And, Security discourse defines who deserves authority – these discourses shape policy by determining what can and cannot be thoughtLipschutz 1998Ronnie, Director – Politics PhD Program, UC Santa Cruz, 1998. “On Security” p. 7

Conceptualizations of security--from which follow policy and practice--are to be found in discourses of security . These are neither strictly objective assessments nor analytical constructs of threat, but rather the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power within the state, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them. Hence, there are not only struggles over security among nations , but also struggles over security among notions . Winning the right to define security provides not just access to resources but also the authority to articulate new definitions and discourses of security, as well. As Karen Litfin points out, " As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses delimit the range of policy options, thereby functioning as precursors to policy outcomes. . . . The supreme power is the power to delineate the boundaries of thought--an attribute not so much of specific agents as it is of discursive practices."

Assuming that politics has an endpoint without looking at the justifications and processes that lead to that politics results in devastating consequences by destroying the agency of discussing the linguistic acts that lead to political choiceBleiker 2000(Roland, Popular Dissent, Agency, and Global Politics, p.242-243)

No dissenting writer can hope to incinerate immediately the dry grass of orthodox linguistic prairies. Discourses live on and appear reasonable long after their premises have turned into anachronistic relics. More inclusive ways of thinking and acting cannot surface overnight. There are no quick solutions , no new paradigms or miraculous political settlements that one could hope for. Discursive forms of resistance , even if they manage to transgress national boundaries, do not engender human agency in an immediate and direct way . Writing dissent is a long process, saturated with obstacles and contradictions. It operates, as outlined in the Interlude preceding this chapter, through tactical and temporal transformations of discursive practices. But this lengthy and largely inaudible process is not to be equated with political impotence. The struggles over the linguistic dimensions of transversal politics are as crucial and as real as the practices of international Realpolitik. They affect the daily lives of people as much as so-called real-world issues. Language , in both speech and writing, is a disguised but highly effective political practice. With this recognition emerges a new kind of activist, situated, as Barthes notes, ‘ half-way between militant and writer’, taking from the former the commitment to act and from the former the commitment to act and from the latter the knowledge that the process of writing constitutes such an act. The task now consists of removing one more layer of abstraction, so that the practical and transversal dimensions of language-based forms of dissent can become visible. For this purpose the next chapter now examines how a specific stylistic form of resistance, usually thought to be the most esoteric of all – poetry – may be able to engender human agency by transgressing the spatial discursive boundaries of global politics.