recognizes that a conservative approach to security is an intrinsic element in the logic of both our national and international political organizing principles. By taking a serioulsy this “unfounded” concept of seucity, it is possible to raise a new agenda of security and politics. THIS FURTHER IMPLIES MOVING FROM A POSITIVE TO A NEGATIVE AGENDA, IN THE SENSE THAT THE DYNAMICS OF SECURITIZATION AND DESECURITIZATION CAN NEVER BE CAPTURED SO LONG AS WE PROCEED ALONG THE NORMAL CRITICAL TRACK THAT ASSUMES SECURITY TO BE A POSITIVE VALUE TO BE MAXIMIZED.

Security discourse is inevitable – their alternative only blocks effective changeJones, 1999 (Richard Wyn, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales, SECURITY, STRATEGY AND CRITICAL THEORY, online)

There are a number of possible responses to these criticisms. One response arises from arguments that emphasize the link between notions of security and deeper assumptions concerning the nature of politics. Walker, for example, argues that the concept of security will inevitably expand to include issues that are not military in nature. This expansion will occur because the questions regarding security are closely implicated in the legitimation of the sovereign state, that is, in deeper notions of politics. Thus: In the end it has never been possible to pin security down to concrete practices or institutions with any great precision, no matter how insistent the voices of military and defence establishments might be. The whole point of concepts of security that are tied to the claims of state sovereignty is that they must expand to encompass everything within the state, at least in its ever potential state of emergency. (R. Walker 1997: 76) As a result: Concerns about [broadening] the practices of security policy into other spheres of political life may well be founded... but the extent to which practices of security are already part of the broader social, political, economic and cultural arenas is not something that can simply be wished awav. (R. Walker 1997: 76) The implication of this argument is that, contrary to Deudney's view, the terrain of security should not simply be abandoned to traditional, militarized conceptualizations. Rather, because the concept of security is inevitably broadened as a result of its connection to deeper issues concerning the legitimacy of various

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forms of governance, its meaning (that is, what is signified by attaching the appellation "security" to a particular issue) must be disputed.

Using the discourse of security is not an endorsement of it – it’s merely a recognition that change must come from withinHansen, 1997 (Lene, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Copenhagen, COOPERATION AND CONFLICT, v32, n4, p. 386)

In contrast to the alternative security conceptions of someone like Galtung, poststructuralists work within or on the margins of not outside of, the discourse of national security. David Campbell, Michael Shapiro and Simon Dalby show how American national security is constructed in different historical periods (Campbell, 1992; Shapiro, 1988; Dalby, 1990); another example is the work on deterrence as a social and political practice as well as a system of signs (Klein, 1988,1990,1994; Luke, 1989; Tunander, 1989; Williams, 1992). Although a normative concern with the current practices of 'national' security is clearly identified in these works, they also show why these practices are incredibily difficult to change. One has therefore to operate within and through the dominant discourse while at the same time exposing its contingent character, change is not impossible, but it is very difficult, and arguing that security should be about something else but the state does not solve the problem.

All Humans have a lust for power.Finkleman ‘01[DAVID FINKLEMAN,] [Director of Analysis and Chief Technical Officer North American Aerospace Defense Command and United States Space Command] SEPTEMBER 2001 [http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/303.pdf] VB

Since nuclear weapons are unequivocal indicators of national sovereignty and technical prowess, their proliferation is more likely than their demise. Clark and Kennedy observe, “Despite the best efforts of freedom loving people, this lust for power cannot be eradicated from the souls of tyrants.” Therefore, we must face the existence of nuclear weapon capability among those who wish us ill.

Link Turn

Delaying the plan causes a second cold warMoore ‘06SAIS Review, Volume 26, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2006, pp. 175-188 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Contributing editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a peace-and security magazine 2006.Online: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v026/26.1moore.pdf VB

To other nations, such a capability would more likely suggest a velvet-glove hegemony that could someday turn to steel-fisted imperialism. What nation could afford to rely on the everlasting good intentions of another nation, even one as relatively benign as the United States? If the United States chooses to pursue a space-control capability, the most likely consequence will be a new Cold War, most likely with China. The new space race would be outrageously expensive; it would suck intellectual resources and scarce capital into black holes of mutual suspicion; it would compromise the ability of nations to meet everyday human needs. Worse, it would undermine international cooperation on solving or at least mitigating a host of pressing global problems.

AT: Reps Shape Reality

Reality shapes representations. They can’t come to a pure objective truth, even if they could, there’s no way of determining if the world of the alt is better than the plan, or the status quo. Mearsheimer, 95 [Professor of Political Science, John, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY, p. 91-2]

The most revealing aspect of Wendt’s discussion is that he did not respond to the two main charge leveled against critical theory in “False Promise.” The first problem with critical theory is that although the theory is deeply concerned with radically changing state behavior, it says little about how change comes about. The theory does not tell us why particular discourses become dominant and other fall by the wayside. Specifically, Wendt does not explain why realism has been the dominant discourse in world politics for well over a thousand years, although I explicitly raised the question in “False Promise” (p. 42). Moreover, he shed no light on why the time is ripe for unseating realism, nor on why realism is likely to be replaced by a more peaceful, communitarian

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discourse, although I explicitly raised both questions. Wendt’s failure to answer these questions has important ramifications for his own arguments. For example, he maintains that if it is possible to change international political discourse and alter state behavior, “then it is irresponsible to pursue policies that perpetuate destructive old orders [i.e., realism], especially if we care about the well-being of future generation.” The clear implication here is that realists like me are irresponsible and do not care much about the welfare of future generations. However, even if we change discourses and move beyond realism, a fundamental problem with Wendt’s argument remains: because his theory cannot predict the future, he cannot know whether the discourse that ultimately replaces realism will be more benign than realism. He has no way of knowing whether a fascistic discourse more violent than realism will emerge as the hegemonic discourse. For example, he obviously would like another Gorbachev to come to power in Russia, but a critical theory perspective, defending realism might very well be the more responsible policy choice.

Threat con good

Even constructed dangers are real – we can recognize the politicization of how danger is perceived while still avoiding foreign policies that risk violence Campbell, 1992 (David, Assistance Political Science Pf- Johns Hopkins, WRITING SECURITY: UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY, p. 252)

In these terms, the future of United States Foreign Policy rests upon considering whether the United States can develop an orientation to the inherently plural world that is not predicated upon the desire to contain, master, and normalize threatening contingencies through violence. Of course, not all Foreign Policy practices can be characterized in this manner, though the fluctuations in the relationship between the United States and Japan, a country which is officially an ally, suggest that ,the distance between peaceful interaction and a strained association, in which the dividing lines are tightly drawn can be easily and speedily traversed. Therefore, thinking about future United States Foreign Policy involves" considering what it would be like to address the incidence of drug use at home without marginalizing consumers or militarizing the threat as foreign; it involves thinking about how to handle the AIDS pandemic without scapegoating certain behaviors as immoral and closing the frontiers to those who test HIV positive; it involves conceiving of a means to address international trade problems without transmitting the fiscal pressures of the world economy to liminal groups within society, or constituting the practices of one's competitors as responsible; and it involves (among many other issues) reducing the tensions which give rise to political violence abroad while refraining from stigmatizing domestic political dissent as terrorism.' Most particularly, thinking about future United States Foreign Policy" involves acknowledging that we are always already situated in dangerous relationships; it involves recognizing that we are indebted to those figurations of otherness which crystallize around problems interpreted as dangers; and it involves appreciating that our orientation to danger and those representations we employ to apprehend it. are capable of reinterpretation and rearriculation. And if the force of these injunctions is accepted, thinking about the future of Foreign Policy shifts onto the terrain of how the "articulation of danger effects the articulation of 'the political.

Some level of threat construction is necessary to anticipate and prevent danger – naivety and denial are worseBerke, 1998 (Even Paranoids Have Enemies, Joseph, founder and Director of the Arbours Crisis Centre ed. Joseph Berke, p. 5-6)

Paradoxically, a certain degree of paranoia is desirable as it is a basis for discrimination (Segal 1994); when we let a new experience touch us, we acknowledge that it may be bad or good, which enables us to anticipate danger. In leaders of an organisation, for instance, a certain degree of paranoid potential can be a useful resource, as oposed to a dangerous naivety that would prevent the leader from becoming aware of the situation of activation of agression in the group, or regression to primitive levels of functioning. Where the leader can be aware of, and apprehend risk and danger, there is the possibility of preparation for the group to face them and cope with them.

NASA Threat Con Good

NASA threat construction good- it gives education of real-world threats.Davis, 1 ["A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs": Total War in the Fossil Record Doug Davis Configurations, Volume 9, Number 3, 2001, pp. 461-508] KZ

Impact-extinction theory may have originated in the summer of 1978, but it is also the interdisciplinary scion of the science of cratering developed in national laboratories during the first decades of the Cold War. The 2,500+ papers and books that have followed up on the Alvarez-Berkeley team’s work29 have been generated in Los Alamos supercomputers and NASA research laboratories as much as they have emerged from the warrens of relatively autonomous universities such as U.C. Berkeley (itself a prominent Big Science institution). An institutional

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beneficiary of the nuclear arms race, impact-extinction theory had also been a party to the Cold War ever since the Alvarez thesis became linked with theories of nuclear winter in the early 1980s. The study of impact-induced extinctions and nuclear winter fed back in support of one another throughout the 1980s, forging a scientific link between the death of the dinosaurs and the effects of nuclear war. Parallels between impacts and nuclear explosions were drawn at the very start of the atomic age. Captain William Parsons, who personally assembled the Little Boy uranium bomb while en route to Hiroshima, boasted upon his return: “if the Japs say a meteor has hit them, we can tell them we have more where this one came from.”30 The continued development of nuclear weapons over the following two decades would make a full-fledged science of that metaphor. In the planetary sciences, impact craters and explosive craters are now treated as basically the same object: the same general theory and a common kit of hydrodynamic equations are used to model each. The similarity is natural—but nevertheless, the connection had to be made, and it was first made on the moon.

Case Turns the K

Case turns the critique - violent conflict blocks any transition to their alternative – only the plan can solve Linklater, 89 (BEYOND REALISM AND MARXISM, ANDREW, SENIOR LECTURER IN POLITICS @ MONASH UNIVERSITY P. 32)

These theoretical disagreements with Marxism generate major differences at the practical level. It is necessary to conclude that a post-Marxist critical theory of international relations must concede that techical and practical orientations to foreign policy are inescapable at least at this juncture. Such an approach must appreciate the need for classical realism methods of protecting the state under conditions of insecurity and distrust, and recognise the importance of the ratoinalist defence of order and legitmacy in the context of anarchy. It is important to take account of the rationalist claim that order is unlikely to survive if the major powers cannot reconcile their different national security interests. In a similar vein, a critical approach to international relations is obliged to conclude that the project of emancipation will not make significant progress if international order is in decline. One of its principal taks would then be to understand how the community of states can be expanded so that it approximates a condition which maximises the importance of freedom and universality. In this case, a critical theory of international relations which recognises the strengths of realism and Marxism must aim for a political practice which deals concurrently with the problem of power, the need for order and the possibility of emancipation through the extension of human community.

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