China K

1NC

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Engagement discourse constructs China as an opportunity that can be harnessed by the United States so long as it imposes its rules on the uncivilized rising power.

The inconsistent representations of China as dangerous without America as a partner and beneficial if alongside it is essential to sustaining American Exceptionalism Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 14

(Oliver, “American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy” 165-168)

Finally, twenty-first-century Opportunity China additionally remains a relatively prominent and powerful construction of American design. Sino-US trade relations are now more significant than at any point in their history, not least because China’s economy is now the second largest in the world9 This is a crucial clement of modern-day Chinese—American relations. Nonetheless, particular ideas of which Chinas economy is constituted are still inextricable from its significance to American policy. To reassert, the economic practices of states are interpretable not merely through the calculated significance of material gain. hut through examination of the ideas which give those gains meaning.9 In the 1950s Washington had maintained an embargo on China despite its international trade activities expanding The military sales embargo of the present day, examined briefly in Chapter 5, further demonstrates that while potential economic opportunities with China exist, their interpretation as opportunities is contingent upon discourse and representation.

As Shaun Breslin observes, China is likely to encounter foreign (especially Western) pressure to liberalize its economy into the foreseeable future.9 Nonetheless, the boundaries of political performance are now far more accommodating of China’s membership to the imagined family of civilized nations. In 2000. For example. China was granted Permanent Normal ‘trade Relations (PNTR, the equivalent of permanent MFN status) with the United States. Like Bush. Clinton revealed that Opportunity China was still an imaginative geography expected to conform to the ideals of American identity. ‘Economically,’ he argued, ‘this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets in unprecedented new ways’.98 In 2001 China was granted membership to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Throughout the Cold War the PRC had been marginalized from the most powerful international institutions, hut this was now a possibility accepted by the regulatory processes nl’ American discourse. The American press. for example. broadly supported China’s WTO entry: ‘The news of |the| agreement is worth celebrating’, noted the Wall Street Journal after China had been granted PN’I’R. establishing the basis for WTO membership.

As ever. then. the endurance of Opportunity China stems from the expectation that it conforms to American ideals of international trade Its significance to US China policy has always been that it works to legitimize actions aimed at facilitating this goal This was reaffirmed in 2008 by President Bush, who asserted that ‘the key to ensuring that all sides benefit is insisting that China adhere to the rules of the international economic system.’ As noted earlier in this chapter. these rules are consistently broken. The

widespread use of tariffs, trade barriers and other protectionist measures by the United States, the EU and countless other state actors illustrates the imaginary existence of these rules as building blocks of a purely fictional “civilized” and orderly system. As the supposed defender of the rules and still the most powerful international actor, not least in the dissemination of information and knowledge, the United States can attribute their abuse to others for selected reasons. Once again, China may indeed be guilty of rule infractions, yet it is one perpetrator among many, and as an imaginative geography of subjective design can be an opportunity only when others — most notably the United States — deem it to be so.

To recap. Chapter 5 interrogated societal American images of China and its people throughout the modern age. The purpose of this chapter has been to similarly explore contemporary American perceptions and interpretations of China. hut with a keener focus upon the presidency of Barack Obama. It began by outlining China’s presence within the election contest of 2008. Obama’s rhetoric towards Beijing softened after securing the presidency, in further affirmation of China’s continuing existence as an imaginative geography whose identity is not simply there to sec, hut is discursively manufactured and controlled. It then showed that while American politicians may adopt varying positions on China as a result of their contrasting ideologies, their underlying concern is still for a country and people which to some extent constitutes a problem to be resolved. It was argued that this is inextricably tied to modern-day representations of a ‘rising’ China which, rather than merely a description of a rapidly developing state, carries powerful connotations of a non-Western challenger to a US-led global status quo.

The chapter then briefly examined some of the imagery of China generated by the 2012 presidential elections, and in particular that which followed traditional patterns of opposition candidates criticizing US China policy and portraying the PRC in broadly negative terms. It also showed how China’s representation as a manipulator of its currency and a principal offender in the realm of ‘cyber warfare’ simultaneously confirms the United Stales as the defender of the rules of the international system despite it (and many other others) being guilty of identical crimes’. Like so many times in the past, American discourse and image utilises inconsistency and contradiction to sustain the accepted binary opposites of a good/civilised U nited S tates in comparison with a bad/uncivilised China ‘the chapter explored how understandings of a ‘rising’ China, tied inexorably to imagery of Threatening China are working to enable the implementation of Obama’s so-called pivot’ towards the Asia Pacific, as well as how the discourses of the pivot’ itself sustain and reinforce the ideas on which it is grounded.

Finally, this chapter has demonstrated how the four highly stable and enduring constructions of Idealised, Opportunity, Uncivilised and Threatening China continue to the reproduced throughout American society today. In the modem information age they co—exist perhaps more prominently than ever. Each has evolved and modified over time but, in many ways. they retain the basic foundations upon which they were first established. Perhaps most importantly, the chapter has shown that these constructions are still actively complicit in the creation of realities in which American foreign policy towards China can he enabled and legitimized. As ever, the most powerful representations of China can be used to best explain how that policy is made possible. Moreover, they allow an interrogation of how US China policy itself serves in the production and reproduction of imagery so that China’s foreignness from the United States can be perpetually reaffirmed.

The impact is extinction – the affirmatives discourse legitimizes plunder and intervention which causes war and environmental destruction. Reject the affirmatives representations – noncooperation is critical to create new forms of knowing Willson, Humanities PhD New College San Francisco, 13

(S. Brain, JD, American University, “Developing Nonviolent Bioregional Revolutionary Strategies,” http://www.brianwillson.com/developing-nonviolent-bioregional-revolutionary-strategies/)

II. The United States of America is irredeemable and unreformable, a Pretend Society. The USA as a nation state, as a recent culture, is irredeemable, unreformable, an anti-democratic, vertical, over-sized imperial unmanageable monster, sustained by the obedience and cooperation, even if reluctant, of the vast majority of its non-autonomous population. Virtually all of us are complicit in this imperial plunder even as many of us are increasingly repulsed by it and speak out against it. Lofty rhetoric has conditioned us to believe in our national exceptionalism, despite it being dramatically at odds with the empirically revealed pattern of our plundering cultural behavior totally dependent upon outsourcing the pain and suffering elsewhere. We cling to living a life based on the social myth of US America being committed to justice for all, even as we increasingly know this has always served as a cover for the social secret that the US is committed to prosperity for a minority thru expansion at ANY cost. Our Eurocentric origins have been built on an extraordinary and forceful but rationalized dispossession of hundreds of Indigenous nations (a genocide) assuring acquisition of free land, murdering millions with total impunity. This still unaddressed crime against humanity assured that our eyes themselves are the wool. Our addiction to the comfort and convenience brought to us by centuries of forceful theft of land, labor, and resources is very difficult to break, as with any addiction. However, our survival, and healing, requires a commitment to recovery of our humanity, ceasing our obedience to the national state. This is the (r)evolution begging us. Original wool is in our eyes: Eurocentric values were established with the invasion by Columbus: Cruelty never before seen, nor heard of, nor read of – Bartolome de las Casas describing the behavior of the Spaniards inflicted on the Indigenous of the West Indies in the 1500s. In fact the Indigenous had no vocabulary words to describe the behavior inflicted on them (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552). Eurocentric racism (hatred driven by fear) and arrogant religious ethnocentrism (self-righteous superiority) have never been honestly addressed or overcome. Thus, our foundational values and behaviors, if not radically transformed from arrogance to caring, will prove fatal to our modern species. Wool has remained uncleansed from our eyes: I personally discovered the continued vigorous U.S. application of the “Columbus Enterprise” in Viet Nam, discovering that Viet Nam was no aberration after learning of more than 500 previous US military interventions beginning in the late 1790s. Our business is killing, and business is good was a slogan painted on the front of a 9th Infantry Division helicopter in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta in 1969. We, not the Indigenous, were and remain the savages. The US has been built on three genocides: violent and arrogant dispossession of hundreds of Indigenous nations in North America (Genocide #1), and in Africa (Genocide #2), stealing land and labor, respectively, with total impunity, murdering and maiming millions, amounting to genocide. It is morally unsustainable, now ecologically, politically, economically, and socially unsustainable as well. Further, in the 20th Century, the Republic of the US intervened

several hundred times in well over a hundred nations stealing resources and labor, while imposing US-friendly markets, killing millions, impoverishing perhaps billions (Genocide #3). Since 1798, the US military forces have militarily intervened over 560 times in dozens of nations, nearly 400 of which have occurred since World War II. And since WWII, the US has bombed 28 countries , while covertly intervening thousands of times in the majority of nations on the earth. It is not helpful to continue believing in the social myth that the USA is a society committed to justice for all , in fact a convenient mask (since our origins) of our social secret being a society committed to prosperity for a few through expansion at ANY cost. (See William Appleman Williams). Always possessing oligarchic tendencies, it is now an outright corrupt corporatocracy owned lock stock and barrel by big money made obscenely rich from war making with our consent, even if reluctant. The Cold War and its nuclear and conventional arms race with the exaggerated “red menace”, was an insidious cover for a war preserving the Haves from the Have-Nots, in effect, ironically preserving a western, consumptive way of life that itself is killing us. Pretty amazing! Our way of life has produced so much carbon in the water, soil, and atmosphere, that it may in the end be equivalent to having caused nuclear winter. The war OF wholesale terror on retail terror has replaced the “red menace” as the rhetorical justification for the continued imperial plunder of the earth and the riches it brings to the military-industrial-intelligence-congressional-executive-information complex. Our cooperation with and addiction to the American Way Of Life provides the political energy that guarantees continuation of U.S. polices of imperial plunder. III. The American Way Of Life (AWOL), and the Western Way of Life in general, is the most dangerous force that exists on the earth. Our insatiable consumption patterns on a finite earth, enabled by but a one-century blip in burning energy efficient liquid fossil fuels, have made virtually all of us addicted to our way of life as we have been conditioned to be in denial about the egregious consequences outsourced outside our view or feeling fields. Of course, this trend began 2 centuries earlier with the advent of the industrial revolution. With 4.6% of the world’s population, we consume anywhere from 25% to nearly half the world’s resources. This kind of theft can only occur by force or its threat, justifying it with noble sounding rhetoric, over and over and over. Our insatiable individual and collective human demands for energy inputs originating from outside our bioregions, furnish the political-economic profit motives for the energy extractors, which in turn own the political process obsessed with preserving “national (in)security”, e.g., maintaining a very class-based life of affluence and comfort for a minority of the world’s people. This, in turn, requires a huge military to assure control of resources for our use, protecting corporate plunder, and to eliminate perceived threat s from competing political agendas. The U.S. War department’s policy of “full spectrum dominance” is intended to control the world’s seas, airspaces, land bases, outer spaces, our “inner” mental spaces, and cyberspaces. Resources everywhere are constantly needed to supply our delusional modern life demands on a finite planet as the system seeks to dumb us down ever more. Thus, we are terribly complicit in the current severe dilemmas coming to a head due to (1) climate instability largely caused by mindless human activities; (2) from our dependence upon national currencies; and (3) dependence upon rapidly depleting finite resources. We have become addicts in a classical sense. Recovery requires a deep psychological, spiritual, and physical commitment to break our addiction to materialism, as we embark on a radical healing journey, individually and collectively, where less and local becomes a mantra, as does sharing and caring, I call it the Neolithic or Indigenous model. Sharing and caring replace individualism and competition. Therefore, A Radical Prescription Understanding these facts requires a radical paradigmatic shift in our thinking and behavior, equivalent to an evolutionary shift in our epistemology where our k nowledge/thinking framework shifts: arrogant separateness from and domination over nature (ending a post-Ice Age

10,000 year cycle of thought structure among moderns) morphs to integration with nature, i.e., an eco-consciousness felt deeply in the viscera, more powerful than a cognitive idea. Thus, we re-discover ancient, archetypal Indigenous thought patterns. It requires creative disobedience to and strategic noncooperation with the prevailing political economy , while re-constructing locally reliant communities patterned on instructive models of historic Indigenous and Neolithic villages.

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Liberalism/Orientalism – 2NC

New orientalism is premised on folding China into the international order through engagement – the affirmative attempts to collapse China’s difference into sameness because of an inherent distaste for their “non-Western” political tradition - the impact is discursive imperialism Vukovich, teaches critical and cultural theory @ Hong Kong University, 12

(Daniel, China and Orientalism Western knowledge production and the P.R.C., pp. xvi-2)

Perhaps a return to the question of orientalism – recall that Said’s book predates the rise of postcolonial studies – and the properly geo-political will help. I do not think the problematic of Sinological-orientalism is going away anytime soon. Perhaps there will come a time when the U.S.-West has to know as much about China as the latter now do about America and Europe – and in an enlarged and rich way, as opposed to the colonial/Cold War/universalist form of the present knowledge systems (or the ham-handed soft power efforts of the

PRC). At that point we can begin to entertain the question of an end to orientalist knowledge production in the world. Even then, however, we would still need to think through the historical legacies of orientalist, racist, and imperial discourse and whether or not this still impacts the global Eastward shift and re- balancing. These have after all been the dominant ways of thinking the Other and the East for a very long time . This is precisely the power and tradition of orientalism as a material part of Western and global intellectual political culture. I do not see China as

exceptionalist in this sense. It is part of global history in these ways too. As for academic work proper, the dominance of empiricism and positivism over against more theoretically informed, self-reflexive approaches to China is still with us. There is as ever the refusal to broach “subjective” and speculative questions . The

corporatization of the academy is almost complete. This is all to say that there will have to be a worldly, political solution to orientalism and that type of representation; a longterm project indeed. Intellectual labor, in other words, is still a part of

the world that labor, trade and capital created. My point is that orientalism (as opposed to “bias”) may not be eternal in the way Althusser talked of ideology, but even with the rise of China it is still on the table, only more so. Chapter 2 first appeared in Cultural Logic in the 2009 annual issue and reappears here in lightly revised form. A few parts of my final chapter appear in “China in Theory: The Orientalist Production of Knowledge in the Global Economy” in Cultural Critique (Fall 2010), although the argument is different here. One’s intellectual debts are innumerable, even beyond the revelations in your footnotes. But I still want to thank a number of people for their work, for comments on mine, or for other forms of support. Liu Kang has been a valuable interlocutor and advisor. Zhang Xudong has also been one, in the US and in China. I’ve learned a good deal from both of them and will continue to do so. Andrew Ross’s support of the manuscript has meant a lot. Likewise for Timothy Brennan, whose work in my view sets the standard for cultural and “postcolonial,” radical critique. Thanks, Tim, for all your help. Gao Mobo’s work is foundational to my thinking about the P.R.C. and its interpretation, as is Wang Zheng’s and Han Dongping’s. Mobo has been not only a former dissertation reader but an intellectual bulwark and inspiration. Several people residing within China have helped me think and sustain this project. The inimitable Han Yuhai and Liu Yuanqi have taught me a great deal – much more than they realize. Others include Shi Xu, Zhao Xun, and Ma Laoshi (via Nanjiecun). And of course my dear iconoclastic friends in Hong Kong, Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman. A roundtable with Wang Hui in Shanghai was most beneficial, as have been his defenses of the alternative complexity of the PRC and modern China. Elsewhere, Arif Dirlik, Utsa Patnaik, and Jason McGrath also provided welcome and clarifying feedback on several different chapters in their own, diverse fields. All of the usual disclaimers apply for all of these interlocutors. From my old cohort in the China Study Group of days gone by I thank the late Joan Hinton (a most remarkable person indeed), Dale Wen, Matt Hale, Robert Weil, Joel Andreas, and Dong Xulin. It was first through the CSG, and then through later, more direct encounters with the “New Left” and “Old Left” perspectives emerging from China, that I first became aware that informed critical approaches to China existed and that William Hinton did. Conference interlocutors at several MLA conventions, at Nanjing University, Shanghai University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, HKU, and Zhejiang University were all useful. I must sincerely thank Michael Dutton and an anonymous reader for the Postcolonial Politics series, as well as Nicola Parkin and Craig Fowlie with Routledge. The draft of this book was first accepted back in June 2009 and I am still glad Michael and the Board took a chance on it. In Hong Kong I received a Research Grants Council award that provided teaching release in 2009–10. That and an earlier grant from Hong Kong University bought me time for revisions and helped me deliver parts of this book at various conferences in China and the U.S. Working in Hong Kong can be exceedingly wonderful and exceedingly trying. Getting work done here requires a lot of good faith and patience in the face of large linguistic, cultural, political, bureaucratic, and other boundaries; it takes a whole village, indeed, and I have depended on a lot of people from the ground level on up. I’d like to thank the entire HKU village in particular. I have benefitted from teaching students from all walks of life in China, Hong Kong, and the U.S. I must thank Liu Xi and especially Yu Xuying for help sustaining a mainland-oriented perspective. Henry Kuok and Jaymee Ng have helped me believe that my teaching here has been mutually beneficial. My greatest, happiest debt in Hong Kong and

elsewhere has been to Vicky Lo, whose love, patience, and generosity have enabled me to rewrite this book and see it through the long march of publication. Without her, nothing, but with her, everything. The next one is for her and the Button. I dedicate this book to my father, who passed away before it came out. An American working-class hero of great adaptability, spirit and love, he taught me perhaps the most of all. In “Orientalism Now,” the concluding chapter of Edward Said’s 1978 book, we are left with the migration of orientalism from European empires and philology to the U.S. imperium and the dominance of social scientific discourse. This project begins where Said left off. It argues that there is a new, “Sinological” form of orientalism at work in the world, one that takes as its object an “Other” that has since the 1970s occupied an increasingly central place within the world system and Western intellectual–political culture: the People’s Republic of China. As with Said’s formulation rooted in the Middle East and South Asia, Sinological-orientalism and its production of a textual “China” helps constitute the identity or “Self” of the West (what Balibar aptly calls the “WesternChristian-Democratic-Universalist identity”) (“Difference” 30). The U.S.-West is what China is not, but which the latter will become. So, too, the new orientalism is part of a neo-colonial or imperialist project: not just the production of knowledge about an “area”

but the would-be management and administration of the area for economic, political, and cultural–symbolic benefit. But whereas orientalism in Said turned upon a posited, essential difference between Orient and Occident (as in Kipling’s famous verse: “Oh, East

is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”), the new form turns upon sameness or more specifically, upon China’s becoming sameness . China is seen as in a process of haltingly but inevitably becoming- the- same as “us”: open , liberal , modern, free . Put another way, “China” is understood as becoming generally equivalent to the West . What this reflects, in part, is the by now familiar resurgence of modernization rhetoric under the cover of “globalization” and the end-of-history thematic famously captured by Francis Fukuyama. But that, in turn, was triggered by the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as by the fateful deployment of the market mechanism and the logic of capital within China. After a noble but brief interruption of the politics and discourse of modernization by Chinese Maoism and by the long decade

of the 1960s and early 1970s, the former is back in charge not only of area studies but of global intellectual–political culture. When one recalls the Marxist cultural analysis of capital as such, namely as an historical force of abstraction that makes unlike things alike on the basis of some third thing called the value-form (their “exchange value” or “general

equivalent”), the relationship between this orientalism and global capitalism appears in sharper relief.

Sinological-orientalism is in an important sense a capital-logic, just as historical capitalism betrays an orientalist one. As Said himself made clear (in at least my reading of him), orientalism and colonial discourse may precede the rise of capitalism, but in the modern era they are hand in glove. So, too, for the present moment, whereby Western investment and “constrainment” strategies are often rationalized on the basis of these being beneficial to the Chinese and their progression towards democracy and human rights (whatever these mean), as well as helping “balance” and protect the rest of Asia from China’s rise. I further address the relationship between orientalist and capital logics in a final chapter. My argument is a totalizing, “functionalist” one about the integral relationship between capitalism and orientalism. But then, so is the thing. The historical conditions of possibility for a global

Sinological-orientalism are the momentous if not counter-revolutionary changes within China itself – its Dengist “era of reform and opening up” dating from 1979 – and the West’s economic, political, and discursive responses to this subsequent rise to global prominence. This paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becomingsameness: China is still not “ normal ” (and has been tragically different), but is engaged in a “universal” process such that it will, and must, become the same as “us.” Whether it wants to or not. That is the present–future offered to China within this discourse, and – as anyone who watched the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies knows (“one world, one dream”) – it is also one taken up within China itself.

Engagement Link – 2NC

Engagement with China presupposes America’s role in the world is to manage the rise of other powers – this anxiety eschews effective predictions about China’s policy changes Zhang, Professor of International Politics @ University of Bristol, 13

(Yongjin, “‘China Anxiety’: Discourse and Intellectual Challenges,” Development and Change 44(6): pp. 1407-1425)

For many centuries, China has been a fixture in the Western imagination . In the words of Jonathan Spence (1999: xi): ‘The sharpness of the feelings aroused by China in the West, the reiterated attempts to describe and analyze the country and its people, the apparently unending receptivity of Westerners to news from China, all testify to the levels of fascination the country has generated’. Imageries of China as either the ‘Yellow Peril’ or the ‘Red Menace’ have been an integral part of Western obsessions and anxieties about China (Pan, 2012). The discourse on the rise of China has informed, and been informed by, these imageries. Few would deny that the Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China is a fast-moving one. Claims such as ‘the coming conflict with America’ (Bernstein and Munro, 1997) and ‘the coming collapse of China’ (Chang, 2001), made only a decade or so ago, now seem light years removed from the present. Ezra Vogel's contemplation of ‘living with China’ in a non-confrontational US–China relationship (Vogel, 1997) is a far cry from Bergsten's proposed ‘partnership of equals’ or a Group of Two (G2) in managing global economic affairs a decade later (Bergsten, 2008). Gerald Segal's (1999) poignant question ‘does China matter?’ has become no more than rhetorical now. Yet the rise of China continues to be a source of anxiety for a variety of reasons. Those who view the power transition as a zero-sum game are concerned that China's rise is synonymous with American decline. China has built up its soft power, Joseph Nye (2005) asserts, ‘at the expense of the United States’. China is also said to have mounted a ‘charm offensive’ worldwide through its diplomatic, trade and cultural initiatives (Kurlantzick, 2007). In an endorsement of Kurlantzick's book, Orville Schell claimed that Chinese soft power ‘has begun to transform the world balance of power in a way that makes it essential for Americans to recalibrate their presumption of US pre-eminence’.2 While some argue that China is increasingly becoming a status quo power, others are convinced that China continues to follow Deng's grand strategy of hiding its capacity and biding its time (Foot, 2006; Friedberg, 2011; Johnston, 2003, 2007; Taylor, 2007). For Brzezinski (2009: 56), China remains ‘a fundamentally cautious and a patiently revisionist power’, and for Barry Buzan (2010: 18), China is no more than ‘a reformist revisionist’. Aaron Friedberg (2011) goes much further and claims that China has engaged in a ‘contest for supremacy’ with the United States in ‘the struggle for mastery of Asia’, whereas Peter Navarro (2008) predicts ‘the coming China wars’ — not because China possesses weapons of mass destruction, but because of its invention of the weapons of mass production. At the same time, Robert Zoellick (2005) argues that ‘the China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s’ and that ‘China does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system’. This is at odds with the conviction of offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that China, the rising power, and the United States, the hegemonic power, are preordained to clash violently. A rising China will inevitably challenge the hegemonic United States; the question is thus

not whether, but when this will happen (Mearsheimer, 2001, 2006; Walt, 2010). Offensive realists may indeed support their proposition by pointing out that China has increased its military spending at a double-digit rate annually in the last two decades and has a military budget second only to that of the United States. China's successful attempts at testing its anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missiles technology in 2007 and 2009 can be cited as clear evidence of China's strategic and purposeful challenge to American dominance in space (Lampton, 2010). China is also said to have developed offensive capability in cyber warfare and has launched the most egregious cyber-attacks on US commercial and government networks (Lampton, 2010; The Wall Street Journal, 2013). Stephen Walt counsels at the same time that there is no need for panic about China's phenomenal rise since China ‘has a long way to go before it becomes a true “peer competitor”’ of the United States (Walt, 2010). The ‘cauldron of anxiety’ in the United States, to borrow the phrase of Zoellick (2005), is not just about China as a rising power but about the uncertain strategic intentions of China. In the words of Jeffrey Legro (2007: 515), ‘the “rising China” problem is not just about power, but purpose’. According to Legro (ibid.: 516), neither realists nor liberals have suitable policy responses to China's rise, because ‘China's diplomatic future…is likely to be more contingent than either the power or interdependence positions allow’. Legro argues that the key is to understand and to seek to shape, if possible, core ideas held by the Chinese leadership and the way they inform China's strategic foreign policy goals. For democratic peace theorists, such a proposition is obviously problematic. If China remains authoritarian and its policy-making processes continue to be opaque, its strategic intentions are likely to be shrouded in secrecy. For them, nothing short of fundamental democratic change in China would solve the problem, simply because ‘a democratic China is much less likely to find itself in a conflict with the United States, partly because Americans will be more tolerant of a rising great power democracy than a rising power autocracy’ (Kagan, 2007: 99). Others are even more concerned about the implications of a rising authoritarian power for the future of the liberal global order championed by the United States. The question is not whether China is likely to challenge the hegemonic power or seek to change the rules of the game, nor whether China and the United States are destined to come into conflict. Rather the big question is simply, and more poignantly, ‘can the liberal system survive [the rise of China]?’ (Ikenberry, 2008). In this scenario, another question has been asked: ‘will China's dream turn into America's nightmare?’ (Saunders, 2010). Beyond the pure power paradigm, the rise of China has instigated no less intensive anxiety. The source is China's growing prosperity . China is to blame for the slow global economic recovery from the financial crisis. According to Paul Krugman (2010): ‘Most of the world's large economies are stuck in a liquidity trap — deeply depressed, but unable to generate a recovery by cutting interest rates because the relevant rates are already near zero. China, by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effect imposing an anti-stimulus on these economies, which they cannot offset’. Krugman proposes what he calls ‘a turn to hardball policy’ towards China (ibid.). Even an increase or decrease in China's purchase of US Treasury bonds causes serious concerns. In July 2010, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) in Beijing had to go out of its way to publicly rule out the so-called ‘nuclear’ option of dumping its vast holdings of US Treasury bonds for political purposes (China Daily, 2010). There are also acute concerns about the ‘dark side’ of China's relentless pursuit of high- speed economic growth, from environmental degradation to climate change . Even before it overtook the US as the largest emitter of CO2 in 2007, China was regarded as the worst polluter. China was accused of having either ‘wrecked’ or ‘hijacked’ the Copenhagen climate deal (Lynas, 2009; Vidal, 2009). Together with India, China is said to have ‘sabotaged the UN climate summit’ at Copenhagen (Rapp et al., 2010). Furthermore, China's forays into Africa raise serious concerns about its global ambition

beyond securing sufficient energy and resources for rapid economic development. Its presence in Africa is seen as having significant impact on the development path of the continent and policy decisions of other powers involved (Alden and Hughes, 2009; Taylor, 2007). As erstwhile pariah state, China is now said to be in ‘pursuit of the pariah’ through its energy security strategy, which shapes its relationship with Iran, Myanmar and Sudan (Canning, 2007). Last but certainly not least, there are anxieties about continued human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic conflicts and rampant corruption in China, and about the Chinese Communist Party's stubborn resistance to democratization. There is nevertheless a real shift to be discerned in the dominant Anglo-American discourse on the rise of China compared to that of a decade ago. The difference is that there is now an underlying consensus that this time the rise of China is for real and it is highly likely to continue, which urgently requires an effective and rigorous response, particularly by the United States. Yet, Will Hutton (2007) contends, the US simply will not make up its mind whether to contain or engage China, even though ‘the writing is on the wall’ and the challenges posed by China's rise are palpable. In other words, the US remains unsure about how to manage China as a rising power. Its policies seem to have vacillated between constraining, containing, engaging, enmeshing and hedging against China's rise, as the moment of great strategic uncertainty lingers on. James Steinberg's (2009) call that ‘China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the expense of security and well-being of others’, reflects not only the deep-seated mutual strategic mistrust between China and the US, but it is also indicative of the ongoing frustration on the part of the US in trying to read China's real strategic intentions (Foot, 2009; Lampton, 2010; Lieberthal and Wang, 2012). Looming large on the horizon is a profound unease about China as a rising power . The ‘China anxiety’ noted above has morphed into such questions as ‘does the future belong to China?’ (Zakaria, 2005); ‘what does China think?’ (Leonard, 2008); ‘what will China want?’ (Legro, 2007); ‘what China wants: bargaining with Beijing’ (Nathan, 2011); ‘will China's rise lead to war?’ (Glaser, 2011); and ‘will China's rise lead to a new normative order?’ (Kinzelbach, 2012). That these questions are being asked and debated both in academia and foreign policy circles is revealing. They testify to deeper anxieties which are discernible but rarely talked about explicitly and which ultimately concern China's pathways to power. That is, given the apparent contradictions in the Chinese political economy, how has China managed to rise so rapidly? How could we have got China so wrong in the recent past? These questions take us beyond concerns expressed about an indeterminate transition of power, strategic uncertainties and the impact of the rise of China on the future world order. It suggests that prior to being a problem, the rise of China is first and foremost a puzzle. If we adopt a twenty-year perspective, it is humbling to observe how seriously we have misjudged China. Put differently, China's political change, economic transformation and strategic policies since 1990 seem to have defied most anticipations, projections and predictions by economists, political scientists and i nternational relations specialists, whether from the political right or the political left, be they realist, liberal or constructivist. China, in other words, keeps surprising us all.

Engagement Link – 2NC

The premise of the affirmatives link defense is “we represented China positively” and “we think the United States is what is causing China to react the way it is” – this ignores the central problem that positive representations of China are a means to fold the East into the US controlled international order. Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 11

(Oliver, Sino-US relations then and now: Discourse, images, policy, Political Perspectives: 5 (3), pp. 27-45)

The movement, then, was interpreted through the values of American identity so that discourse remained tightly controlled and regulated. Confirmation of China as an uncivilised other in relation to the superior and law-abiding West soon followed as Washington lobbied the world’s leading multilateral economic organisations for a withdrawal of support. Weapons sales to the PRC were banned and high level military exchanges were postponed. Another round of sanctions later followed in which lending to China by international financial institutions and official diplomatic exchanges both ceased. Sanctions against Beijing were legitimised on the basis that China had once again failed to conform to the superior standards of Western civilisation. As Suettinger puts it, the West ‘recoiled in horror and disgust, expelling it from the company of modern civilized nations’ (Suettinger, 2003: 1). In 1992 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell argued that America remained ‘a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that “cannot escape history” because we are “the last best hope of earth”’ (Powell, 1992: 32). As the ‘last best hope’ the United States could still unproblematically occupy a location from which it claimed exceptionalism, through an identity based upon the values of democracy and liberty for all. The events in and around Tiananmen Square were framed accordingly and on 6 June 1989 President George Bush argued that the momentous, tragic events in China give us reason to redouble our efforts to continue the spread of freedom and democracy around the globe...to broaden the community of free nations, and to reaffirm the rights of man (Woolley and Peters, American Presidency Project [online]). Time informed its readers that by the morning of 4 June ‘the great, peaceful dream for democracy had become a horrible nightmare’ (Time, 12 June, 1989). However, that dream was American, not Chinese. Despite apparent signals from China that it was now following in the footsteps of the West yet another Chinese ‘revolution’ had failed to conform to American expectations. The imagined geography of Uncivilised China existed to Americans as starkly now as it had done a century earlier as it remained a nation and a people which lacked the imagined standards of the civilised Western world. It had taken just a few weeks for prevailing imagery of China to shift dramatically from overtly positive to negative but beneath that shift lay enduring and powerful continuities and commonalities. Harry Thayer, former director of the American Institute in Taiwan, articulated the situation perfectly: ‘China was oversold in 1978-79, just as we had oversold Chiang Kai-shek in World War II…the Chinese turned out not to be saints and perfect partners after all. This is a long standing problem in the relationship’ (Tucker, 2001: 327-328). Warren Cohen is representative of much of the relevant literature when he describes the United States’ historical relations with China as ‘schizophrenic’, with ‘a pattern of alternating highs and lows’ (Cohen,

2010: 278 and 280). Indeed, throughout the body of comparable literature American images of China and the Chinese have been variously misrepresented and underestimated. Certainly, American images of China have shifted quickly and dramatically in terms of their relative positivity and negativity at given moments. However, this analysis shows that they have also endured as more powerful underlying assumptions about China’s identity across extended temporal periods. Specifically, it has argued that imagery should be acknowledged not only as representations of what the Chinese do, but additionally constitutive of enduring assumptions about who the Chinese are. To achieve this, a reinterpretation of imagery emphasised its inextricability from discourse and identity processes. American discourse is that which has always constructed images of China in particular ways, providing selected realities of that country and its people. Moreover, because the identities of others are always produced from understandings about the identity of the self, China has always been historically represented in relation to the United States. The paper has argued that the idea of Uncivilised China has remained an especially durable construction, produced in relation to the necessarily more civilised United States. It has also shown that foreign policy must be understood not as the actions of prediscursive states but the continual process by which states are made foreign in relation to one another. In such a way, it has argued that American imagery of China represents an inextricable component of US China policy. That imagery, in fact, has always been actively complicit at every stage of its formulation, enactment and justification. During the earliest period of Sino-US relations American discourse worked to construct the identity of Uncivilised China as backward, heathen and anachronistic and as failing to adhere to Western standards of civilisation. Imagery of Uncivilised China became accepted and naturalised and endured for generations, throughout the Chinese revolutionary period in the early years of the twentieth century and during the 1989 protest movement and the events in Tiananmen Square (among innumerable others). Imagery at each of these particular moments can be logically analysed in isolation as dramatic shifts of attitude and opinion were undoubtedly in evidence. However, beneath these shifts lay more enduring assumptions of identity which remained highly durable and largely unchanged. Expectations of Uncivilised China have always been that it civilise to Western standards. As such, whether American imagery of that country has appeared more overtly positive or negative at any given moment is, to a certain extent, irrelevant. Further, at each of these moments comparatively stable understandings about Uncivilised China worked to legitimise actions in Washington . They created realities within which Uncivilised China had to change , and in which certain political possibilities could be introduced at the expense of others . They allowed Americans to support the British-led opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century, delay recognition of the new Chinese government in 1912 and implement sanctions upon Beijing after the Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ of 1989. China’s increasing involvement in contemporary global affairs means that Washington’s desire for Beijing to participate peacefully and cooperatively within the US-dominated system of global political and economic governance is more palpable today than ever . Powerful American images of China and the Chinese and the policies they will serve to enable and justify must accordingly become a focus of more concerted scholarly attention . It is imperative, in other words, that these ‘schizophrenic’ relations be acknowledged as at least partly contingent upon pervasive and durable imagistic foundations. Only in this way can the contours of the relationship between the U nited States and China be more satisfactorily understood so that historical episodes we wish not to be repeated might somehow be avoided in the future.

Cooperation Link – 2NC

Engagement with China unites global elites to advance the exploitative project of globalization – the impact is endless war Nordin, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion @ Lancaster University, 14

(Astrid, “Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars”, IJBS 11(2) p. online)

In this new fractal state of war and hostility, the Chinese state has joined forces with the American leadership to reinstate the hegemony of the global (of which they have surely dreamt, just like the rest of us). To the American unilateral war on terror in Afghanistan and George W. Bush’s call “you are either with us or against us”, the Chinese government responded with a (perhaps reluctant) “we are with you!” This wish to be part of the global American self has not meant, however, the full contribution to the war effort that some American representatives may have hoped. China has, since around the time of 9/11 shifted from being extremely reluctant to condone or participate in any form of “peacekeeping” missions, including under United Nations (UN) flag, to being the UN Security Council member that contributes most to UN peacekeeping missions. Much of this participation has taken the form of non-combatant personal. Nonetheless, China has been an actively involved party in ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. It has provided police training for Afghanistan’s security forces, as well as mine-clearance. Though it was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq without UN mandate, China has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the occupation, as it is one of the biggest winners of oil contracts in Iraq. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been accused of ‘free-riding’ on American efforts, but China has nonetheless been clearly positioned as part of the participating and benefiting ‘we’. The Chinese state has benefited from participation in the war on terror in more ways than one. The war has increased Chinese influence in Central Asia. It has legitimized China’s harsh clamp-downs in Xinjiang, where the state claims its violence is justified by the presence of separatist ‘terrorists’ in the Muslim Uyghur community. Not least, China’s participation in the war on terror has been used to demonstrate to the world that China is now a ‘responsible great power’, as measured by the standard of ‘international society’ (see Yeophantong 2013 for a discussion of this ‘responsibility’ rhetoric). Again, this rhetoric of ‘responsibility’ has been deployed by both American and Chinese leaders to tie China more tightly to the purported American-led ‘we’. More recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has stressed the importance of continued Sino-US co-operation over Afghanistan post-2014 troop withdrawal. Wang has publicly stressed the common goals of China and the US with regards to Afghanistan: ‘We both hope Afghanistan will continue to maintain stability … We both hope to see the reconstruction of Afghanistan and we both don’t want to see the resurgence of terrorism’ (cited in Chen Weihua, 2013). China and the USA have jointly engaged in what is termed advisory and capacity-building for Afghans, for example in training Afghan diplomats, and their co-operation continues around shared goals in the region. Much could be said here about China’s participation in the American-led globalization project and war on terror. My point here is simply to note that whatever we read America as doing through its war on terror, China is a supporting and benefiting actor in this process. It is clearly positioned as part of this global idea of self. At the same time, however, China is also portrayed, from within and without, as a challenger, an alternative, or an ‘other’ to that global , American or Western order. We therefore turn next to the Chinese scholarly and governmental rhetoric

that claims to offer such an alternative or challenge to the Western way of war that Baudrillard criticized and that we can see China joining in the war on terror. (ii). Contemporary PRC rhetoric on pre-modern Chinese thought on war In contemporary China, the official rhetoric on war focuses on pre-emption and the claim that China will never be a ‘hegemonic’ or warmongering power – unlike the US. In this rhetoric, the Chinese war is by nature a non-war. Official documents emerging in the last decade repeatedly stress that China is by nature peaceful, which is why nobody needs to worry about its rise. In the 2005 government whitepaper China’s Peaceful Development Road, for example, we are told that: [i]t is an inevitable choice based on China’s historical and cultural tradition that China persists unswervingly in taking the road of peaceful development. The Chinese nation has always been a peace-loving one. Chinese culture is a pacific culture. The spirit of the Chinese people has always featured their longing for peace and pursuit of harmony (State Council of the PRC 2005b). The whitepaper (and numerous other official and unofficial publications) posit an essentialised Chinese culture of peacefulness as prior to any Chinese relations with the world. This rhetoric of an inherently non-bellicose Chinese way has also echoed in Chinese academic debates, where Chinese pre-modern philosophy has come back in fashion as a (selectively sampled) source of inspiration. The claims and logics that have come out of these debates are varied. One significant grouping of Chinese academics directly follow the government line and claim that ‘choosing “peaceful rise” is on the one hand China’s voluntary action, on the other hand it is an inevitable choice’ (Liu Jianfei 2006: 38). That peacefulness and harmony is something that ‘Chinese people’ have always valued is an implication, and often explicitly stated ‘fact’ in these literatures. Zhan Yunling, for example, claims that ‘from ancient times until today, China has possessed traditional thought and a culture of seeking harmony’ (Zhang Yunling 2008: 4). This claim to natural harmony is mutually supportive of the claim that ‘the Chinese nation’ has always been a peaceful nation, to authors such as Liu Jianfei (2006), or Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli (2006). A related set of commentators further stress the significance of militarily non-violent means to China getting its (naturally peaceful) way in international relations. For example, Ding Sheng draws on the Sunzi quote mentioned above: ‘to subjugate the enemy’s army without doing battle is the highest of excellence’ (Ding Sheng 2008: 197). This line of argument typically sees what some would call ‘soft power tools’ as a way of getting others to become more like yourself without any need for outright ‘war’ or other forms of physical violence. In a discussion of the official government rhetoric of ‘harmonious world’ under former president Hu Jintao, Shi Zhongwen accordingly stresses that the doctrine opposes going to extremes, and therefore contradicts what Shi calls ‘the philosophy of struggle’ (Shi Zhongwen 2008: 40, where ‘struggle’ implies Marxist ideology). Qin Zhiyong similarly argues that China needs to steer away from collisions and embrace the aim of ‘merging different cultures’ (Qin Zhiyong 2008: 73). At the same time, few Chinese academics question the direction of the ‘merging of cultures’ discussed above – clearly it is other cultures that should merge into China’s peaceful one. In a common line of thought that draws on the historical concept of Tianxia, or ‘All-under-heaven’, it is argued that the Chinese leadership can thus bring about a harmonious world through ‘voluntary submission [by others] rather than force’ simply through its superior morality and exemplary behaviour (Yan Xuetong 2008: 159). On this logic, the leadership will never need to use violence, because everybody will see its magnanimity and will want to emulate its behaviour (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34. See Callahan 2008: 755 for a discussion). Much of these debates have come to pivot around this concept of Tianxia , an imaginary of the world that builds on a holistic notion of space, without radical self-other distinction or bordered difference. To some thinkers, this imagination is based on a notion of globalisation (for example Yu Xiaofeng and Wang Jiangli 2006: 59) or networked space (Ni Shixiong and Qian Xuming

2008: 124) where everything is always already connected to everything else in a borderless world. In these accounts, Tianxia thinking is ‘completely different from Western civilisation, since Chinese civilisation insists on its own subjectivity, and possesses inclusivity’ (Zhou Jianming and Jiao Shixin 2008: 28). Despite this apparent binary, it is claimed that Tianxiaism involves an identification with all of humankind, where there is no differentiation or distinction between people (Li Baojun and Li Zhiyong 2008: 82). A thinker whose deployment of the Tianxia concept has been particularly influential is Zhao Tingyang, who proposes the concept as a Chinese and better way of imagining world order (Zhao Tingyang 2005; 2006), where ‘better’ means better than the ‘Western’ inter-state system to which Tianxia is portrayed as the good opposite. In opposition to this ‘Western system’, he argues that Tianxia can offer ‘a view from nowhere’ or a view ‘from the world’, where ‘[w]orld-ness cannot be reduced to internationality, for it is of the wholeness or totality rather than the between-ness’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 39). However, as a consequence of a prioritisation of order over the preservation of alterity, ‘any inconsistency or contradiction in the system will be a disaster’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). As a corollary of this prioritisation, Zhao comes to insist on the homogeneity of his all-inclusive space, which aims at the uniformity of society (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33, emphasis in original) where ‘all political levels … should be essentially homogenous or homological so as to create a harmonious system’ (2006: 33). The aim of the Tianxia system is thus to achieve one single homogeneous and uniform space. Clearly, for such homogeneity to be born from a heterogeneous world, someone must change. Zhao argues that: one of the principles of Chinese political philosophy is said ‘to turn the enemy into a friend’, and it would lose its meaning if it were not to remove conflicts and pacify social problems – in a word, to ‘transform’ (化) the bad into the good (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 34). Moreover, this conversion to a single ‘good’ homogeneity should happen through ‘volontariness’ rather than through expansive colonialism: ‘an empire of All-under-Heaven could only be an exemplar passively in situ, rather than positively become missionary’ (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 36, emphasis in original). However, when we are given clues as to how this idea of the ‘good’ to which everyone should conform would be determined, Zhao’s idea of self-other relations seems to rely on the possibility of some Archimedean point from which to judge this good, and/or the complete eradication of any otherness, so that the one space that exists is completely the space of self (Zhao Tingyang 2006: 33). Thus, Zhao confesses that ‘[t]he unspoken theory is that most people do not really know what is best for them, but that the elite do, so the elite ought genuinely to decide for the people’ (2006: 32). As explained by William A. Callahan: By thinking through the world with a view from everywhere, Zhao argues that we can have a ‘complete and perfect’ understanding of problems and solutions that is ‘all-inclusive’. With this all-inclusive notion of Tianxia, there is literally ‘no outside’.… Since all places and all problems are domestic, Zhao says that ‘this model guarantees the a priori completeness of the world’ (Callahan 2007: 7). This ‘complete and perfect’ understanding is hence attainable only to an elite, who will achieve homogeneity (convert others into self) through example. Eventually, then, there will be no other, the ‘many’ will have been transformed into ‘the one’ (Zhao Tingyang 2005: 13, see also 2006). It is through this transformation and submission to the ruling elite that the prevention of war is imagined. If Baudrillard had engaged with these contemporary Chinese redeployments of pre-modern thought on war (which, to my knowledge, he never did), I think he would have recognised many of the themes that interested him in Western approaches to the first Gulf war. Most strikingly, this is a way of talking about war that writes out war from its story. Like deterrence, it is an imagination of war that approaches it via prevention and pre-emption. What is more, we recognise an obsession with the self-image of the self to itself – in this case, a Chinese, undemocratic self rather than a Western, democratic one. In this Chinese war, like in the Persian Gulf of which

Baudrillard wrote, there is no space for an Other that is Other. In the Tianxia imaginary, Others can only be imagined as something that will eventually assimilate into The System and become part of the Self, as the Self strives for all-inclusive perfection. There is no meeting with an Other in any form. Encounter only happens once the Other becomes like the Self, is assimilated into the One, and hence there is no encounter at all (for an analysis that reads Baudrillard and Tianxia to this effect in a Chinese non-war context, see Nordin 2012). (iii). Contemporary Chinese war and its various modes As was the case with the first Gulf War, the war that we are waiting for here in the Chinese case is thus a non-war. If by war we mean some form of (symbolic) exchange or some clash of forms, agons, or forces (as we tend to do even in the current ‘cutting edge research’ in ‘critical war studies’, see Nordin and Öberg 2013) – we cannot expect it to take place. In China, we see not only a participation in the Western system of (non)war through the war on terror, but also another system that precisely denies space for imagining an other as Other, which in turn makes the idea of exchange impossible . In this sense, the Ancient Chinese approach to war through the Tianxia concept – at least as it is reflected by current Chinese thinkers like Zhao Tingyang and Yan Xuetong – is not a Clausewitzean war continuing politics by other means, but precisely a continuation of the absence of politics by other means. It arguably shares this aspect with both the first and the second Gulf Wars. This, however, is certainly not to say that there are not those who fear a Chinese war or that we have no reason to fear it. In various guises, the war that is imagined through a Clausewitzean ontology of agonistic and reciprocal exchange returns and is reified also in China. It is not uncommon for authors discussing the Chinese traditions of thinking war that I describe above to begin their discussion by explicitly drawing on Clausewitz and take his war as their point of departure (for example Liu Tiewa 2014). For several Chinese writers, it is clear that this building of a ‘harmonious world’ is directed against others whose influence should be ‘smashed’ (Fang Xiaojiao 2008: 68). From this line of thinkers, the call to build a harmonious world has also been used to argue for increased Chinese military capacity, including its naval power (Deng Li 2009). Although Chinese policy documents stress that violence or threat of violence should be avoided, they similarly appear to leave room for means that would traditionally be understood as both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in Joseph Nye’s dichotomisation (See for example State Council of the PRC 2005a). Indeed, many of Chinas neighbours have voiced concern with growing Chinese military capacity over the last few years, and a Chinese non-war is no less frightening to its neighbours than a war – be it labelled ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘real’ or ‘virtual’. This Chinese war – past, present and future – is acted out in various different modes . Violent war is reified through the spectacle of computer games, art, online memes, cartoons and not least dramas on film and television (Diamant 2011, 433). The Chinese state claims success in all of its wars, and simultaneously claims that it has never behaved aggressively beyond its borders (which is also, of course, a convenient way of glossing over all the violence perpetrated by the Chinese state within those borders, the violence with which they are upheld and with which they were established in the first place, and the clear contradiction between the state’s fixation on territorial integrity and its borderless and holistic Tianxia rhetoric). Popular cultural renditions of war paint a more varied picture, but all contribute to a reification of war.

A2: Perm Both – 2NC

1.Perm links or its severance out of the 1AC’s representations – that’s a voting issue because it makes the AFF a moving target which makes clash impossible – neg ground outweighs because it’s always reactionary

2.Policymaking DA – the perm reduces the alternative’s epistemology to a policy statement – that allows critical reflection to be co-opted for the service of empire – prefer the alternative alone Steinmetz, Sociology Prof @ University of Michigan, 6

(George, “Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Sociological Theory 23:4)

Until recently, U.S. imperialism seems to have continually regenerated the mirage of its own insignificance or dwindling importance . This self-euphemization corresponded to the informal nature and universalistic self-presentation of American geopolitical engagements. The blindness of most of American society to the very existence of this empire is mirrored in the near invisibility of the topic in the main sociology journals.70 But surely it is incumbent on sociologists to look beyond and beneath the official rhetoric and leftist millennial dreams of American decline and to explore the topic in more detail. This silence stands in sharp

contrast to the journals in political science and even in history. Of course, one reason for this difference is that these groups are more likely than sociologists to be called on to give lessons to the imperial state .71 But rather than avoiding the

topic altogether, sociologists could explore the possibility of giving lessons about (or against) empire. The refusal to provide lessons for empire is not just a normative objection to polices that violate foreign sovereignty and dignity

but also an analytic argument rooted in some of the characteristic ontological features of social life. Society is an ‘‘open system,’’ in the sense that social events are typically overdetermined by a multiplicity of causal structures rather than being produced by a single cause (as in the ideal production of an effect in a scientific laboratory experiment) or by a constantly recurring cluster of causal factors. The openness of the social means that we will never attain the positivist grail of the ‘‘constant conjunction of events.’’ Although we may be able to explain events such as the 19th-century European scramble for colonies retroductively, or extrapolate patterns into the very near future under highly constrained contextual conditions, we will never be able to predict such events except by sheer luck. As a result, the only kind of affirmative lesson we would ever be able to give to empire, even if we were so inclined, would be to prescribe policies whose outcomes would be impossible to foresee.72

The science of public policy, in other words, has the choice of being either thoroughly and willfully political or resolutely historical and nonpredictive. To avoid having one’s work functionalized by empire , then,

one should create accounts that are ontologically and epistemologically adequate to the processual, conjunctural, contingent nature of social life, and hence irreducible to simple policy statements .73 That is not to say that one cannot diagnose conditions that generate inequality or distorted knowledge about the social world, and call for their absenting; here there is no prediction but rather a retroductive analysis specifying social determinants.

3. Noncooperation key – wholesale rejection is the only way to prevent hegemonic ideology from reasserting itself, it’s so powerful that anything but complete withdraw allows imperial knowledge to reassert itself – that’s Willson.

4.Externalization DA – the perm projects knowledge production outwards to make a policy to engage with China instead of using knowledge to establish a deeper understanding of how internal desire constructs imperial relationships with others. The alternative’s act of self-reflection is key to undermine the conditions that imperialism impossible, and the perm disrupts the process. Philipose, Women's Studies Prof @ California State University Long Beach, 8

(Liz, “The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9:1,60 -81)

Neoliberalism, with its foundations in colonial knowledge, conspires to support empire in numerous ways. It relies upon and creates a culture of neurochemical selves whose disaffection from politics is more likely to be treated psychopharmaceutically rather than taken as a crisis of firmly held beliefs. We code social dismay and the pain of contemporary existence as biological impulses that have no social import. We become further removed from the possibility of taking our own emotions seriously , and that creates a tremendous hindrance to our ability to engage others as emotional subjects . Ultimately, not taking our own emotions seriously means not taking our human spirit seriously, and that translates into an inability to see others as the embodiment of human spirit. The problem for political movements is how to politicize and activate a population increasingly removed from a passionate, caring ethic – a population which cannot move unless personally affected, and which cannot be personally affected by the suffering and pain of others. Progressive and peaceful social movements often seem to believe that if people only knew what US foreign policy does to others , or what governments keep from us, or in what conditions most of our commodities are produced , then we would eventually stop creating harmful practices and systems. Of course, it is crucial to be informed about political events. However, the knowledge we seem to be missing is that of the self, of our own selves as we have come to be constituted through neoliberal and colonial knowledges . The neoliberal, colonial self of the western world is impaired in its ability to focus on one of the best indicators of whether or not we live a collectively good life – our emotional responses. In this context, an effective challenge to empire requires us to recover our relationship to emotional life as political actors . We need to face up to the historical and contemporary social forces that remove us from our emotions and the emotions of others, and, simultaneously, to reconstitute a public relationship to emotions in general . These are necessary steps to imagining more clearly the work of political movements and the kinds of communities we aim to construct out of the present imperial moment.

Framework

A2: Framework – 2NC Framework – weigh the affirmatives epistemological assumptions before its hypothetical legal effects – prefer it

Policymaking – discourse is inseparable from implementation of the plan – no representation is objective, it has a history and serves particular interests in its articulation. The affirmatives dominant framing enables a hierarchical US-China relationship which flips the case Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow @ University of Manchester, 11

(Oliver, Sino-US relations then and now: Discourse, images, policy, Political Perspectives: 5 (3), pp. 27-45)

Traditionally, foreign policy analysis has reflected the tendency of the dominant realist and liberal schools to ignore the significance of discourse and imagery to the advancement of policy and to focus instead upon material forces . In consequence, the role of ideas within the formation and enactment of policy has been broadly overlooked . Moreover, the foreign policy of states has been understood to constitute the manifestation of those material forces as the objective behaviour of singular, isolated units of analysis. In the particular case of China, for example, Thomas J. Christensen argues that contemporary debates are centred on distributions of material power. ‘Power is what matters’, he argues, ‘and what matters in power is one’s relative capabilities compared with those of others, especially other great powers’ (Christensen, 2001: 6). In 1989, however, James Rosenau argued that ‘the breakdown of the old interstate system is necessitating reformulation of [the ways in which] domestic and international processes sustain each other’ (Rosenau, 1989: 5). Peter Gourevitch similarly suggested that the domestic and international realms should be examined holistically, since traditional distinctions between established levels no longer reflect reality (Gourevitch, 1978). David Campbell provides a useful reorientation of traditional assumptions of foreign policy so that analysis shifts from a concern for the relations between states to one for the processes by which states are made foreign in relation to one another. Societal representations of foreign lands and people, he argues, are more than descriptions of others ‘out there’. They constitute the discursive construction of states at all levels of society and the ubiquitous process by which actors are made foreign in relation to the identity of the self. When understood in these terms, processes of representation become a ‘specific sort of boundary producing political performance’ (Ashley, 1987, p.51, emphasis in original). The power inherent to domestic or societal discourse, then, is such that the truths it advances are able to create the necessary reality within which particular policies are not only enabled but justified as logical and proper courses of action. As Foucault explains, power is understood to be inextricable from knowledge so that one cannot be advanced in the absence of the other (Foucault, 1980: 52). The result is a power/knowledge nexus which precludes the advancement of discourse and the establishment of truth as neutral or dispassionate endeavours (Foucault, 1979). Discursive representation, then, is unavoidably performative in the sense that ‘it produces the effects that it names’ (Gregory, 1995: 18). Ellingson agrees, noting that the historical construction of non-Europeans as ‘lower’ peoples has been at the heart of the establishment of a global European hegemony (Ellingson, 2001: xiii). International relations therefore represent an arena of power that is both political and discursive, wherein discourses create certain possibilities and preclude others (Apple, 2003, p.6). This means that

American discourses and imagery about China have never been produced objectively or in the absence of purpose and intent . Their dissemination must always be acknowledged as a performance of power, however seemingly innocent or benign. They are able to create the imagined conditions within which appropriate, and perhaps even ostensibly unsavoury, action can be enacted while other potential policies are dismissed as inappropriate or impossible. As Doty confirms, ‘the naturalization of meaning has had consequences ranging from the appropriation of land, labor and recourses to the subjugation and extermination of entire groups of people’ (Doty, 1998: 7). The intention of this paper is not to dismiss entirely the utility of the ‘traditional’ approaches to International Relations. Yet, China and the United States share a history of alliance and war, trust and suspicion, sympathy and hatred and their relations should not be conveniently reduced to overtly materialistic analyses of policy, merely of what happened. It is necessary to achieve a complementary understanding of how it was able to happen. To return to the example provided by Howarth and Stavrakakis (2000: 3), then, the forest could be destroyed , left in tact or even protected but each policy would always be fundamentally reliant upon which of its potential representations is considered true by those responsible for its future. In such a way, American discourse and imagery of China are not merely related to, or somehow affective towards, the enactment of US China policy (as authors within the imagery literature have variously suggested). They are in fact inextricable from, and constitutive of, that policy so that they can never accurately be conceived as separate or distinct . Rather, they must consequently be understood as actively complicit at every stage of its formulation, enactment and justification.

Praxis– policymaking takes the world as given which foreground unjust social orders making violence inevitable – rethinking ontological starting points is a pre-requisite to policy action Cox, Poli Sci Prof @ York University, 96

(Robert, “Approaches to World Order,” pg. 144-147)

Ontology lies at the beginning of any enquiry. We cannot define a problem in global politics without presupposing a certain basic structure consisting of the significant kinds of entities involved and the form of significant relationships among them . We think, for example, about a system whose basic entities are states and of an

hypothesized mechanism called the balance of power through which their relation- ships may be understood to constitute a certain kind of world order. From such ontological beginnings, complex theories have been built and specific cases — particular inter-state

relationships — can be exam- ined. There is always an ontological starting point . Any such ontological standpoint is open to question . All of the terms just used have ontological meanings: global politics, structure, system, states, balance of power, world order. I choose "global poli- tics" deliberately to avoid certain ontological presuppositions inherent in other terms such as "international relations," which seems to equate nation with state and to define the field as limited to the inter- actions among states; or "world system," which has been given a specific meaning by certain writers, notably by Immanuel Wallerstein. "Global politics' is looser and broader as a starting point than these other terms, although the reader will soon see that even

"politics" constitutes an ontological limitation for me. My thinking would prefer something like "political economy." Theory follows reality. It also precedes and shapes reality . That is to say, there is a real historical world in which things happen; and theory is made through reflection upon what has happened. The separation of theory from historical happenings is,

however, only a way of thinking, because theory feeds back into the making of history by virtue of the way those who make history (and I am thinking about human collectivities, not just about prominent individuals) think about what they are doing. Their understanding Of What the historical context allows them to do, prohibits them from doing, or requires them to do, and the way they formulate their purposes in acting, is the product of theory. There is a grand theory written by scholars in books; and there is a common-sense theory which average people use to explain to

themselves and to others why they are doing what they The ontologies that people work with derive from their historical experience and in turn become embedded in the world they construct. What is subjective in understanding becomes objective through action. This is the only way, for instance, in which we can understand the state as an objective reality. The state has no physical existence, like a building or a lamp-post; but it is nevertheless a real entity. It is a real entity because everyone acts as though it were; because we know that real people with guns and batons will enforce decisions attributed to this nonphysical reality. These embedded structures of thought and practice — the nonphysi- cal realities of political and social life — may persist over long periods of time, only to become problematic, to be called into question, when people confront new sets of problems that the old ontologies do not seem able to account for or cope with. In such periods, certainties about ontology give place to skepticism. As the European old regime passed its peak and entered into decline, Pyrrhonism, a revival of skepticism from the ancient world, became an intellectual fashion.' Now postmodernism, more attuned to a generation that disdains to seek models from the past, performs the function Of disestablishing (or, in its terms, deconstructing) the heretofore accepted ontologies. In a recent work,2 Richard Ashley argued that there is no indubi- table

Archimedean point, no single firm foundation, on which to build a science Of global politics.' Every purported firm ground is to be doubted in the eyes of eternity. We are not, however, working with the eyes Of eternity but with a myopia particular to the late twentieth century. Indeed, our perspectives may be strongly influenced by a sense of the invalidity of former certainties — those of the Cold War, of a bipolar structure of world power, of US

hegemony. Our challenge is not to contribute to the construction of a universal and absolute knowledge ,

but to devise a fresh perspective useful for framing and working on the problems of the present. There is a lingering absolutism in the very denial of the possibility of absolute knowledge — a regret, a striving to approximate something like it, to endow our practical wisdom with universality. As intellec- tuals and theorists, we are disposed to think of our task as that of homo sapiens, though we might be more effective were we

to see our task as that of an adjunct to homo fabcr, the maker of history. To deconstruct the ontological constructs of the passing present is a first step towards a more pertinent but still relative knowledge . The task of clearing the ground should not become an obstacle to constructing new perspective that can be useful even though it in turn will ulti- mately be to critical reevaluation. Homo faber is also homo sapiens. There is a cumulative as well as a dis- junctive quality to history. Distinct historical phases, with their histori- cally specific ontologies, are not sealed off from one another as mutually incomprehensible or mutually irrelevant constructs.' Historical phases in our own current of civilization are produced, one following the other, in a process of contradiction. The contradictions and conflicts that arise within any established structure create the opportunity for its trans- formation into a new structure. This is the simplest model of historical change. The successive phases of other currents of civilization can be understood by the human mind's capacity for analogy. The encounters and merging of civilizations can be understood by a combination Of pro- cess and analogy. These capacities of thought make the historical pro- cess intelligible. Knowledge of history, not just of events but of the regu- larities or general principles that help explain historical change, can, in turn, become a guide for action. History thus generates theory. This theory is not absolute knowledge, not a final revelation or a complete- ness of rational knowledge about the laws of history. It is a set of viable working hypotheses. It is a form of knowledge that transcends the specific historical epoch, that makes the epoch intelligible in a larger perspective — not the perspective of eternity which stands outside his- tory, but the perspective of a long sweep of history. There are special epistemological as well as ontological issues to be resolved in working within an era of structural change. Positivism offers an epistemological approach congenial to periods of relative structural stability. The state of the social whole can be taken as given in order to focus upon those particular variables that frame the specific and limited object of enquiry. Positivism allows for detailed empirical investigation of discrete problems. The observing subject can be thought of as separated from, as not directly involved with, what is investigated. The purpose of enquiry is to bring the aberrant activity that focused attention as an object of

study back into a compatible relationship with the relatively stable whole. Although this is not always clearly recognized, in positivism there is an implicit identity between the observer-analyst and the stable social whole. This identity at the level of the whole allows for the fiction of a separation between subject and object at the level of the specific issue. Positivism is less well adapted to enquiry into complex and comprehensive change . For this we need an epistemology that does not dis-guise but rather explicitly affirms the dialectical relationship of subject and object in historical process. Intentions and purposes are under- stood to be embodied within the objectified or institutionalized struc- tures of thought and practice characteristic of an epoch. Where positivism separates the observing subject from the observed object of

enquiry, this other historically oriented, interpretative, or hermeneutic epistemology sees subject and object in the historical world as a reciprocally interrelated whole. Such an epistemology is more adequate as a guide to action towards structural change , even though it may not attain the degree of precision expected of

positivism. This essay is an attempt to develop such an approach. A shift of ontologies is inherent in the very process of historical structural change . The entities that are significant are the emerging structures and the processes through which they emerge. Reflection upon change discredits old ontologies and yields an intimation of a possible new ontology. Use of the new ontology becomes the heuristic for strategies of action in the emerging world order.

No offence – they choose their assumptions and they got infinite prep to do so. If they can’t defend them, they should lose

Representations precede any of the affirmatives empirical analysis – we cannot understand the affirmatives policy approach to China without first understanding how our unconscious desires construct China in Western media, scholarship, and government documents - before we can study China external to the US, we have to reflect on how the US has come to know China

Pan, IR Prof @ Deakin University, 12

(Chengxin, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,” Introduction, pp. ebook)

Critical epistemological reflection on the field of China’s i nternational relations is anything but trivial . At one level, some measure of selfreflectivity is not only necessary but also unavoidable. It pervades all literary works, as literature is always implicitly a

reflection on literature itself.25 All forms of knowledge contain within themselves some conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect, autobiographical accounts of the knowing/writing self at either individual or certain collective levels. As evidenced in the selfimage of positivist knowledge in general, the very absence of critical self reflection in China watching already denotes a particular way of speaking about itself, namely, as a cumulative body of empirical knowledge on China. The problem is that this scientistic self-understanding is largely uncritical and unconsciously so. If Pierre Macherey is right that what a work does not say is as important as what it does say,26 then this curious silence and unconscious-ness in the writing of China’s rise needs to be interrupted and made more conscious, a process which Jürgen Habermas calls reflection.27 Besides, it seems impossible for China watching to watch only China. Aihwa Ong notes that ‘When a

book about China is only about China, it is suspect’.28 We may add that it is also self-delusional. China as an object of study does not simply exist in an objectivist or empiricist fashion , like a freefloating, self-contained entity waiting to be directly contacted, observed and analysed. This is not to say that China is unreal, unknowable or is only a ghostly illusion constructed entirely out of literary representation. Of course China does exist: the Great Wall, the Communist

Party, and more than one billion people living there are all too real. And yet, to say something is real does not mean that its existence corresponds with a single, independent and fixed meaning for all to see. None of those aforementioned ‘real’ things and people beam out their meaning at us directly, let alone offer an unadulterated, panoramic view of ‘China’ as a whole. China’s existence, while real, is better understood, to use Martin Heidegger’s term, as a type of ‘being-in-theworld’. 29 The ‘in-the-world-ness’ is intrinsically characteristic of China’s being, which always needs to be understood in conjunction with its world, a world which necessarily includes China-bound discourse and representation. R. G. Collingwood once said that ‘all history is the history of thought’, meaning

that no historian can speak directly of hard historical facts without reference to various thoughts about those facts.30 Likewise, insofar as China cannot exist meaningfully outside of language and discursive construction of it, no study of it is ever possible, let alone complete, without studying our thoughts about it . For this reason, echoing George Marcus and Michael Fisher’s call for ethnography to ‘turn on itself’ and ‘to create an equally probing, ethnographic knowledge of its social and cultural foundations’, 31 this book takes the representation of China (rather than ‘China’ itself) as its main object of study. It calls for a critical autoethnographic turn in China watching. Certainly, there has been no shortage of study on Western representations of China. Alongside Western intellectual interest in this country is a longstanding tradition of documenting this interest, as evidenced in an extensive and diverse body of literature on Western images of China.32 If we also count the works on Western perceptions of Asia, the size of that literature is even more impressive. 33 But this makes it all the more conspicuous that to date precious little has been said or written about contemporary China watching in global politics. For instance, a large portion of the existing study is fixated either on past perceptions of China or perceptions of China’s past. Historical investigation, valuable as it is, cannot substitute for an up-to-date account of contemporary Western knowledge on

China. Meanwhile, most literature tends to limit its purview to ‘non-scholarly’ sources, such as government documents, official speeches , mass media , public opinion, travel writings, novels, documentaries and films. As a result, by design or by accident, scholarly literature is often able to escape attention. Furthermore, even as some academic writings in historiographical, sociological, philosophical, cultural, and linguistic contexts have begun to be critically scrutinised, 34 with few

exceptions Western IR scholarship on China’s rise continues to be overlooked. 35 This is especially curious given that since the US consolidated its global dominance after World War II (WWII), IR discourses have become a main frame of reference for mainstream Western worldviews. 36 Is this because discipline-based scholarship such as IR is better able to minimise the prejudice of Orientalism? Edward Said once claimed that ‘interesting work is most likely to be produced by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a “field” like Orientalism defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically’. 37 However, it would be naïve, as Said himself would probably agree, to

give the disciplines of IR and Political Science such benefit of the doubt. Though apparently defined intellectually rather than

geographically, neither field is politically innocent or neutral. In fact, both remain largely an American/Western social science, whose implicit or unintended loyalty to the United States (US) is probably not dissimilar to that of Orientalism to Europe. 38 Indeed, precisely because these disciplines have now gained a false reputation of being value-free or scientifically objective, their contribution to Western construction of other societies could be all the more significant and lasting, thus deserving closer investigation. Failing that ,

it would be difficult for us to grasp the dynamics and complexities of contemporary Western representations of China in global politics. No doubt, critical scholarship in the fields of IR and postcolonial studies has begun to problematise mainstream IR knowledge. Several important works in IR and cultural studies have examined at length the social construction of self/Other and the politics of representation in relation to the South, the East (‘Near East’), and Asia.39 However, none of their focus is primarily on Western representations of China. Said’s seminal work Orientalism, despite its sweeping subtitle ‘Western Conceptions of the Orient’, is concerned mainly with the Middle East.40 When sometimes Said is invoked in China analysis, it is often, perhaps justifiably, to probe China’s own ‘Orientalist’ legacy (or in Xiaomei Chen’s term, Occidentalism).41 Finally, where there exists useful criticism of Western IR discourses on China’s rise, the criticism is often confined to empirical debate or concerned with factual or narrowly-conceived methodological

matters related to specific works, claims, or issues. 42 Most participants in such debates agree that there is a real China out there, and that the main problem with Western representa-tion lies in its misrepresentation , bias, or tainted perceptions : once such distortion is rectified, objective knowledge of China will be within reach. For example, having insightfully noted that ‘Our uncertainties about China are as much a product of uncertainties about ourselves as they are about China’, Brantly Womack then goes on to suggest that we should strive for an ‘accurate understanding of China’ through looking at the ‘real’ China and ‘its internal dynamic’. 43 To many, Womack’s approach makes perfect sense: How could it be otherwise? And yet,

appeals to ‘reality’ through more empirical research are ultimately of limited value . As Eric Hayot et al. put it, ‘noting the discrepancy between reality and representation, as it applies to particular objects of discourse, no longer works as critique… critique

has to acknowledge imagination as something more than a distorter of fact’. 44 Understanding representation as ‘something more’ than an empirical matter is crucial, though this does not mean that empirical analysis has become irrelevant; it has not

and will not. But if our critique of Western representations stays at an empirical level, it will be ultimately ineffective, if not misleading itself. For one thing, there is no compelling reason to suggest that our newer empirical data can serve as a more reliable base on which to build China knowledge . Moreover, as will be

made clear in the book, the overall function of Western representations is self-imagination . For all their claims to scientific objectivity, they have not been primarily about presenting an empirically accurate picture of China in the first instance. As such, no amount of ‘ accurate’ empirical facts or logical reasoning

contrary to Western assumptions of China is likely to succeed in challenging those assumptions.

Consequently, in spite of the vast body of works that focus on Western images and representations of China, there is a glaring lack of critical analysis of contemporary Western thought on China’s rise in the field of IR (broadly defined), a gap which this book aims to fill. The book is not interested in asking whether or to what extent various forms of China knowledge accurately reflect ‘Chinese reality’. Nor will it offer my own ‘authentic’ or ‘objective’ picture of that reality—so long as it is ‘my own’, it can be neither authentic nor objective. Instead, it will examine how various representations of ‘Chinese reality’, created under the guises of objective knowledge, are discursively and socially constructed, and how such constructions function in international relations theory and practice. Different from a conventional study of national image in foreign policy making, the main concern of the book is with a sociology of knowledge and politics of representation in relation to China watching. To this end, the book draws attention to two dominant and recurring themes and assumptions on China’s rise: the ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’. These themes may be variously termed as ‘regimes of truth’, ‘metanarratives’, or a certain ‘style of thought’, 45 but here they are referred to as ‘paradigms’, a term made academically popular by Thomas Kuhn.46 More on the

definition of the term will be said in a moment and in the next chapter. For now, like colonial discourse, a paradigm is ‘a signifying system without an author’. 47 In this sense, to illustrate my misgivings with the two China paradigms is not to pick on any individual scholars/authors or their specific works, even though in order to critically engage with those paradigms we have no choice but to rely on examples found in specific publications. Also, these paradigms are not to be confused with any specific arguments or theoretical

frameworks. A paradigm is a type of basic conceptual lens through which what can and cannot be known about a certain object of study is delineated, and from which certain specific arguments and theoretical frameworks can flow. Though the paradigms of ‘China threat’ and ‘China opportunity’ may be found more readily in the IR field of China watching, they are not the exclusive patents of IR scholars. To better illustrate these two paradigms, it is necessary to select the relevant literature on an eclectic basis. Coming within the purview of my analysis are, consequently, not just academic writings on China’s foreign policy and international relations, but also other pieces in the ‘China representation’ puzzle such as media reports, commentaries, and official discourses. As well as cutting across genre lines, the ‘China threat’ and

‘China opportunity’ paradigms are not confined within any particular geographical boundaries. True, the US has played a leading role in setting the agenda for Western perceptions of China’s rise and much attention of the book will therefore be

paid to the American discourse, but these paradigms are by no means distinctively American. This is why I use the designation ‘Western’ to cast a wider geopolitical net (and at the same time to leave out ‘non-Western’ sources to avoid making my enterprise too unwieldy). Of course, by ‘Western’ here I do not really mean ‘Western’ per se, whatever that term might mean. My source materials, in most cases, are drawn from English literature published in a few selected Western countries, notably the US, Britain, and Australia. Discourses from other Western countries, such as France and Germany, will not be examined, for the simple reason that their inclusion is beyond the scope and capacity of this single volume. Furthermore, even as I focus almost exclusively on English literature, I do not claim to do full justice to

the inherently heterogeneous quality of China writings in those ‘Anglophone’ locales. My understanding is that no matter how hard we try to narrow down our scope of investigation, we are bound to encounter still subtler spatial differences, contextual nuances, and temporal variations, which could well exist in the writings of the same author. Consequently, this study, its subtitle notwithstanding, does not claim to capture the full complexities or ‘totality’ of Western IR representations of China’s rise, let alone China watching in general.

A2: Plan Focus – 2NC The action of the plan is less important than the discourse used to support it – the affirmative’s engagement is willing to compromise on everything except for the principle that America is meant to lead and its power through security is paramount to the planet’s survival. Neoconservative ideology is constructed through representations, not policies, which means analysis of the logic constructing the affirmative’s advantages should take priority over the plan’s predicted outcomes or benevolent intentions. Pan and Turner, senior lecturer in IR @ Deakin University and Research Fellow in IPE @ University of Manchester, 16

(Chengxig and Oliver, “Neoconservatism as discourse: Virtue, power and US foreign policy,” European Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-26)

When Clinton asserted that ‘[t]he future of politics will be decided in Asia … and the United States will be right at the center of the action’ (Clinton, 2011), she articulated the ‘truth’ of American entitlement to power, and the need to act forcefully and even unilaterally in a region many thousands of miles from the mainland US. So, too, does the rebalance stem from a belief in the necessity of American power, to export and protect American virtue through the advancement of the ‘beachhead for liberty’. The 2015 US National Security Strategy, for example, asserts unequivocally that: America must lead. Strong and sustained American leadership is essential to a rules-based international order that promotes global security and prosperity as well as the dignity and human rights of all peoples. The question is never whether America should lead, but how we lead. (White House, 2015) The goal of expanding the reach of the American self, inevitably in tandem with American power, is thus essentially unquestioned by Obama. This is reflected in his admission that while he was no ideological bedfellow of former ‘neocon’ president Ronald Reagan, he once found himself ‘in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview’. Obama explains that with the end of the Cold War — which saw the triumph of American virtue and the confirmation of US hegemony — he ‘had to give the old man his due’ (Obama, 2007: 289). Obama’s implicit endorsement of the worldview that sent US resources to Iraq and Afghanistan shines a light on the nature of neoconservatism not as a badge, qualification or characteristic, but as a dynamic societal discourse that is something far more than the ‘3Ps’ approach is equipped to capture. Obama’s continuation of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are cited as particular evidence that his approach to foreign policy has diverged little from that of Bush (Lynch, 2014). For example, shortly after taking office, Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The use of military drones also markedly increased. Still, there is more to the story than policy similarities alone. Like Bush in 2001 and generations of politicians before him, Obama frames the advancement of US power and primacy as an advancement of a uniquely benevolent American identity: we must draw on the strength of our values — for the challenges that we face may have changed, but the things that we believe in must not. … America will … tend to the light of freedom and justice … for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are. That is the source, the moral source, of America’s authority. (White House, 2009) As ever, the ‘moral source of America’s authority’ is its virtuosity in the presence of barbaric Others and the only conceivable way to ‘tend to the light of freedom’ is through the expansion of American power, albeit in modified, softer forms. The point here is not about determining the extent to which the Obama administration can be labelled ‘neoconservative’; many

avoid such an explicit label while pointing to the retention of backroom ‘neocon’ personnel and the ‘neocon consensus’ that steers his policy approach (Jackson, 2014; Singh, 2014). Designating Obama a neoconservative would be ‘absurd’, suggests Underhill. Yet, to win the argument over the ‘neocons’ in 2008, Obama embraced and adapted, rather than rejected, the concepts they used. As a result, he ‘did not stand outside their “world”’ (Underhill, 2012: 4). This shared ‘world’, presented in the literature as the Bush–Obama foreign policy consensus, is certainly noteworthy. Yet, it cannot be detached from the still wider and more encompassing discursively constructed ‘world’ explored throughout this article. Obama is unavoidably caught up in a history that pervades the present. When Walter Russell Mead (2011) argues that Obama’s liberal style of politics in the pursuit of identical aims makes him ‘a more effective neo-conservative’ than Bush, he alludes to the power and seduction of neoconservatism as a discourse whose parameters may be repackaged, but not completely discarded. Indeed, Obama has been confident that his deliberate appeals to a righteous and powerful US identity will find a sympathetic domestic audience beyond Washington: in 2010, 80% of Americans considered the US an exceptional nation (Jones, 2010); and in 2012, 85% reported the belief that the US is a force for good in the world (Goodenough, 2012). Ultimately, then, this is less about Obama and his administration than about the discursive conditions in the US within which the construction of neoconservatism remains logically possible and, indeed, widely acceptable. This brief comparative analysis of Bush and Obama reinforces the argument that as a discourse, neoconservatism does not have a single face or formation. It revises and updates over time so that it becomes liable to transformation and disruption. As such, the brand of multilateralism espoused by Obama, which has seen the US deepen its involvement in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asia Summit (Turner, 2014), can be acceptable in the pursuit of a virtuous and powerful US. Thus, when Max Boot (2004) argues that ‘neocons’ such as himself ‘don’t have a problem with alliances. They are [simply] wary of granting multilateral institutions (such as the United Nations) a veto over US action’, he expresses the widespread belief in America’s ‘righteous might’ to export its essential elements. Across US history, this widespread belief, being the product of the mutually constitutive discourses of American virtue and power, has conjured up a world populated by uncivilised, inferior and barbaric Others, rationalising and even necessitating their subjugation in the name of advancing the US self through its superior and self-righteous capabilities. Foreign Others are no longer explicitly referred to as ‘uncivilised’ or ‘inferior’, but the neoconservative logic that underpinned such rhetoric and its attendant actions survives today. Democrats and Republicans have come to share some form of post-9/11 ‘neoconservative agenda’. As our analysis has shown, this is explained less by recent convergences of policy preferences than by the persistent construction of a virtuous US with a duty to advance superior power . Thus, the presidential election of 2016, like that of 2008, is unlikely to fundamentally disrupt this long history. Unless the twin discourses of virtue and power in the American self-imagination are granted more concerted critical attention, neoconservatism may remain a powerful and largely unquestioned component of future US foreign policy thinking and practice. This article began by arguing that neoconservatism has been traditionally conceptualised through the ‘3Ps’ approach, which, while useful in certain respects, has yet to produce a satisfactory explanation of how neoconservatism is formed, what it represents or why its presence is likely to continue. To address these problems, we argued that neoconservatism is most meaningfully conceived as a discourse. Specifically, we put forward the case that neoconservatism is constituted primarily by two powerful and pervasive discourses in the US: those of virtue and power. These discourses were crucial to the establishment of the US itself , and to its later expansion and emergence into an assertive international actor. Virtue and power, we argued, have often been

inextricable and mutually complementary in the US self-construction, expanding and advancing in the service of each other. From this theoretical base, our aim was to provide a novel and productive examination of what neoconservatism is and how it is dynamically constituted, with the implications for better understanding its change and continuity in American foreign policy. While we tend to agree with others that neoconservatism remains an active force in contemporary US foreign policy processes, we did so on new analytical and methodological grounds. In our analysis, neoconservatism and its change and continuity are not judged simply by its external logic, for instance, by the fact that Obama and his allies have adopted ‘neoconservative’ principles, that ‘backroom personnel’ from the Bush administration have remained or that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to linger. Rather, they are best understood through its internal logic and rules of discursive formations. As so many others before them, Presidents Bush and Obama adhere to understandings of a virtuous US that must retain superior material power for the survival and exportation of its universal values. The Bush administration implemented extreme and costly policies, with broad American support, in the extraordinary aftermath of 9/11. However, contrary to popular opinion, American neoconservatism is not best envisioned as bold, boisterous and brash; its power and influence as a discourse comes from its acceptance as unquestionable common sense (Fairclough, 1992a) and thus its ability to escape critical attention to it qua discourse. In its ‘Bush Doctrine’ manifestations, neoconservatism may have proven politically toxic, but as a particular discursive formation that is used to define the US, it is intoxicating and self-gratifying; it tells Americans who they are in an irresistibly flattering manner. As this discursive formation ‘produce[s] the subject and simultaneously along with him [sic] what he is given to see, understand, do, fear and hope’ (quoted in Fairclough, 1992b: 31, emphasis in original), neoconservatism as a discourse is productive of its adherents and constitutive of a set of policies . Thus, the ‘3Ps’ approach to neoconservatism has certain merit. Yet, understanding neoconservatism cannot begin or end with specific people, policies or even principles. Its discursive formations are far more fundamental to explaining its resilience, variations and continued relevance to US foreign policy. To the extent that discourses of virtue and power are not necessarily unique to US self-imagination, our approach could help explain why neoconservatism may not be a distinctively American phenomenon (Gove, 2004).

Impact

Impact Calculus – 2NC Structural violence outweighs – it creates all forms of macro-level violence – obscuring its role guarantees future conflicts - reject their appeals to empirical evidence because suffering cannot be captured in a dataset – only centering impact calc on affect can arrive at truth Springer, Professor of Geography @ University of Otago, 11

(Simon, “Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies,” Political Geography (30) pp. 90-98)

The confounding effects of violence ensure that it is a phenomena shot through with a certain perceptual blindness. In his monumental essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin (1986) exposed our unremitting tendency to obscure violence in its institutionalized forms, and because of this opacity, our inclination to regard violence exclusively as something we can see through its direct expression. Yet the structural violence resulting from our political and economic systems ( Farmer, 2004 and Galtung, 1969), and the symbolic violence born of our discourses ( Bourdieu, 2001 and Jiwani, 2006), are something like the dark matter of physics, ‘[they] may be invisible, but [they have] to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what might otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective [or direct] violence’ ( Zizek, 2008: 2). These seemingly invisible geographies of violence – including the hidden fist of the market itself – have both ‘nonillusory effects’ ( Springer, 2008) and pathogenic affects in afflicting human bodies that create suffering ( Farmer, 2003), which can be seen if one cares to look critically enough. Yet, because of their sheer pervasiveness , systematization , and banality we are all too frequently blinded from seeing that which is perhaps most obvious . This itself marks an epistemological downward spiral , as ‘the economic’ in particular is evermore abstracted and its ‘real world’ implications are increasingly erased from collective consciousness ( Hart, 2008). ‘The clearest available example of such epistemic violence’, Gayatri Spivak (1988: 24–25) contends, ‘is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’, and it is here that the relationship between Orientalism and neoliberalism is revealed.

Since Orientalism is a discourse that functions precisely due to its ability to conceal an underlying symbolic violence (Tuastad, 2003), and because the structural violence of poverty and inequality that stems from the political economies of neoliberalism is cast as illusory (Springer, 2008), my reflections on neoliberalism, Orientalism, and their resultant imaginative and material violent geographies are, as presented here, purposefully theoretical. As Derek Gregory (1993: 275) passionately argues, ‘human geographers have to work with social theory… Empiricism is not an option, if it ever was, because the “facts” do not (and never will) “speak for themselves”, no matter how closely… we listen’. Although the ‘facts’ of violence can be assembled , tallied, and categorized, the cultural scope and emotional weight of violence can never be entirely captured through empirical analysis. After Auschwitz, and now after 9/11, casting a sideways glance at violence through the poetic abstractions of theory must be considered as an enabling possibility . This is particularly the case with respect to understanding the geographies of violence, as our understandings of space and place are also largely poetic (Bachelard, 1964 and Kong, 2001)

Invisible wars come first – only looking backwards at inequality can solve extinction Szentes, Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest, 8

(Tamás, and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society” http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf) []=gender corrected

It’s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the

world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended

with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous

resources badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people,

manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical terror,

organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth,

ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and

“invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions , thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars . It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic

and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in

our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars . Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted

environment. However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which

everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak

about and make “survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural

and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies,

codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final

catastrophe or a common solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated . Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment.

Impact – Ethics First Prioritize debate over the ethics of the system that the AFF endorses prior to evaluating the consequences of the plan – there is no way to calculate costs or benefits without first establishing an ethical baseline to judge what is an acceptable outcome; their framework trades off with a cosmopolitan political orientation which is necessary to confronting every impeding security crisis, which means framework both solves and turns the case Burke et al, Associate Professor of International and Political Studies at UNSW Australia, 14

(Anthony, Katrina Lee-Koo is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Australian National University, and Matt McDonald is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Queensland “Ethics and Global Security” pg 1-9)

With its world wars , cold wars, proxy wars, colonial wars, guerrilla wars, civil wars, drug wars, and new wars, not to mention its genocides, nuclear weapons , economic crises, gender-based violence, refugees, famines and environmental disasters , the twentieth century was a century of chronic and endemic insecurity. What will

the twenty-fi rst century become? It certainly has not started out well. Its fi rst decade alone saw aircraft smashing into New

York’s World Trade Center, a new global war on terror, the near-death of the nuclear non-prolif eration regime, the Indian Ocean and

Japanese tsunamis, Cyclone Nargis, the war in Iraq , genocide in the Sudan, and three brutal wars in Palestine and Lebanon. The picture beyond that does not improve when we add global stalemate on climate change , mass slaughter in the Congo, Islamist terrorism in Pakistan and India , a craze for walls and “border protection”, and strategic anxiety about Iran, North Korea, the rise of China, and a future of drone, cyber and space war. All of these examples have been riven with moral anxiety and exemplifi ed particular ethical choices : whether to use poison gas against enemy forces to protect one’s own; whether to bomb populated areas to shorten a war or degrade an enemy’s industrial capacity; whether to develop and deploy weapons that can destroy cities in a few seconds and kill millions; whether to use starvation as a weapon of war; whether to support Islamic extremists in a proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, in the face of warnings about how they were likely to turn on their masters afterwards; and when that time came, whether to fi ght such extremists by systemic violations of the international laws of war

and human rights. The debates over these issues refl ect many things: their inherent moral complexity, competing ethics and norms, and a global interest in their rightness and long-term impact. None of these ethical questions and dilemmas are new, but the fi eld of security studies has been slow to address them, and it has not established a tradition of ethical thought (Burke 2010; for new research see Floyd 2007; Hayden 2005; Robinson 2011; Roe 2012). This book attempts to address that gap, and to contribute to a dialogue about the possibilities for a genuinely global security orientation and practice in international politics. We survey a range of ethical perspectives and arguments relating to diverse problems on the global security agenda, so that we can begin to understand

how ethical commitments shape security relationships and outcomes : how poor or compromised ethics can contribute to insecurity ; and how good ethical arguments and decisions might be able to improve the situation .

While examining elements of existing ethical perspectives (such as realism, liberalism and just war theory), we push on to argue for a specifi cally

cosmopolitan ethics . A cosmopolitan ethics aims to ensure the security of all states and communities through time, by aiming for the elimination rather than just the management of grave insecurities . We regard such an ethics as not merely morally desirable , but as strategically necessary , and with this objective, we develop ethical guidelines for the decisions and policies of all security actors. We list these principles here in Box 1.1 below, and explain them in the section entitled ‘Key Principles of a Cosmopolitan Security Ethics’. If practices of global security politics raise ethical questions at the conceptual level, they have also precipitated broader debate and contestation in the “real world” of international security. The Burmese military’s refusal to allow foreign aid to enter the country after the 2008 cyclone, which killed 140,000, provoked global outrage, calls for foreign intervention, and active regional diplomacy (Evans 2008b; Kouchner 2008). After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 280,000, the United Nations and ASEAN moved to create an early warning system and response capability in recognition of the failure to have such a system in place beforehand or to even put such threats on the region’s security agenda (Burke and McDonald 2007: 1). Some of the scientists who built the fi rst atomic bombs questioned their use in warfare and opposed the later development of fusion weapons, while scores of former national security policymakers have supported calls for total nuclear disarmament (Bird 2005: 426; Burke 2009; Oppenheimer 1984: 113; Schweber 2000). The 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident at Fukushima led many Japanese (and four European countries) to question the role of nuclear power in their energy supply, and brought calls for stronger global regulation of the industry (Fackler 2012). The widespread bombing and targeting of civilians in war have provoked major innovations in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including the classifi cation of area bombing and rape as war crimes, and new treaties outlawing land mines and cluster weapons. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established to prosecute major international crimes including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression. Aggression has been defi ned in such a way (‘the use of armed force by a State against the

sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations’) that it would have put the US, Britain and Australia in the dock had it been in force at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Amendments to the Rome Statute 2010).

The moral anxiety and debate in such cases—just a few of many—suggests something important. Ethics matters . In this book, we contend that the nature of global insecurity in the last century, and the kinds of security that the world will be able to achieve in this century, depends significantly on ethics : on the ethics we bring to our analysis, policymaking and decisions; on the

ethics that underpins our understanding of what security is and to whom it is owed; and on the ethics that shapes the realities we accept or deny. Whether people live or die , whether they suffer or prosper—which people live and prosper and where they are able to do so— are

ethical questions. How these questions are answered in the real world will be the results of particular ethical frameworks , rules and decisions ; the result of the ways in which ethical dilemmas are posed, and how they are addressed and resolved. Is it right to attack—or target—cities with nuclear weapons? Is it right to even possess them? Is it right to detain asylum seekers, push their boats out to sea, or return them to the places from which they fl ed? Is it right to target terrorists and insurgents with remote-controlled robotic aircraft and missiles, even if those killed include civilians and if their operators aim—and kill—without risk? Is it right to invade a foreign country to stop crimes against humanity, end a famine, build a state, or remove a regime, and if so, what are the right ways of going about it? Is it right to use torture, or suspend habeas corpus or

the rule of law, to protect our security? What forms of reasoning, what criteria and ends, should govern such decisions? These are some of what most of us recognise as “moral” questions central to war and security—questions about killing, harm and humanity—and put in this form they are certainly of great importance. In particular, such questions are addressed in great depth in the “just war” tradition, and you will read more about that school of thought in the pages that follow. However, in this book we argue that the infl uence and problem of ethics in security goes beyond moral choices in particular cases, and beyond questions of war and violence, to take in the very system and infrastructure of global security itself. This “system” is a dynamic and contested set of processes that develops out of the frameworks provided by (and actions of) key structures and actors: international treaties and law, regional and global organisations, governments, militaries, intelligence and aid agencies, NGOs, corporations, communities, and civil society organisations. The “international”

management of security, however, should not be confused with a genuinely global sensibility, perspective, practice or set of institutions. Currently, we have a largely state-centric international security system that attempts very imperfectly to deal with increasingly global processes and dynamics of insecurity: risks and threats that have transnational and often global sources and

symptoms. This system is structured around a cooperative tension (and sometimes outright confl ict) between national security policies and military alliances, regional security organisations (like ASEAN or the OSCE) and collective security “regimes” of international law, treaty agreements and

international organisations in areas like arms control, disarmament, and the environment. These regimes refl ect both cosmopolitan commitments to deal with global problems in an eff ective and equitable way, and an uglier power politics that generates compromises that reflect particular national and corporate (rather than global) interests . Such regimes are also almost entirely missing or stagnant in areas like the energy and the world economy. A global approach to security thus recognises that our common problems are global in scope and that national, regional and collective security responses need to be reformed to serve genuinely global ends (Burke 2013a). In our view,

the kind of global security system we have, how and to whom it provides security, is the very first ethical question . Does this system serve the interests of states and corporations alone or the interests of all people and the ecosystems that they depend

on? Does it serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful, or the poor and the marginalised? Does it serve the interests of some at an unacceptable cost to others? These concerns preoccupied a “high level panel” of former states-people asked by then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to map out a new global security agenda in 2004. In their report, A More Secure World, they said: Diff erences of power, wealth and

geography do determine what we perceive as the gravest threats to our survival and well-being. Differences of focus lead us to dismiss what others perceive as the gravest of all threats to their survival . Inequitable responses to threats further fuel division . Many people believe that what passes for collective security today is simply a system for protecting the rich and powerful. (United Nations 2004: 2) We believe that “ethics” and “morality” are not things that can be brought to insecurity or war from outside, to a space that would otherwise be

unethical or amoral. Rather, we believe that even before we face a specific moral decision , ethics constitutes the choices available to us—that particular ethical commitments , options , limits and imperatives are implicit in the system itself, and in particular theoretical and policy world views. Every vision, every practice, and every system of security has an ethics—

even if we cannot agree that all are equally ethical. As Richard Shapcott argues, any work of political ethics must draw attention to the possible consequences or implications of different starting points …it is only once we have assessed or understood these [consequences] that we can reflect adequately upon our ethics and whether we think the costs of our positions are worth it, or not, or whether they are justifi able or need modifi cation. (Shapcott 2010: vii-viiii) In sum, even as we accept that to be able to term a perspective or behaviour “amoral”, “immoral”, or “unethical” is a powerful and sometimes

legitimate use of language, it is analytically more helpful to be able to lay out the assumptions and commitments

of a range of ethical frameworks that bear on the problems and realities of global security, so that their eff ects can be considered and judged. Even as we assume a responsibility to advance a distinctive global security ethics that is better

—that will lead to a more just and stable world—we do so in a global political context where moral pluralism is a fact. Debate among competing ethical perspectives is necessary and important. Following Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, we see ethics not merely as right or moral behaviour, but as a vision of the good—the ‘highest good’, an end towards which ‘every action and decision seems to aim’ (Aristotle 2012: 216). This distinguishes our approach from the “just war” tradition, which is the closest thing we currently have to an ethics that addresses (some) security questions, like war, terrorism and intervention. The end of the just war tradition seems unduly modest, being merely to reduce the evils of an institution (war) that it otherwise sees as an enduring social fact (Walzer 2006). Our interest is larger: to understand and judge war and violence within a more general global picture—and ethics—of security. When ethics is understood in terms of an overarching vision of the social or political good, moral conduct and decision-making will then be framed so as to contribute to the desired end, and will be shaped by the ways in which that good is defi ned and understood. What that ultimate end is becomes crucial, because so much fl ows from it. Indeed, defi ning the ultimate good not only drives ethics, but is an ethical problem in itself, because settling on the overarching end of ethics involves making decisions about what the world is (or ought to be) like, who matters, what their needs are, who has responsibility, what those responsibilities are, and how to discharge them. It shapes the realities we can see or attempt to create. We also focus on ethics because of an important practical distinction between “ethics” and “morality”. It is often said that morality relates to conduct whereas ethics relates to a broader good towards which moral conduct will lead. It also seems that when morality is invoked in international aff airs it is used negatively, to resolve a problem where it may be necessary to do harm or have truck with evil— to decide when killing may be legitimate or necessary, how much killing, for how long, and at a cost that does not exceed the good we may be trying to do by way

of it. Morality here is about St Thomas Aquinas’s “double eff ect”. Ethics , in contrast, opens up a more positive trajectory: to think of more systemic visions of peace, justice and human fl ourishing that might eliminate the need to resort to violence. At the same time, we acknowledge that grand ethical or moral visions can be dangerous, if they legitimate unjust practices or blind us to destructive consequences. And we accept the need for constant refl ection on and interrogation of our ethical commitments and their implications in practice. Even if in this book we accept the (contested) claim that the highest good—the end—of ethics is “security”, there is a range of diverse and confl icting perspectives on what these ends are. (Our view, as we explain below, is that the best way to understand security as a highest good is in a global or cosmopolitan way.) The most

infl uential perspective, as discussed in Chapter 1, is associated with the theory of realism and the majority of state practices. It holds that national security is the ultimate end, and the security of individuals , ecosystems or the world in general is invisible or is at least subordinate. Some classical realists also profess a concern to stabilise a structurally unalterable system of

state confl ict, so as to reduce the incidence and severity of war and seek mutual security. The national security perspective views the security of one’s own state’s citizens as paramount, and views global security relationships through the prism of how that state has determined its “national interests”— which could well include the security of citizens and

other states, environmental protection, and human rights, but often does not. In this perspective “international security” is the problem of managing cooperative, competitive and confl ictual relations among states that act fi rst and foremost according to their own interests—however those interests are defi ned. The interests and security of others can be disregarded or even sacrifi ced to that end. An alternative perspective—which has gained traction in the United Nations and among NGOs—is that human security is the ultimate good, and that national security policies and international security relations need to aim for that goal. While it remains a contested concept, among the most compelling accounts of human security was set out by the United Nations’ Commission on Human Security, which described it as being based on the creation of ‘political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity’ at an individual and community level. In this view of human security, systems work holistically and give people both ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ to enable a diverse range of cultures, faiths and communities to prosper and coexist (Commission on Human Security 2003: 4). A third perspective hovers uneasily between the two, but has also been infl uential since the end of the Second World War, especially on the founding of the United Nations and on the development of key arms control, disarmament, and regional and global security regimes. This view, linked to liberal and international society perspectives in international relations thought, is that collective security is the ultimate end—especially of international law and global cooperation. This perspective holds that states must subordinate their freedoms and interests to international law, participate constructively in a transnational system of security, and consider the security needs and interests of other states. Later ideas of common and cooperative security gave even stronger emphasis to a view that security could only be achieved in common with other states through rule-based cooperative mechanisms and practices (Evans 1993; Independent Commission 1982). This perspective shapes the attitudes of many states towards important global security regimes such as that formed around the United Nations Charter, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and to a lesser extent, regional organisations such as the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was also the concern of important UN documents: the 2004 report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and the Secretary-General’s 2005 report, In Larger Freedom, released prior to the most signifi cant conference of UN member states since the organisation’s founding, the 2005 World Summit. However, the collective security system remains largely state-centric (even if concerns with human security and crimes against humanity

are increasingly present in UN discussions and Security Council decision-making) and is ethically troubling in three signifi cant ways. First, the collective security system is still centred on states’ rights and interests , and affords spoilers great latitude to damage efforts at global cooperation and problem-solving ; second, the system is riven with power play and

inequality, especially when we consider the membership of the Security Council and the veto powers held by its permanent members; and third, when collective security turns to coercion and enforcement it can be extremely destructive of human life and stability, as happened during the comprehensive trade embargo enforced on Iraq during the 1990s, and is a risk in any form of “humanitarian” intervention. In this book, we will argue for a fourth perspective that draws normative inspiration from aspects of the human and cooperative security approaches and seeks to harmonise national security practices with legitimate global

ends. This perspective argues, in a “cosmopolitan” way, that global security is the ultimate end that should govern an ethics of security; that the security of

all human beings, communities, ecosystems and states is of equal value . The ethics of a global security system holds that the reduction and prevention of serious harm is an overarching goal, and that competing claims must wherever possible be harmonised and negotiated through dialogue, rules and law rather than violence and coercion. Even where violence might remain regrettably necessary or ethically defensible, it will still mark a broader failure of the system to provide comprehensive security and reduce confl ict, and may put all those other eff orts into peril. More about the core aims and principles of this cosmopolitan global security ethics is outlined below. We are aware that such a system will be diffi cult to achieve in a world where many governments and actors are unsympathetic to its premises, but we also argue that were this ethics to become infl uential, the security benefi ts for all states, human beings and the global environment would be great. It is an ethics aimed at creating security on a universal basis, rather than providing limited succour to some parts of a world that merely seeks to manage and limit insecurity. A further word is needed here about the problem posed by ethical pluralism— which contradicts the commonsense

view that behaviours and norms can be divided between those that are ethical and those that are not. Ethics is not a choice to do good when the overwhelming temptation—or the easier option—is to do evil; it is, rather, a competing set of perspectives about what it is to do good, and about what that good might be. It is challenging to think, for example, that an ethic could provide moral sanction to the killing of tens of thousands of noncombatants to defend a state in a time of “supreme emergency”, a consequence that many consider to be evil. Yet this argument, made by the respected American philosopher Michael Walzer (2006: 251–63) in his book Just and Unjust Wars, is just one of many morally-controversial positions that have been put by “just war” theorists. Even as they have done so much to defend the principle of non-combatant immunity and provide rational guidelines for the resort to war, some just war writers have endorsed the use of torture in extreme situations and supported preventive war in

violation of the United Nations Charter (Ignatieff 2004: 140; Bellamy 2006c; Burke 2005; Reus-Smit 2005). As much as it may occasionally disturb us, ethics is a contested and morally pluralistic space, one that promises as much danger as benefit to humankind and the planet we depend on . In short, ethics is contained in everything we do and are, and the very possibility of security (or insecurity) for billions of human beings hinges on it.

Impact – Self Fulfilling Prophecy – 2NC Securitization is a self-fulfilling prophecy Song, associate professor of political science at the University of Macau, 15

(Weiqing, Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account, China Review 15(1) p. muse)

This article identifies the three modes of securitization activity. In all of these modes, securitizing agents communicate the China threat [End Page 164] issue referentially (that is, using the linguistic act of identifying something) to their audiences/subjects in the context of shared knowledge in a particular domain. It can be structurally incorporated into the field of theoretical research, addressed to elites and focused on the security and strategic sectors. It can also be structurally incorporated into ideological debates and conflicts, addressed to an attentive or well-informed public and focused on the political sector. Alternatively, it can be assigned to a broad context of culture and civilization, addressed to the general public and encompassing a comprehensive range of sectors.

In these processes, the actors are performing acts with communicative force. Although the intended meanings are not directly signaled, they can be inferred from the contexts of the different modes. The so-called China threat can be predicted as inevitable, based on deductive reasoning from scientific theory. Rhetorical power comes from a specialized domain of scholarly expertise. Following an inductive logic, the same conclusion can be drawn from past experiences and current observations. It can also be inferred from psychological traits and prejudices. In the latter case, the issue of the China threat is securitized by eliciting an intuitive emotional response from the audience that bypasses ordinary justification. In other words, the subject’s perception of the China threat results from immediate a priori knowledge or experiential belief. The agents thereby heighten their audiences’ sense of the seriousness and urgency of the issue.

A securitization act succeeds only when it achieves the intended effect. A poststructuralist securitization analysis of the China threat issue in this article reveals the specific ways in which power and knowledge constitute each other through different modes. All types of performative communication, regardless of their domains, attempt to build identities—in this case, that of a “threatening” China—through means such as linking and differentiating. The real aim of this process of securitization is not to identify the cause of the “China threat,” but rather to elicit a reaction from an audience. The China threat thesis may become a self-fulfilling prophecy . If so, this may have very real policy implications and political consequences.

Reflection First – 2NC Prioritize critical reflection on the social practices of the West prior to interrogating the behavior of China – insofar as any knowledge of Chinese behavior can be deduced Pan, IR Prof @ Deakin University, 12

(Chengxin, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,” pg. 152-153)

In this context, self-reflection cannot be confined to individual China watchers or even the China watching community Never a purely personal pursuit or even a disciplinary matter. China knowledge is always inextricably linked with the general dynamism of Western knowledge, desire and power in global politics. Its self-reflection should thus extend to the shared collective self of the West , its assumed identity and associated foreign policy (China policy in particular). If China can be seen as a being—in—the—world, these issues are part and parcel of the world in which China finds itself and relates to others. But until now they have largely escaped the attention of China watchers Maybe it is because these are primarily the business of scholars of Western/American culture, history and foreign relations, rather than that of China scholars. After all, there is a need for division of labour in social sciences. True. for various reasons it is unrealistic to expect China scholars to be at the same time experts on those ‘non-China’ issues Nevertheless, since China watchers both rely on and contribute to their collective Western self-imagination in their understanding of China, it is crucial that they look at their collective Western self in the mirror. Take the negative image of China’s brutal Soviet-style sports system for example. Every now and then, such an image will be reliably brought up to reinforce China’s Otherness more generally. But if the ways American young talents are trained are put under the same spotlight, the difference between the US and China is no longer as vast as it appears. 14 In doing so, the previous China image is no longer as defensible as it seems . In brief, the broader point here is that the same China may take on quite different meanings when we are willing to subject ourselves to similar scrutiny. We may better appreciate why China looks the way it does when we are more self-conscious of the various lenses paradigms, and fore-meanings through which we do China watching. Con we cannot fully comprehend why the Chinese behave in a certain way until we pay attention to what we have done (to them), past and present. Such self-knowledge on the part of the West is essential to a better grasp of China . Without the former, China knowledge is incomplete and suspect.

Yet, to many, self-reflection is at best a luxurious distraction. At worst it amounts to navel-gazing and could turn into ‘a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorce from the ‘real world’ such concern is hardly justified, however. The imagined Western self is integral to the real world, and critical self-reflection also helps reconnect China watching to the ‘real world of power relations to which it always belongs. By making one better aware of this connection, it helps open up space for emancipatory knowledge As Mannheim notes:

The criterion of such sell-illumination is that not only the object but we ourselves fall squarely within our field of vision. We become visible to ourselves, not just vaguely as a knowing subject as such but in a certain role hitherto hidden from us, in a situation hitherto impenetrable to us, and with motivations of which we have not hitherto been aware. In such a moment the inner connection between our role, our motivations, and our type and manner of experiencing the world suddenly draws upon us, hence the

paradox underlying these experiences, namely the op opportunity for relative emancipation from social determination, increases proportionately with insight into this determination.

Still, there may be a lingering fear that excessive reflectivity could undo much of the hard-won China knowledge. But again to quote Mannheirn, ‘the extension of our knowledge of the world is closely related to increasing personal self-knowledge and self-control of the knowing personality’. 17 Even when that does expose our lack of knowledge about China, all is not lost. Such revelation is not a sign of ignorance, but an essential building block in the edifice of China knowledge. Confucius told us that “to say that you know when you do know and say that you do not know when you do not know— that is [the way to acquire] knowledge’. Thus, the knowing subject can emancipate itself from its delusion about its own being)9 the real meaning of ignorance is that one claims to know when one does not or cannot know.

Impact – Epistemology – 2NC Knowledge regarding the other is coded by desire prior to the process of information gathering. Their representation of Others as either threats or opportunities partakes in an Orientalist stereotyping of foreign policy behavior that projects US misbehavior onto everything but ourselves. This comes from a gap inherent in data collection and truth, which is filled by a fearful demand for certainty. The implication of this is that you should assess all of their truth claims as ideological statements serving a particular political end rather than objectively true or accurate predictions about what China will do – specifically, the end of legitimizing the position of the already powerful. Pan, IR Prof @ Deakin University, 12

(Chengxin, “Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China's Rise,” Introduction, pp. ebook)

To connect knowledge with desire is not to suggest that knowledge is reducible to any individual whim. Like language, knowledge is first and foremost a social property, whose reception qua knowledge must depend on its intersubjective appeal to collective emotion and social desire. Writings are driven by the desire to write, which in turn is conditioned on the desire to read/know in the wider emotionally imagined community, a process governed throughout by the ‘erotics of knowledge’.72 If it is through knowledge that reality is made meaningful, it is social desire that makes certain knowledge desirable and its production possible and profitable. To be sure, the role of desire in such a process is often invisible, silent, unconscious, and largely unacknowledged. That is because while ultimately knowledge is both a product of and for desire and emotion, in order to be worthy of the name, knowledge has to conceal its emotive trace ; or so it is believed. Even with the concealment, modern science cannot deny its roots in the modern desire for certainty and identity . It is neither coincident nor ironic that Descartes, whose anxious desire for certainty finds expression in the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’ of an Either/Or (either there is a secure foundation upon which our knowledge can be based, or we will be engulfed in uncertainty and darkness),73 is credited with laying the foundation for modern science. It is not despite but because of the Cartesian Anxiety that Descartes ‘discovered’ human reason (cogito ergo sum, or ‘I think, therefore I am’) as the secure, indubitable foundation for certainty. From this emerges also the certain identity of modern man as the rational knowing subject, an identity which promises the ability to obtain objective knowledge about the world. Yet objective certainty, however desirable or precisely because it is desirable, is an illusory effect of desire. The desire for certainty may be satisfied only within desire and through the certainty of desire. When certainty is not within reach, the modern knowing subject, unable or unwilling to give up its quest, turns to the illusive certainty and comfort of what John Dewey called ‘emotional substitute’: ‘in the absence of actual certainty… men cultivated all sorts of things that would give them the feeling of certainty’.74 Trust is one such feeling, which is not based on objective certainty, but cultivated through a process of ‘emotional inoculation’. 75 Fears and fantasies are two other forms of emotional substitute, especially useful for making sense of strangers. By fantasising about an uncertain other’s assimilability and eventual transformation into the self, one can gain a sense of certainty. Alternatively, one may arrive at a sense of predictability by reducing that other to an already known prototype of menace . Either way, these emotional

substitutes provide the much-desired antidote of certainty to the Cartesian Anxiety: either the other can be converted, or it must pose a threat. In this way, the initial uncertainty of the other translates into the certainty of an emotive either/or. As emotional substitutes for certainty, fears and fantasies have figured prominently in what Robert Young calls ‘colonial desire’, which regulates colonialists’ encounters with and their knowledge of various unfamiliar Others. These emotions together make up an ‘ambivalent double gesture of repulsion and attraction’ towards the colonised. 76 On the one hand, colonial desire finds people of other races and colours ‘disgusting’ and ‘repulsive’, hence an object of fear and paranoia. At the same time, colonial desire projects onto those (same) people some degree of ‘ beauty , attractiveness or desirability’, 77 thus making them an exotic source of fantasy and wonder. According to Homi Bhabha, underlying such ambivalent structures of feeling is precisely the modern desire for certainty, identity and ‘a pure origin’.78 Thanks to this ever-present modern desire, the aforementioned ambivalent colonial stereotype is able to acquire ‘its currency’ and ‘ensure[s] its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures’. In this sense, Orientalism is best seen as ‘the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements’. 79 What this latent form of Orientalist knowledge reveals is not something concrete or objective about the Orient, but something about the Orientalists themselves , their recurring , latent desire of fears and fantasies about the Orient. Indeed, only when imbued with such unconscious but persistent desire can Orientalism get ‘passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another’.80 Western knowledge of China’s rise is precisely such a text that has been caught up in the silent emotive current. For example, the ‘China threat’ paradigm bears the stamp of fears, whereas the ‘China opportunity’ paradigm can be best seen as manifestations of modern fantasies. These emotions about China’s rise are certainly not identical to the Orientalist colonial desire in the nineteenth century. For instance, the overtly sexual/racial connotation that once was a hallmark of old-style colonial desire is no longer prevalent in contemporary writings on China. What used to be some of the main obsessions in European colonial fears and fantasies, such as miscegenation and racial hybridity, have now been repackaged as issues of multiculturalism, norm diffusion, socialisation, and so forth. Still, a similar structure of colonial desire lives on; even the racial facet has not disappeared completely in contemporary China watching. 81 Thus, to better understand the twin China paradigms, we need to put them in the context of (neo)colonial desire, and ask how they have more to do with the West’s latent quest for certainty and identity than with the manifest search for empirical truth about ‘Chinese reality’. If all social knowledge is yoked to some intertextuality and worldliness, much of the worldliness of the ‘threat’ and ‘opportunity’ discourses of China is then made up of the (renewed) fears and fantasies accompanying the Western modern desire and self-imagination. All knowledge, insofar as it is a manifestation of desire, implies a power relationship with its desired object . ‘Where there is desire, the power relation is already present’. 82 Thus, knowledge loses its ostensible innocence and reveals its ties with power . As Foucault argues, ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge’, nor is there ‘any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’. Taken together, power and the production of knowledge ‘directly imply one another’ and are mutually dependent and reinforcing. 83 The power/knowledge nexus has a constructivist import. Social knowledge cannot be an objective reflection of reality, but it is not merely a text disconnected from reality either. It is able to inform practice and help construct the reality it purports only to describe. If reality is subject to wordly interpretation, then the interpreting word is ultimately worldly with ‘real-world’ consequences.84 Jim George notes that ‘the process of discursive representation is never a neutral, detached one but is always imbued with the power and authority of

the namers and makers of reality—it is always knowledge as power’. 85 In a similar vein, Nicholas Onuf suggests that ‘saying is doing: talking is undoubtedly the most important way that we go about making the world what it is’.86 With his ‘Axis of Evil’ utterance, for example, George W. Bush effectively told Americans that ‘We can’t go back to sleep again’. 87 In other words, something would have to be done (and indeed has been done). In assuming knowledge as power and theory as practice, we should refrain from taking some self-serving short-cuts. As we are most closely attached to our own desire and most acutely aware of our knowledge, we might assume that the knowledge in the power/knowledge nexus is largely ‘our’ knowledge and the power mostly ‘our’ power. Such an assumption is evident, for example, in much of the mainstream IR literature on ‘norm diffusion’ and ‘socialisation’, which often implicitly privileges Western knowledge and power. But this ethnocentric reading of power/knowledge is problematic. Reality is subject to interpretation and construction by knowledge, ideas and norms, but it is almost always a result of co-interpretation and co-construction by a myriad of sources of knowledge as power. Western knowledge is no doubt a dominant source (let’s assume for a moment that Western knowledge is singular); nevertheless, it is only one among many contenders in an increasingly democratic world of representation. Consequently, to argue for theory as practice is not to say that the world is mainly of our making. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, all history is contemporary history, but that ‘does not mean that all history is our contemporary history’.88

Alternative

Alternative – 2NC The alternative is a framework question – if we win the debating about the AFFs assumptions is important, then we win as long as we prove them wrong Critique of securitization reclaims the political – highlighting contradictions unlocks potentialities and forges political praxis – immanent critique is comparatively better than their impulse to act without reflection Nunes, IR Lecturer @ University of York, 12

(João, Reclaiming the political : emancipation and critique in security studies. Security Dialogue, Vol.43 (No.4). pp. 345-361)

It thus becomes clear that critique for emancipatory approaches is not the questioning of security in the general sense. Predominant ideas and practices of security

do deserve close scrutiny and, very often, fierce opposition. However, by emphasizing the insecurities affecting people, this approach moves beyond the idea that ‘security’ is merely a representation of reality or a modality for dealing with issues . Rather, critique sets out to impact upon political actors’ perceptions and actions , so as

to pave the way for a reconstruction of security along more open, inclusive and democratic lines .

Critique strives to redress immediate insecurities and to work towards the long-term objective of a life less determined by unwanted and unnecessary constraints. This leads to a third idea: the reconstructive agenda of emancipatory approaches is supported by a practical strategy for transformation. Booth has advanced the term ‘emancipatory realism’ (2007: 6) to denote the grounding of security as emancipation upon the real condition of insecurity and its wish to transform it. In fact, emancipatory realism draws on

immanent critique as an analytical method and a political strategy. Immanent critique was one of the stepping-stones of Frankfurt School Critical Theory: for Max Horkheimer, philosophy should highlight contradictions and unlock potentialities in current arrangements . In his words, ‘[p]hilosophy confronts the existent, in its historical context, with the

claim of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relation between the two and thus transcend them’ (1974 [1947]: 182). Immanent critique follows logically from the acknowledgment of the insecurities of individuals and groups, and plays into the normative and political agenda of security as emancipation . This is because the immanent method is at once analytical and connected to political praxis : it ‘engages with the core commitments of particular discourses, ideologies or institutional arrangements on their own terms, in the process locating possibilities for radical change within a particular existing order’ (McDonald, 2012: 60). The internal contradictions of predominant security arrangements, made visible by immanent critique , constitute fault-lines where alternative visions of security can be fostered. Immanent critique also entails the identification of transformative possibilities in the form of ideas and actors in particular contexts that have the potential to contribute to change. Taken together, these three ideas – insecurity as the starting point; theory as praxis; and immanent critique – constitute a promising steppingstone for reclaiming the political in CSS. They show that it is possible to avoid the closure inherent in pessimistic views of security: security is ultimately about the experiences of real people in real places, and predominant versions of security can be challenged and eventually transformed. These

ideas also help to reclaim the political by strengthening the capacity of CSS to recognize political complexity. By drawing attention towards insecurities, emancipatory approaches add further layers in which the political construction of security can be scrutinized – thus allowing for a better understanding of the meanings attached to security in particular historical and social contexts. Finally, these ideas can help reclaim the political in CSS by bringing this field closer to practical transformative politics . Immanent critique allows for judgments to be made in relation to existing understandings and practices of security, in light of how they respond to the needs of the most

vulnerable. Simultaneously, the identification of contradictions and potentialities offers concrete steps for change.

Evaluate links before the alternative – if we win their method locks in oppressive hierarchies, you vote NEG because the plan is unethical - it’s better to try and fail with a new approach than to stick with one you know guarantees violence

Rejection Solves – 2NC Rejection solves – American imperialism is sustained through discursive commitment to its virtues – refusing those values with complete indifference unravels the moral justification for constant intervention Pan and Turner, senior lecturer in IR @ Deakin University and Research Fellow in IPE @ University of Manchester, 16

(Chengxig and Oliver, “Neoconservatism as discourse: Virtue, power and US foreign policy,” European Journal of International Relations, pp. 1-26)

The discourses of American virtue and power, for all their apparent tendencies of mutual estrangement, also contain tendencies of mutual attraction in which the rules of the constitution of neoconservatism are on display. To begin with, the discourses of virtue have some built-in appreciation of the importance of power. Indeed, power is welded to virtue not so much by ‘neoconservatives’ as by a logic of discursive persuasion within the discourses of virtue. We suggest that this persuasion operates on two levels: power as an entitlement and power as a necessity. At the first level, the imagery of a virtuous US evokes a sense of entitlement to power and international leadership . A powerful myth in the US has always been that, as a virtuous people, Americans have a special role or ‘manifest destiny’ towards global spiritual rebirth (Hunt, 2009: 20). In consequence, the US has a natural right to power, leadership and even hegemony. Jefferson’s vision of an all-encompassing ‘Empire of Liberty’ is a pertinent example of how an image of virtue entails its claim to both power and expansion. As already suggested, America’s assumed entitlement to power was first practised in colonists’ encounters with Native Americans. Acting on assumptions of moral and civilisational superiority, President James Monroe proclaimed that to civilise the ‘savage’ Native Americans, ‘the control of the United States over them should be complete and undisputed’ (Monroe, 1896: 46). These discourses did not merely describe the world; they constructed the reality of the world by justifying a foreign policy that hinged on both American virtue and power. The effective exercise of power helped not only to consolidate a discourse of American power, but also to reinforce discourses of American virtue. As James William Gibson (1989: 14) put it: ‘“American” technological and logistic superiority in warfare became culturally transmitted as signs of cultural-moral superiority. … Might made right and each victory recharged the culture and justified expansion’. In this process, thanks to domestic American ‘institutional ingenuity’, such as a federal system and the separations of power, the US was able to become ‘both republic and empire’ (Kane, 2008: 36), thus helping mitigate the political tension between virtue and power. As well as an entitlement, power has also been conceived as necessary for the survival of American virtue in an otherwise evil world. The construction of a virtuous America necessarily implies the existence of evil and/or barbarism. As Gaddis argues, the Founding Fathers considered the US a ‘beachhead for liberty’ in a world of tyranny (quoted in Fettweis, 2009: 508). Under such Manichean circumstances, there is no alternative to power to safeguard American virtue, and only through power can the struggle against evil be won. In Theodore Roosevelt’s words, ‘the barbarian will yield only to force’ (LaFeber, 1994: 226), in keeping with his famous mantra of ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. American power and primacy, then, rather than the antithesis of American virtue, is almost its precondition. Virtue and power became one in Podhoretz’s (1982) plea that ‘the survival not only of the United States but of free institutions everywhere in the world depends on a resurgence of American power’, as much as in Franklin Roosevelt’s belief in the ‘righteous might of the American people’ (quoted in Doenecke and Stoler, 2005:

197). Such discursive convergence between virtue and power, though not always recognised as ‘neoconservative’ in American history, has long provided the logic for contemporary ‘neocons’ to insist, for instance, that ‘[t]he best democracy program ever invented is the U.S. Army’ (Michael Ledeen, quoted in Bacevich, 2005: 85). This embrace of military power in the name of global democracy promotion is therefore not a recent neoconservative deviation from the American liberal ideal, but an essential part of its discursive logic. Robert Kagan unpacks this seductive logic when he asks: if the United States is founded on universal principles, how can Americans practice amoral indifference when those principles are under siege around the world? And if they do profess indifference, how can they manage to avoid the implication that their principles are not, in fact, universal? (Quoted in Bacevich, 2005: 87) If the discourses of virtue contain a clamour for power, American discourses of power also frequently arrive laden with convictions of American virtue. In Luce’s (1999 [1941]: 170) words, ‘our vision of America as a world power [must] include a passionate devotion to great American ideals’. Of course, a distinctively realist discourse of power in the US often cautions against moralism and neoconservatism (see Williams, 2005), but the frequent need for such cautions testifies to the enduring appeal for the US to use power in the name of virtue, ‘in search of monsters to destroy’, as John Quincy Adams famously put it. From the outset, many Americans see US power as more than material capabilities ‘out there’. It is often deemed a form of power that is soft and benevolent, imbued with a universal moral purpose and responsibility. The Spanish–American War of 1898, for example, was branded a conflict for ‘high purpose’ that gave ‘ten millions of the human race’ a ‘new birth of freedom’ (Republican Party, 1900). Such a discursive fusion of American power with ‘freedom’ (a favourite embodiment of American virtue) continued with remarkable similarity in Woodrow Wilson’s explanation of America’s occupation of Cuba — ‘Not for annexation but to provide the helpless colony with the opportunity for freedom’ (quoted in Stelzer, 2004: 9) — and, of course, in George W. Bush’s (2003) address on the Iraq War: ‘We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people’. Enduring recourse to the language of virtue and freedom is essential not only in justifying the use of military power, but also to sustaining the latter’s very existence. As Kristol and Kagan (1996: 28) warn: ‘without a sense of mission, they [Americans] will seek deeper and deeper cuts in the defense and foreign affairs budgets and gradually decimate the tools of US hegemony’. They argue that without the justification and purpose of virtue, American power would be less likely to survive, hence the need for virtue to remain integral to Americans’ understanding of power. Thus, despite the widely perceived polarisation between its realist and liberal traditions, the US can rarely be accurately conceived as either a pure realist power or a stay-at-home liberal exemplar. The ‘mutual attraction’ logic of the discourses of virtue and power suggests that it more often than not needs to be both, so that ‘the power of American virtue ensure[s] the virtuousness of American power’, and vice versa (Kane, 2008: 15). Rather than running independently or parallel to one another, they become one in a neoconservative synthesis that encompasses both moral clarity and military strength. This is not to say that neoconservatism is America’s destiny, or that Americans are an inherently ‘neocon nation’, as Kagan (2008a) would have us believe. However, by unreflectively representing itself through the discourses of virtue and power, the US lends itself to a syncretic neoconservative persuasion. At this juncture, it is worth clarifying that neoconservatism is not an automatic, ahistorical construct of two similarly ahistorical, deterministic discourses. With limitations of space, we cannot fully examine the historical, disjointed and sometimes contingent nature of the discursive constitutions of neoconservatism. Yet, it is worth noting that these discourses are formed in history and discursively shaped by events such as the two world wars, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet

Union and 9/11. Such historic events, as well as broad social trends, commonly stir debates about American virtue and power, and how they should relate to one another in the face of changing modernities at home and abroad. In turn, those debates may give rise to different discursive arrangements of virtue and power, resulting in the formulation of different variants of neoconservatism, realism and liberalism.1 For example, to ‘neocons’ such as Podhoretz (1996), the Cold War victory and the disappearance of the Soviet ‘evil empire’, by vindicating America’s purpose and moral strength, would paradoxically see the end of the neoconservative project and the ascendancy of realism. At the same time, however, these historical changes emboldened some ‘second-generation neocons’ to agitate for ‘nothing short of universal dominion’ (Krauthammer, 1991: 13). In short, when opportunities for, and threats to, American virtue and power are conceived differently, virtue and power may in some circumstances part their discursive company. Alternatively, they may result in different permutations or discursive fusions of neoconservatism, some of which may appear more extreme, others more expedient and circumspect, and still others possibly even unrecognisable as neoconservatism as we commonly know it. Yet, insofar as the dominant American self-imagination continues to be co-constructed by the discourses of virtue and power, the variations may mean changes in the specific discursive formations of neoconservatism (such as from the so-called first-generation and second-generation neoconservatisms), rather than the end of neoconservatism per se. A case in point is the de-emphasis of military power and the call for a ‘restoration of America’s moral authority’ after the Iraq War (Obama, 2009: 119). US foreign policy can deviate from the particular version of neoconservatism — what Jacob Heilbrunn (2009: 219) calls ‘neoconservatism on steroids’ — championed by the architects of that conflict. However, such deviation, as exemplified by Fukuyama’s (2007) critique of ‘Bushite’ neoconservative foreign policy, does not mean that we are necessarily entering a post-neoconservatism period. A close inspection of Fukuyama’s (2007) After the Neocons, for instance, reveals that he has not defected from neoconservatism altogether, but rather its excessive variant. His call for a ‘realistic Wilsonianism’ can be seen as a return to what might be called ‘baseline neoconservatism’. Being ‘good at reading “the moment”’ (Jacques, 2006), Fukuyama may be a microcosm of where the US is today.

AFF Answers

Framework

Framework – only evaluate link arguments based on the plan text. Key to clash since we only have comparative solvency evidence about the plan and more logical since thinking and acting aren’t opportunity costs. Their framework/alternative arguments distract from institutional analysis – that undermines their sustainability and effectiveness – that’s net offence Welsh, Comm Prof @ Appalachia State University, 13

(Scott, “The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics,” pg. 81)

Certeau does not, however, reduce political contest to the "micro" politics of everyday life. Just because he recognizes that the power of the weak resides in the effective authority of the strong does not mean that we can rest assured that everything will simply work out in the end. Jodi Dean finds a naive faith of this kind in those who imagine that accelerated and broadly dispersed conversations , made possible by the Internet and social media, might ultimately deliver free and equal democratic deliberation. So in response, she argues that

such efforts "to displace polities onto the activities of everyday or ordinary people" draw attention away from the still very real need for political challengers to build support , win elections, and ultimately exercise authority themselves . While Certeau is partly responsible for drawing recent scholarly attention to the politics of everyday life, he never- theless deliberately avoids falling into the trap Dean identifies. Instead, as important as the daily "capture of

speech" is to democratic politics, we must not, Ceneau argues, attribute a magical democratic power to vernacular voices. Speech, he

clarifies, is not an adequate "substitute" for "work." S2 Certeau's distinction between speech and work, however, may be

either more or less than meets the eye. It signals, rather, the necessity of a sustained capture of speech , which is only possible upon winning a measure of institutional authority . Hence, Certeau rejects the "jubilation" of intellectuals "who wish to collapse a system of authority without preparing for its replacement." 83

Instead, meaningful change requires forms of symbolic resistance that plan an eventual campaign for and a reintegration with state authority . He writes, "If it is not organized, if it is not inscribed, ewen as a strategy, within the network of national forces in order to effec'ively change a system, (al demand Of conscience Will be neither reformist nor revolutionary," but Will be ' 'extinguished.'

Alt Fails – 2AC

Have to transform systems from the inside out-otherwise rhetoric changes but not policies.McCormack, PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster, 2010

(Tara, Critique, Security and Power: The political limits to emancipatory approaches, pg 59-61)

In chapter 7 I engaged with the human security framework and some of the problematic implications of ‘emancipatory’ security policy frameworks. In this chapter I

argued that the shift away from the pluralist security framework and the elevation of cosmopolitan and emancipatory goals has served to enforce international power inequalities rather than lessen them . Weak or unstable states are subjected to greater international scrutiny and international institutions and other states have greater freedom to intervene, but the citizens of these states have no way of controlling or influencing these international institutions or powerful states. This shift away from the pluralist security framework has not challenged the status quo, which may help to explain why major international institutions and states can easily adopt a more cosmopolitan rhetoric in their security policies. As we have seen, the shift away from the pluralist security framework has entailed a shift towards a more openly hierarchical international system, in which states are differentiated according to, for example, their ability to provide human security for their citizens or their supposed democratic commitments. In this shift, the old pluralist international norms of (formal) international sovereign equality, non-intervention and ‘blindness’ to the content of a state are overturned. Instead, international institutions and states have more freedom to intervene in weak or

unstable states in order to ‘protect’ and emancipate individuals globally. Critical and emancipatory security theorists argue that the goal of the emancipation of the individual means that security must be reconceptualised away from the state . As the domestic sphere is understood to be the sphere of insecurity and disorder, the international sphere represents greater emancipatory possibilities, as

Tickner argues, ‘if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state sovereignty must be severed’ (1995: 189). For critical and emancipatory theorists there must be a shift towards a ‘cosmopolitan’ legal framework, for example Mary Kaldor (2001: 10), Martin

Shaw (2003: 104) and Andrew Linklater (2005). For critical theorists, one of the fundamental problems with Realism is that it is unrealistic. Because it prioritises order and the existing status quo, Realism attempts to impose a particular security framework onto a complex world, ignoring the myriad threats to people emerging from their own governments and societies. Moreover, traditional international theory serves to obscure power relations and omits a study of why the system is as it is: [O]mitting myriad strands of power amounts to exaggerating the simplicity of the entire political system. Today’s conventional portrait of international politics thus too often ends up looking like a Superman comic strip, whereas it probably should resemble a Jackson Pollock. (Enloe, 2002 [1996]: 189)

Yet as I have argued, contemporary critical security theorists seem to show a marked lack of engagement with their problematic (whether the international security context, or the Yugoslav break-up and wars). Without concrete engagement and analysis, however, the critical project is undermined and critical theory becomes nothing more than a request that people behave in a nicer way to each other. Furthermore, whilst contemporary critical security theorists argue that they present a more realistic image of the world, through exposing power relations, for example, their lack of concrete analysis of the problematic considered renders them actually unable to engage with existing power structures and the way in which power is being exercised in the contemporary international system. For critical and emancipatory theorists the central place of the values of the theorist mean that it cannot fulfil its promise to critically engage with contemporary power relations and emancipatory possibilities. Values must be joined with engagement with the material circumstances of the time.

Alt Fails – 1AR

No alternative from radical security standpoint---ends progressive politics that should be focused on effective interventions like the affLoader, Oxford criminology professor, 2007

(Ian, “Civilizing Security”, guessoumiss.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/civilizing-security.pdf)

The strands of radical thought outlined in this chapter offer a cogent critique of the state and its securitizing practices. It is a

critique that appears able to capture important aspects of a historical record that has seen states time and again, in both authoritarian and democratic contexts, allocate the

benefits and burdens of policing in ways that systematically protect the security interests of powerful constituencies at the expense of those of the poor and dispossessed. It supplies, in addition, a cogent account of the dangers of placing security at the ideological heart of government, of the capacity of security politics to colonize public policy and pervade social life in ways that threaten democratic values and sustain fear-laden, other-disregarding forms of political subjectivity and collective identity. In these respects, this variant of state scepticism offers a critique of the operation and effects of state power that in many

significant respects we share (N. Walker 2000; Loader 2002). But it also poses what are undoubtedly some pro- found challenges to the position we wish here to construct and defend. If we are to make a persuasive case for both the good of security, and the indispensability of the state to the production of that good, then we need to find a means of rising to them. These objections then are far from trivial , and we have not devoted this chapter to them simply in order to knock them down. But they nonetheless arise from a standpoint that is not itself without shortcomings , as we hope to show in meeting them. As a prelude to the more sustained

effort along these lines that we offer in part II, let us consider briefly what these shortcomings are. For analytic purposes, they may usefully be put into three groups. This radical variant of

state scepticism tends, first of all, to underplay the openness of political systems and the theoretical and political prospects that this affords. It displays, in particular, a structural fatalism that overlooks the overlap between the production of specific and general order, such that disadvantaged groups and communities have a considerable stake not only in controlling state power, but also in using public resources (including policing resources) as a means of generating more secure forms of economic and social existence. It also remains insufficiently attentive to how the mix between general and specific order (the extent, in other words, to which policing is shaped by common as well as factional interests) is conditioned by political struggle and the varieties of institutional settlement to which this gives rise, thereby varying over time and between polities. Much the same point, moreover, can be directed at the radical critique of the violence that underpins liberal political orders that aim to be free of such violence . One finds here a quite proper

insistence on the troubling conundrum that democratic polities ultimately depend upon coercion to enforce collective

decisions and protect democratic institutions. But this point is hammered home in terms that are overly sweeping and reductionist - often, as in the writings of Agamben (2004a), as a philosophical claim that invites but resists sociological scrutiny. If 'there is always a violence at the heart of every form of political and legal authority' (Newman 2004:575), upon what grounds can we distinguish between, or develop a critique of, the security-seeking practices of particular states - and why would we bother? Radical anti-statism evinces ,

secondly, a preference for social and political criticism over social and political reconstruction . It favours a politics that privileges the monitoring,

exposure and critique of the sys- tematic biases of state power {as, for instance, in the indefatigable efforts of the British-based NGO Statewatch), one that implicitly or expressly holds that 'security' is so stained by its uncivil association with the (military and police) state that the only available radical strat- egy is to destabilize the term itself, while contesting the practices that are

enacted under its name (Dalby 1997: 6; see, also, Dillon 1996: ch. 1). There can, from this vantage point, be no progressive democratic

politics aimed at civilizing security. Rather, one is left with a politics of critique, and a failure of political imagination, that leaves radically underspecified the feasible or desirable alternatives to current institutional configurations and practices, or else merely gestures towards the possibility of transcendent forms of

non-state communal ordering - as in George Rikagos's (2002: 150) claim that 'the only real alternatives to current policing practices are pre-capitalist, non-commodified security arrangements'. Finally, one finds what we think of

as a one-sided appraisal of the sources of inequality and insecurity in the world today. This leftist anti- statist sensibility tends, in the ways we have demonstrated, towards an account of social injustice that views it as the product of the state's malign and coercive interventions rather than of its impotence and neglect. Here one finds a curious parallel with the neo-liberalism con- sidered in the last chapter - the state remains the problem. But one also encounters a critique of security politics that views it as tied to the pro- duction of

authoritarian government - as if security is in some essential fashion inimical to democracy and human rights. Here the radical critic begins to inhabit similar ground to that occupied by what we characterized in chapter 1 as the 'security lobby'. They assess the landscape very differently

and commit to diametrically opposed political purposes. But they cling commonly and tenaciously to the belief that security stands opposed to liberty. Our aim, in part II, is to move beyond these positions and opposi- tions: first, by retrieving the idea of security as a public good that is axiomatic both to the production of other goods (most directly, liberty) and to the constitution of democratic political communities; second, by arguing that the production of this good demands not the wholesale critique and transcendence of state forms, but more robust regulatory interventions by democratized state institutions. We must first, however, factor into our positive case two further critiques of the state, starting with

the claim that it is a cultural monolith.

K of security is too totalizing—not everything is a violent enframing and seeking to reprogram methods of representation from the outside is less effective than internal institutional reform. Nunes, Warwick international studies professor, 2012

(Joao, “Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies”, Security Dialogue, 43.4, SAGE

In the works of these authors, one can identify a tendency to see security as inherently connected to exclusion, totalization and even violence. The idea of a ‘logic’ of security is now widely present in the critical security studies literature. Claudia Aradau (2008: 72), for example, writes of an ‘exclusionary logic of security’ underpinning and legitimizing ‘forms of domination’. Rens van Munster (2007: 239) assumes a ‘logic of security’, predicated upon a ‘political organization on the exclusionary basis of fear’. Laura Shepherd (2008: 70) also identifies a liberal and highly

problematic ‘organizational logic’ in security. Although there would probably be disagreement over the degree to which this logic is inescapable, it is symptomatic of an overwhelmingly pessimistic outlook that a great number of critical scholars are now making the case for moving away from security. The normative preference for desecuritization has been picked up in attempts to contest, resist and ‘unmake’ security (Aradau, 2004; Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 2007). For these contributions, security cannot be reconstructed and political transformation can only be brought about when security and

its logic are removed from the equation (Aradau, 2008; Van Munster, 2009; Peoples, 2011). This tendency in the literature is problematic for the

critique of security in at least three ways. First, it constitutes a blind spot in the effort of politicization. The assumption of an exclusionary, totalizing or violent logic of security can be seen as an essentialization and a moment of closure . To be faithful to itself, the politicization of security would need to recognize that there is nothing natural or necessary about security – and that security as a paradigm

of thought or a register of meaning is also a construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance through practice. The exclusionary and violent meanings that have been attached to security are themselves the result of social and historical processes,

and can thus be changed . Second, the institution of this apolitical realm runs counter to the purposes of critique by foreclosing an engagement with the different ways in which security may be constructed. As Matt McDonald (2012) has argued, because security means different things for different people, one

must always understand it in context . Assuming from the start that security implies the narrowing of choice and the empowerment of an elite forecloses the acknowledgment of security claims that may seek to achieve exactly the opposite: alternative possibilities in an already narrow debate and the contestation of

elite power.5 In connection to this, the claims to insecurity put forward by individuals and groups run the risk of being neglected if the desire to be more secure is identified with a compulsion towards totalization, and if aspirations to a life with a degree of predictability are identified with violence. Finally, this tendency blunts critical security studies as a resource for practical politics . By overlooking the possibility of reconsidering security from within – opting instead for its replacement with other ideals – the critical field weakens its capacity to confront head-on the exceptionalist connotations that security has acquired in policymaking circles. Critical scholars run the risk of playing into this agenda when they tie security to

exclusionary and violent practices, thereby failing to question security actors as they take those views for granted and act as if they were inevitable. Overall, security is just too important – both as a concept and as a political instrument – to be simply abandoned by critical scholars. As McDonald (2012: 163) has put it, If security is politically powerful, is the foundation of political legitimacy for a range of actors, and involves the articulation of our core values and the means of their protection, we cannot afford to allow dominant discourses of security to be confused

with the essence of security itself. In sum, the trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations . The politicization of security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security ideas and practices; however, it has

paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the meaning of security itself. By foreclosing the possibility of alternative notions of security, this imbalanced politicization weakens the analytical capacity of critical security studies, undermines its ability to function as a political resource and runs the risk of being politically counterproductive . Seeking to address these limitations, the next section revisits emancipatory understandings of security.

Objective Conditions First – 2ACThe alt doesn’t change the framework states operate within – that takes out all of their root cause claims, external impacts, and justifies our epistemology – their heuristic makes war and structural violence more likely de Araujo, professor for Ethics at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 14

(Marcelo, “Moral Enhancement and Political Realism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(2): 29-43)

Some moral enhancement theorists argue that a society of morally enhanced individuals would be in a better position to cope with important problems that humankind is likely to face in the future such as, for instance, the

threats posed by climate change , grand scale terrorist attacks , or the risk of catastrophic wars. The assumption here is quite

simple: our inability to cope successfully with these problems stems mainly from a sort of deficit in human beings’ moral motivation . If human beings were morally better – if we had enhanced moral dispositions – there would be fewer wars, less terrorism , and more willingness to save our environment . Although simple and attractive,

this assumption is , as I intend to show, false . At the root of threats to the survival of humankind in the future is not a deficit in our moral dispositions, but the endurance of an old political arrangement that prevents the pursuit of shared goals on a collective basis. The political arrangement I have in mind here is the international system of states. In my analysis of the political implications of moral enhancement, I intend to concentrate my attention only on the supposition that we could avoid major wars in the future by making individuals morally better. I do not intend to discuss the threats posed by climate change, or by terrorism, although some human enhancement theorists also seek to cover these topics. I will explain, in the course of my analysis, a conceptual distinction between “human nature realism” and “structural realism,” well-known in the field of international relations theory. Thomas Douglas seems to have been among the first to explore the idea of “moral enhancement” as a new form of human enhancement. He certainly helped to kick off the current phase of the debate. In a paper published in 2008, Douglas suggests that in the “future people might use biomedical technology to morally enhance themselves.” Douglas characterizes moral enhancement in terms of the acquisition of “morally better motives” (Douglas 2008, 229). Mark Walker, in a paper published in 2009, suggests a similar idea. He characterizes moral enhancement in terms of improved moral dispositions or “genetic virtues”: The Genetic Virtue Program (GVP) is a proposal for influencing our moral nature through biology, that is, it is an alternate yet complementary means by which ethics and ethicists might contribute to the task of making our lives and world a better place. The basic idea is simple enough: genes influence human behavior, so altering the genes of individuals may alter the influence genes exert on behavior. (Walker 2009, 27–28) Walker does not argue in favor of any specific moral theory, such as, for instance, virtue ethics. Whether one endorses a deontological or a utilitarian approach to ethics, he argues, the concept of virtue is relevant to the extent that virtues motivate us either to do the right thing or to maximize the good (Walker 2009, 35). Moral enhancement theory, however, does not reduce the ethical debate to the problem of moral dispositions. Morality also concerns, to a large extent, questions about reasons for action. And moral enhancement, most certainly, will not improve our moral beliefs; neither could it be used to settle moral disagreements. This seems to have led some authors to criticize the moral enhancement idea on the ground that it neglects the cognitive side of our moral behavior. Robert Sparrow, for instance, argues that, from a Kantian point of view, moral enhancement would have to provide us with better moral beliefs rather than enhanced moral motivation (Sparrow 2014, 25; see also Agar 2010, 74). Yet, it seems to me that this objection misses the point

of the moral enhancement idea. Many people, across different countries, already share moral beliefs relating, for instance,

to the wrongness of harming or killing other people arbitrarily, or to the moral requirement to help people in need. They may share moral beliefs while not sharing the same reasons for these beliefs, or perhaps even not being able to articulate the beliefs in the conceptual framework of a moral theory (Blackford 2010, 83). But although they share some moral beliefs, in some circumstances they may lack the appropriate motivation to act accordingly. Moral enhancement, thus, aims at improving moral motivation, and leaves open the question as to how to improve our moral judgments. In a recent paper, published in The Journal of Medical Ethics, neuroscientist Molly Crockett reports the state of the art in the still very embryonic field of moral enhancement. She points out, for example, that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) citalopram seems to increase harm aversion. There is, moreover, some evidence that this substance may be effective in the treatment of specific types of aggressive behavior. Like Douglas, Crockett emphasizes that moral enhancement should aim at individuals’ moral motives (Crockett 2014; see also Spence 2008; Terbeck et al. 2013). Another substance that is frequently mentioned in the moral enhancement

literature is oxytocin. Some studies suggest that willingness to cooperate with other people,and to trust unknown prospective

cooperators, may be enhanced by an increase in the levels of oxytocin in the organism (Zak 2008, 2011; Zak and Kugler 2011; Persson and Savulescu 2012, 118–119). Oxytocin has also been reported to be “associated with the subjective experience of empathy” (Zak 2011, 55; Zak and Kugler 2011, 144). The question I would like to examine now concerns the supposition that moral enhancement – comprehended in these terms and assuming for the sake of argument that, some day, it might become effective and safe –

may also help us in coping with the threat of devastating wars in the future. The assumption that there is a relationship between, on the one

hand, threats to the survival of humankind and, on the other, a sort of “deficit” in our moral dispositions is clearly

made by some moral enhancements theorists. Douglas, for instance, argues that “according to many plausible theories, some of the world’s most important problems — such as developing world poverty, climate change and war — can be attributed to these moral deficits” (2008, 230). Walker, in a similar vein, writes about the possibility of “using biotechnology to alter our biological natures in an effort to reduce evil in the world” (2009, 29). And Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson go as far as to defend the “the need for moral enhancement” of humankind in a series of articles, and in a book published in 2012. One of the reasons Savulescu and Persson advance for the moral enhancement of humankind is that our moral dispositions seem to have remained basically unchanged over the last millennia (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 2). These dispositions have proved thus far quite useful for the survival of human beings as a species. They have enabled us to cooperate with each other in the collective production of things such as food, shelter, tools, and farming. They have also played a crucial role in the creation and refinement of a variety of human institutions such as settlements, villages, and laws. Although the possibility of free-riding has never been fully eradicated, the benefits provided by cooperation have largely exceeded the disadvantages of our having to deal with occasional uncooperative or untrustworthy individuals (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 39). The problem, however, is that the same dispositions that have enabled human beings in the past to engage in the collective production of so many artifacts and institutions now seem powerless in the face of the human capacity to destroy other human beings on a grand scale, or perhaps even to annihilate the entire human species. There is, according to Savulescu and Persson, a “mismatch” between our cognitive faculties and our evolved moral attitudes: “[…] as we have repeatedly stressed, owing to the progress of science, the range of our powers of action has widely outgrown the range of our spontaneous moral attitudes, and created a dangerous mismatch” (Persson and Savulescu 2012, 103; see also Persson and Savulescu 2010, 660; Persson and Savulescu 2011b; DeGrazie 2012, 2; Rakić 2014, 2). This worry about the mismatch between, on the one hand, the modern technological capacity to destroy and, on the other, our limited moral commitments is not new. The political philosopher Hans Morgenthau, best known for his defense of political realism, called attention to the same problem nearly fifty years ago. In the

wake of the first successful tests with thermonuclear bombs, conducted by the USA and the former Soviet Union, Morgenthau referred to the “contrast” between the technological progress of our age and our feeble moral attitudes as one of the most disturbing dilemmas of our time: The first dilemma consists in the contrast between the technological unification of the world and the parochial moral commitments and political institutions of the age. Moral commitments and political institutions, dating from an age which modern technology has left behind, have not kept pace with technological achievements and, hence, are incapable of controlling their destructive potentialities. (Morgenthau 1962, 174) Moral enhancement theorists and political realists like Morgenthau, therefore, share the thesis that our natural moral dispositions are not strong enough to prevent human beings from endangering their own existence as a species. But they differ as to the best way out of this quandary: moral enhancement theorists argue for the re-engineering of our moral dispositions, whereas Morgenthau accepted the immutability of human nature and argued, instead, for the re-engineering of world politics. Both positions, as I intend to show, are wrong in assuming that the “dilemma” results from the weakness of our

spontaneous moral dispositions in the face of the unprecedented technological achievements of our time. On the other hand, both positions are correct in recognizing the real possibility of global catastrophes resulting from the malevolent use of, for instance, biotechnology or nuclear capabilities. The supposition that individuals’ unwillingness to cooperate with each other, even when they would

be better-off by choosing to cooperate, results from a sort of deficit of dispositions such as altruism, empathy, and benevolence has been at the core of some important political theories. This idea is an important assumption in the works of early modern political realists such as Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. It was also later endorsed by some well-known authors writing about the origins of war in the first half of the twentieth century. It was then believed, as Sigmund Freud suggested in a text from 1932, that the main cause of wars is a human tendency to “hatred

and destruction” (in German: ein Trieb zum Hassen und Vernichtung). Freud went as far as to suggest that human beings have an ingrained “inclination” to “aggression” and “destruction” (Aggressionstrieb, Aggressionsneigung, and Destruktionstrieb), and that this

inclination has a “good biological basis” (biologisch wohl begründet) (Freud 1999, 20–24; see also Freud 1950; Forbes 1984; Pick 1993, 211–227; Medoff 2009). The attempt to employ Freud’s conception of human nature in understanding international relations has recently been resumed, for instance by Kurt Jacobsen in a paper entitled “Why Freud Matters: Psychoanalysis and International Relations Revisited,” published in 2013. Morgenthau himself was deeply influenced by Freud’s speculations on the origins of war.1 Early in the 1930s, Morgenthau wrote an essay called “On the Origin of the Political from the Nature of Human Beings” (Über die Herkunft des Politischen aus dem Wesen des Menschen), which contains several references to Freud’s theory about the human propensity to aggression.2 Morgenthau’s most influential book, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, first published in 1948 and then successively revised and edited, is still considered a landmark work in the tradition of political realism. According to Morgenthau, politics is governed by laws that have their origin in human nature: “Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature” (Morgenthau 2006, 4). Just like human enhancement theorists, Morgenthau also takes for granted that human nature has not changed over recent millennia: “Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover these laws” (Morgenthau 2006, 4). And since, for Morgenthau, human nature prompts human beings to act selfishly, rather than cooperatively, political leaders will sometimes favor conflict over cooperation, unless some superior power compels them to act otherwise. Now, this is exactly what happens in the domain of international relations. For in the international sphere there is not a supranational institution with the real power to prevent states from pursuing means of self-defense. The acquisition of means of self-defense, however, is frequently perceived by other states as a threat to their own security. This leads to the security dilemma and the possibility of war. As Morgenthau put the problem in an article published in 1967: “The actions of states are determined not by moral principles and legal commitments but by considerations of interest and power” (1967, 3). Because Morgenthau and early modern political philosophers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes defended political realism on the grounds provided by a specific conception human nature, their version of political realism has been frequently called “human nature realism.” The literature on human nature realism has become quite extensive (Speer 1968; Booth 1991; Freyberg-Inan 2003; Kaufman 2006; Molloy 2006, 82–85; Craig 2007; Scheuerman 2007, 2010, 2012; Schuett 2007; Neascu 2009; Behr 2010, 210–225; Brown 2011; Jütersonke 2012). It is not my intention here to present a fully-fledged account of the tradition of human nature realism, but rather to emphasize the extent to which some moral enhancement theorists, in their description of some of the gloomy scenarios humankind is likely to face in the future, implicitly endorse this kind of political realism. Indeed, like human nature realists, moral enhancement theorists assume that human nature has not changed over the last millennia, and that violence and lack of cooperation in the international sphere result chiefly from human nature’s limited inclination to pursue morally desirable goals. One may, of course, criticize the human enhancement project by rejecting the assumption that conflict and violence in the international domain should be explained by means of a theory about human nature. In a

reply to Savulescu and Persson, Sparrow correctly argues that “structural issues,” rather than human nature , constitute the main factor underlying political conflicts (Sparrow 2014, 29). But he does not explain what exactly these “structural issues” are, as I intend to do later. Sparrow is right in rejecting the human nature theory underlying the human enhancement project. But this underlying assumption, in my view, is not trivially false or simply “ludicrous,” as he suggests. Human nature realism has been implicitly or explicitly endorsed by leading political philosophers ever since Thucydides speculated on the origins of war in antiquity (Freyberg-Inan 2003, 23–36). True, it might be objected that “human nature realism,” as it was defended by Morgenthau and earlier political philosophers, relied upon a metaphysical or psychoanalytical conception of human nature, a conception that, actually, did not have the support of any serious scientific investigation (Smith 1983, 167). Yet, over the last few years there has been much empirical research in fields such as developmental psychology and evolutionary biology that apparently gives some support to the realist claim. Some of these studies suggest that an inclination to aggression and conflict has its origins in our evolutionary history. This idea, then, has recently led some authors to resume “human nature realism” on new foundations, devoid of the metaphysical assumptions of the early realists, and entirely grounded in empirical research. Indeed, some recent works in the field of international relations theory already seek to call attention to evolutionary biology as a possible new start for political realism. This point is clearly made, for instance, by Bradley Thayer, who published in 2004 a book called Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. And in a paper published in 2000, he affirms the following: Evolutionary theory provides a stronger foundation for realism because it is based on science, not on theology or metaphysics. I use the theory to explain two human traits: egoism and domination. I submit that the egoistic and dominating behavior of individuals, which is commonly described as “realist,” is a product of the evolutionary process. I focus on these two traits because they are critical components of any realist argument in explaining international politics. (Thayer 2000, 125; see also Thayer 2004) Thayer basically argues that a tendency to egoism and domination stems from human evolutionary history. The predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of international politics, he argues, is a reflex of dispositions that can now be proved to be part of our evolved human nature in a way that Morgenthau and other earlier political philosophers could not have established in their own time. Now, what some moral enhancement theorists propose is a direct intervention in our “evolved limited moral psychology” as a means to make us “fit” to cope with some possible devastating consequences from the predominance of conflict and competition in the domain of international politics (Persson and Savulescu 2010, 664). Moral enhancement theorists comprehend the nature of war and conflicts, especially those conflicts that humankind is likely to face in the future, as the result of human beings’ limited moral motivations. Compared to supporters of human nature realism, however, moral enhancement theorists are less skeptical about the prospect of our taming human beings’ proclivity to do evil. For our knowledge in fields such as neurology and pharmacology does already enable us to enhance people’s

performance in a variety of activities, and there seems to be no reason to assume it will not enable us to enhance people morally in the future. But the question, of course, is

whether moral enhancement will also improve the prospect of our coping successfully with some major threats to

the survival of humankind , as Savulescu and Persson propose, or to reduce evil in the world , as proposed by Walker. V. The point to which I would

next like to call attention is that “human nature realism” – which is implicitly presupposed by some moral enhancement theorists – has been much criticized over the last decades within the tradition of political realism itself. “Structural realism,” unlike “human nature realism,” does not seek to derive a theory about conflicts and violence in the context of international relations from a theory of the moral shortcomings of human nature. Structural realism was originally proposed by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State and War, published in 1959, and then later in another book called Theory of International Politics, published in 1979. In both works, Waltz seeks to avoid committing himself to any specific conception of human nature (Waltz 2001, x–xi). Waltz’s thesis is that the thrust of the political realism doctrine can be retained without our having to commit ourselves to any theory about the shortcomings of human nature. What is relevant for our understanding of international politics is, instead, our understanding of the “structure” of the international system of states (Waltz 1986). John Mearsheimer, too, is an important contemporary advocate of political realism. Although he seeks to distance himself from some ideas defended by Waltz, he also rejects human nature realism and, like Waltz, refers to himself

as a supporter of “structural realism” (Mearsheimer 2001, 20). One of the basic tenets of political realism (whether “human nature realism” or “structural realism”) is, first, that the states are the main, if not the only, relevant actors in the context of international relations; and second, that states compete for power in the

international arena. Moral considerations in international affairs, according to realists, are secondary when set against the state’s primary goal, namely its own security and survival . But while human nature realists such as Morgenthau explain the struggle for power as a result of

human beings’ natural inclinations, structural realists like Waltz and Mearsheimer argue that conflicts in the international arena do not stem from human nature, but from the very “structure”

of the international system of states (Mearsheimer 2001, 18). According to Waltz and Mearsheimer, it is this structure that compels individuals to act as they do in the domain of international affairs. And one distinguishing feature of the international system of states is its “anarchical structure,” i.e. the lack of a central government analogous to the central governments that exist in the context of domestic politics. It means that each individual state is responsible for its own integrity and survival . In the absence of a superior authority, over and above the power of each sovereign state, political leaders often feel compelled to favor security over morality , even if, all other things being considered, they would naturally be more inclined to trust and to cooperate with political leaders of other states. On the other hand, when

political leaders do trust and cooperate with other states, it is not necessarily their benevolent nature that motivates them to be cooperative and trustworthy, but, again, it is the structure of the system of states that compels them. The concept of human nature, as we can see, does not play a decisive role here. Because Waltz and Mearsheimer depart from “human nature realism,”

their version of political realism has also sometimes been called “neo-realism” (Booth 1991, 533). Thus, even if human beings turn out to become morally enhanced in the future, humankind may still have to face the same scary scenarios described by some moral

enhancement theorists. This is likely to happen if, indeed, human beings remain compelled to cooperate within the present structure of the system of states. Consider, for instance, the incident with a Norwegian weather rocket in January 1995. Russian radars detected a missile that was initially suspected of being on its way to reach Moscow in five minutes. All levels of Russian military defense were immediately put on alert for a possible imminent attack and massive retaliation. It is reported that for the first time in history a Russian president had before him, ready to be used, the “nuclear briefcase” from which the permission to launch nuclear weapons is issued. And that happened when the Cold War was already supposed to be over! In the event, it was realized that the rocket was leaving Russian territory and Boris Yeltsin did not have to enter the history books as the

man who started the third world war by mistake (Cirincione 2008, 382).3 But under the crushing pressure of having to decide in such a short time, and on the basis of unreliable information, whether or not to retaliate, even a morally enhanced Yeltsin might have given orders to launch a devastating nuclear response – and that in spite of strong moral dispositions to the contrary. Writing for The Guardian on the basis of recently declassified documents, Rupert Myers reports further incidents

similar to the one of 1995. He suggests that as more states strive to acquire nuclear capability, the danger of a major nuclear accident is likely to increase (Myers 2014). What has to be changed, therefore, is not human moral dispositions, but the very structure of the political international system of states within which we currently live. As far as major threats to the survival of humankind are concerned, moral enhancement might play an important role in the

future only to the extent that it will help humankind to change the structure of the system of states. While moral enhancement may possibly have desirable results in some

areas of human cooperation that do not badly threaten our security – such as donating food, medicine, and money to poorer countries – it will not motivate political leaders to dismantle their nuclear weapons . Neither will it deter other political leaders from pursuing nuclear capability, at any rate not as long as the structure of international politics compels them to see prospective cooperators in the present as possible enemies in the future. The idea of a “structure” should not be understood

here in metaphysical terms, as though it mysteriously existed in a transcendent world and had the magical power of determining leaders’ decisions in this world. The word “structure” denotes

merely a political arrangement in which there are no powerful law-enforcing institutions. And in the absence of the kind of security that law-enforcing institutions have the force to create, political leaders will often fail to cooperate, and occasionally

engage in conflicts and wars, in those areas that are critical to their security and survival. Given the structure of international politics and

the basic goal of survival, this is likely to continue to happen, even if, in the future, political leaders become less egoistic and power-seeking through moral enhancement. On the other hand, since the structure of the international system of states is itself another human institution, there is no reason to

suppose that it cannot ever be changed. If people become morally enhanced in the future they may possibly feel more strongly motivated to change the structure of the system of states, or

perhaps even feel inclined to abolish it altogether. In my view, however, addressing major threats to the survival of humankind in the future by means of bioengineering is unlikely to yield the expected results , so long as moral enhancement is pursued within the present framework of the international system of states.

Case First – 2AC Case disproves the critique – the alts normative ethical vision for IR is unattainable and gets coopted. Managing insecurity through the plan is better than the alt – AND only evaluate link args if they win alt solvency Chandler, IR Prof @ University of Westminster, 13

(David, “No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies,” Critical Studies on Security, 2013 Vol. 1, No. 1, 46–63)

We would argue that the removal of the prefix ‘critical’ would also be useful to distinguish security study based on critique of the world as it exists from normative theorising based on the world as we would like it to be. As long as we keep the ‘critical’ nomenclature, we are affirming

that government and international policy-making can be understood and critiqued against the goal of emancipating the non-Western Other. Judging policy-making and policy outcomes, on the basis of this imputed goal , may provide ‘critical’ theorists with endless possibilities to demonstrate their normative standpoints but it does little to develop academic and political understandings of the world we live in. In fact, no greater straw [person] man

could have been imagined, than the ability to become ‘critical’ on the basis of debates around the claim that the West was now capable of undertaking emancipatory policy missions . Today, as we witness a narrowing of transformative aspirations on behalf of Western policy elites, in a reaction against the ‘hubris’ of the claims of the 1990s (Mayall and Soares de Oliveira 2012) and a slimmed down approach to sustainable, ‘hybrid’ peacebuilding, CSS has again renewed its relationship with the policy sphere. Some academics and policy-makers now have a united front that rather than placing emancipation at the heart of policy-making it should be ‘ local knowledge’ and ‘local demands’. The double irony of the birth and death of CSS is not only that CSS has come full circle – from its liberal teleological universalist and emancipatory claims , in the 1990s, to its discourses of limits and flatter ontologies ,

highlighting differences and pluralities in the 2010s – but that this ‘critical’ approach to security has also mirrored and

mimicked the policy discourses of leading Western powers. As policy-makers now look for excuses to explain the

failures of the promise of liberal interventionism, critical security theorists are on hand to salve Western consciences with analyses of non-linearity , complexity and human and non-human assemblages. It appears that the world cannot be transformed after all. We cannot end conflict or insecurity , merely attempt to manage them. Once critique becomes anti-critique (Noys 2011) and emancipatory alternatives are seen to be merely expressions of liberal hubris, the appendage of ‘critical’ for arguments that discount the possibility of transforming the world and stake no claims which are unamenable to power or distinct from dominant philosophical understandings is highly problematic . Let us study security, its discourses and its practices, by all means but please let us not pretend that study is somehow the same as critique.

Ontolgoical Security – 2ACAlternative would undermine the ontological security of international actors---this loss would be compensated by new securitization and nullify the alternative. Rumelili, Koc IR professor, 2011

(Bahar, “Identity And Desecuritization: Possibilities And Limits”, 1-14, online pdf)

The two layered conception of security alerts us to the fact that transformed security relations cannot be solely predicated on an erasure of difference between self and other because it would be undermining ontological security, which derives from the stability of the self/other relationship. Wendt, Aradau, and Huysmans are, in different

ways, suggesting desecuritization strategies that would be undermining of security-as-being. In order to resist the construction of the other as a threat to survival, the other does not have to cease through assimilation in a broader conception of self, disidentification or fragmentation. To the contrary, such reconfigurations of self/other relations challenge the stability of self/other distinctions, and hence generate ontological insecurity . Ontological insecurity refers to a state of disruption where the self has lost its anchor for the definition of its identity. It arises when the self loses its ability to distinguish itself from significant others, and have those distinctions socially accepted and validated. This uncertainty of being may be generated by a host of factors. As shown in the diagram below, these include desecuritization processes that are based on the negation and elimination of the constitutive differences between self

and other. In other words, if the removal of concerns that the other constitutes a physical threat to self is generated or simply accompanied by representations that undermine the constitutive differences between self and other, a state of ontological insecurity arises. A state of ontological insecurity compels the self to engage in practices that reinstitute the identity distinctions that would ensure the certainty and stability of its being. If the freedom to constitute a distinct self is challenged, greater is the possibility that this insecurity at the layer of being will be compensated by securitization, the construction of the other as a threat to survival. As a result, processes of desecuritization that undermine the ontological security of the self are likely to be unsustainable, and counter-acted by practices of either re-securitizing the self/other relationship which was desecuritized in the first place or constructing another significant other to be securitized.

Ontolgoical Security – 1AR

The alternative assumes problematic state practices are the result of deliberate rationality—rather they are the result of routinized practices that exist prior to cognition in the pursuit of ontological security. Mitzen, Ohio State political science professor, 2006

(Jennifer, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma”, European Journal of International Relations, 12.3, proquest)

Ontological security is security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice.5 To say that individuals need security of this self is to say that their understandings of it must be relatively stable. Needing stability does not mean that selfunderstandings must be forever unchanging; indeed such

changes are essential for learning and personal development. The idea is rather that individuals value their sense of personal continuity because it underwrites their capacity for agency. A crucial requirement of a stable self-understanding is that one's actions can sustain it over time. The consequences of action will always either reproduce or contradict identities, and since identity motivates action its stability over time depends on it being supported in practice. Another way to say this is that identity is a dynamic process from which action flows and in turn sustains identity. Of course, there are many ways to be agentic, including choosing rationally, matching appropriately, or varying a performative act. The application of ontological security to these differing conceptions is at this point unclear. However, since my goal is to engage realist IR theory, which treats states as rational actors, I develop

the concept of ontological security with respect to rational agency (this also is broadly consistent with Giddens' focus). Rational agents make purposive choices in consequentialist terms, weighing alternatives and directing action toward a set of internally consistent ends. In most IR scholarship this capacity is taken-for-granted. The concept of ontological security allows us to see rational agency instead as an effect of practices. Specifically, the claim that ontological security is a basic need begins with the proposition that actors fear deep uncertainty as an identity threat. Such uncertainty can make it difficult to act, which frustrates the action-identity dynamic and makes it difficult

to sustain a self-conception. Ontological insecurity refers to the deep, incapacitating state of not knowing which dangers to confront and which to ignore, i.e. how to get by in the world. When there is ontological insecurity, the individual's energy is consumed meeting immediate needs. She cannot relate ends systematically to means in the present, much less plan ahead. In short, she cannot realize a sense of agency. Ontological security, in contrast, is the condition that obtains when an individual has confident expectations, even if probabilistic, about the meansends relationships that govern her social life. Armed with ontological security, the individual will know how to act and therefore how to be herself.

Normally, we do not consider uncertainty as posing a problem for action, much less identity. From a rationalist perspective, faced with uncertainty actors will assign probabilities and maximize their expected utility. They then update probabilities in a Bayesian fashion, i.e. by adjusting their initial beliefs about the relative plausibility of an event in light of new evidence, making optimal use of all available information available (Morrow, 1994: Ch.

6). This model has the demanding preconditions that actors must know, at least probabilistically, the alternative courses of action, the causal relationship between action and outcomes, and the consequences of possible outcomes (March, 1999: 14-15; Morrow, 1994). Most rationalist theory assumes that this knowledge is either relatively easy to come by or that actors can compensate for its absence rather unproblematically. Decision-makers might have different understandings of causal relationships or states of the world, which means they could have different probability distributions over likely outcomes (for example, reasonable people in the US disagree about the threat posed by China). But despite subjective differences the theory assumes that actors always have sufficient knowledge to assign

probabilities and act rationally. However, this assumes that the actor has confidence in the fundamental cognitive stability of her environment, and such confidence is not automatic. Everyday life is so full of potential dangers that individuals cannot possibly process them all. Threats are both physical - your neighbor might attack, a tornado might

strike - and social - you might be fired, your spouse might leave you. Moreover, novel or infrequent events are simply impossible to know in advance. Some theorists call these latter cases, situations where assigning probabilities is impossible, 'hard' or 'fundamental' uncertainty (Knight, 1971(1921); Ellsberg, 1961).6 Hard

uncertainty reduces -objectively - the confidence actors can have in probability assignments. Pulling these points together, Giddens (1991: 36) argues that all social actors intrinsically know that behind the routines of daily life, 'chaos lurks'. Constant awareness of such chaos would generate tremendous anxiety, making it extremely difficult to reconcile competing threats and take any action at all. Even if an actor could imagine every possible contingency, the attempt to hold all threats at bay would be exhausting. Knowing she cannot possibly

imagine the universe of contingencies only compounds the anxiety, paralyzing any remaining capacity to act. In order to be themselves and to act, therefore, individuals need to bring uncertainty within tolerable limits, to feel confident that their environment will be predictably reproduced. Importantly, this confidence is independent of the objective level of uncertainty, which might remain high. It is an internal, subjective property. Routines and

Basic Trust Ontological security-seeking is the drive to minimize hard uncertainty by imposing cognitive order on the environment. Actors do this by developing a cognitive 'cocoon' that 'bracket(s) on the level of practice [knowledge of the] possible events which could threaten the bodily or psychological integrity of the agent' (Giddens, 1991: 39, 40). Because this cocoon enables actors to trust that their cognitive world will be reproduced, following

Giddens I call it an actor's basic trust system.7 Because actors cannot respond to all dangers at once, the capacity for agency depends on this system, which takes most questions off the table. Importantly, this happens outside the level of conscious choice. On a day-to-day basis identity is not 'held in mind'; actors concentrate on the 'task at hand' and the need to stabilize one's ends is cognitively set aside (Giddens, 1991: 36). That is, self-integration is maintained at the level of 'practical' consciousness while purposive

choice occurs at the level of 'discursive' consciousness. The mechanism generating basic trust is routinization , which regularizes social life, making it, and the self, knowable. Routines are internally programmed cognitive and behavioral responses to information or stimuli. Some are strictly

personal,8 but social relationships are an important source of routinization. Whether personal or social, by definition routinized responses are unthinking or habitual - options are not weighed; information is not updated . Unlike rational action, in short, which implies a conscious decision to do A but not B, routines are not chosen in any meaningful sense, but taken-for-granted; reflection is suppressed (March, 1999: Ch. 5). In fact, this suppression is the source of their security-generating power. By giving actors automatic responses to stimuli, routines pacify the cognitive environment, bounding the arena of deliberative choice.

Routines thus serve the cognitive function of providing individuals with ways of knowing the world and how to act, giving them a felt certainty that enables purposive choice. They also serve the important emotional function of 'inoculating' individuals against the paralytic, deep fear of chaos. Attachment and Recognition Because routines sustain identity, actors become attached to them. Individuals like to feel they have agency and become attached to

practices that make them feel agentic. Letting go of routines would amount to sacrificing that sense of agency, which is hard to do

Reps Focus Fails – 2AC

Focus on representations assumes deliberative rational subjects rather than time-pressured agents of routine which policymakers are—means the alt goes nowhere. Pouliot, Centre for International Peace and Security Studies director, 2008

(Vincent, “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities”, International Organization, Spring, ebsco)

The representational bias in modern thinking is reinforced by the logic of scientific practice and its institutional environment. In trying to see the world from a detached perspective, social scientists put themselves "in a state of social weightlessness." 18 Looking at the world from above and usually backwards in time

implies that one is not directly involved in social action and does not feel the same proximity and urgency as agents do. Contrary to practitioners, who act in and on the world, social scientists spend careers and lives thinking about ideas, deliberating about theories, and representing knowledge. As a result, they are enticed "to construe the world as a spectacle, as a set of significations to be interpreted rather than as concrete problems to be solved practically."19 The epistemological consequences of such a contemplative eye are tremendous: what scientists see from their ivory tower is often miles away from the practical logics enacted on the ground. For instance, what may appear to be the result of rational calculus in (academic) hindsight may just as well have derived from practical hunches under time pressure. This "ethnocentrism of the scientist"20 leads to substituting the practical relation to the world for the observer's (theoretical) relation to practice - or, to use Bourdieu's formula, "to take the model of reality for the reality of the model."21 To return to diplomacy, Kissinger, whose career spanned the divide between the academic and the policy worlds, concurs that "there is a vast difference between the

perspective of an analyst and that of a statesman The analyst can choose which problem he wishes to study, whereas the statesman's problems are imposed on him. The analyst can allot whatever time is necessary to come to a clear conclusion; the overwhelming challenge to the statesman is the pressure of time The analyst has available to him all the facts The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time that he is making them."22 As a result, diplomacy is an art not a science.23 It is a practice enacted in and on the world, in real time, and with actual consequences for the practitioner. As such, the practicality of diplomacy cannot be fully captured by detached, representational observation. From this perspective, the epitome of the representational bias is rational choice theory and its tendency to deduce from the enacted practice (opus operatum) its mode of operating (modus operandi). The problem is deeper than the well-known tautology of

revealed preferences. By mistaking the outcome of practice for its process, rational choice "project[s] into the minds of agents a (scholastic) vision of their practice that, paradoxically, it could only uncover because it methodically set aside the experience agents have of it."24 While social scientists have all the necessary time to rationalize action post hoc, agents are confronted with practical problems that they must urgently solve. One cannot reduce practice to the execution of a theoretical model . For one thing,

social action is not necessarily preceded by a premeditated design. A practice can be oriented toward a goal without being consciously informed by it. For another, in the heat of practice, hunches take precedence over rational calculations. In picturing practitioners in the image of the theorist, rational choice theory produces "a sort of monster with the head of the thinker thinking his practice in reflexive and logical fashion mounted on the body of a man of action engaged in action."25 In IR, the literature on the rational design of international institutions best exemplifies this representational bias.26 It is correct that states seek to mold international institutions to further their goals; but it does not follow that this design is instrumentally rational. The outcome of political struggles over institutions and the process of struggling over institutions follow two different logics - observational versus practical. One cannot impute to practitioners a theoretical perspective that is made possible by looking at social action backward and from

above. In IR, the representational bias is not the preserve of rational choice theory, however; most constructivist interpretations of rule-based behavior also fall victim to it. In March and Olsen's seminal formulation, the logic of appropriateness deals with norm- and rule-based action conceived "as a matching of a situation to the demands of a position."27 This definition, however, encompasses two distinct modes of social action.28O n the one hand, the logic of appropriateness deals with rules that are so profoundly internalized that they become taken for granted. On the other hand, the logic of appropriateness is a reflexive process whereby agents need to figure out what behavior is appropriate to a situation.29S ending calls these two possible interpretations "motivationally externalist" versus "motivationally internalist,"30a distinction that hinges on whether

agents reflect before putting a norm into practice. Problematically from a practice theory perspective, a vast majority of constructivist works fall in the former camp, according to which norm based actions stem from a process of reflexive cognition based either on instrumental calculations, reasoned persuasion, or the psychology of compliance. Here the representational bias shows very clearly. But even those few

constructivists who theorize appropriate action as non0reflexive assimilate it to the output of a structural logic of social action or a habit resulting from a process of reflexive internalization . Nowhere in these interpretations is there room for properly theorizing practical knowledge. Three main strands of constructivist research construe appropriateness as a motivationally externalist logic of social action. A first possibility is to introduce "thin" instrumental rationality in the context of a community, that is, a norm-rich environment. Keck and Sikkink's "boomerang model" is one of the best-known frameworks of this genre: state elites' compliance with transnational norms first comes through strategic calculations under normative pressure; only at a later stage do preferences change.31 Schimmelfennig's notion of rhetorical action— "the strategic use of norm-based arguments' —follows a similar logic of limited strategic action constrained by constitutive communitarian norms and rules. A second possibility is to conceive of appropriateness as a logic that relics on reasoned persuasion. Building on Habermas's theory of communicative action, several constructivists theorize that the "logic of arguing" leads actors to collectively deliberate "whether norms of appropriate behavior can be justified, and that norms apply under given circumstances."33 Other constructivists build on the notion of "social learning" to explain the workings of argumentative persuasion in social context.-*4 Finally, a third externalist interpretation of appropriate- ness emphasizes cognitive processes that take place at the level of the human mind. Relying on psychological notions such as the acceptability heuristic, omission bias, and images, Shannon argues that "[a]ctors must feel justified to violate a norm to satisfy themselves and the need for a positive self-image, by interpreting the norm and the situation in a way that makes them feel exempt."35 Overall, most constructivists construe appropriateness as a reflexive logic of action based on thin rationality, reasoned persuasion, or the psychology of compliance. Meanwhile, a few constructivists take the externalist route and prefer to emphasize the nondeliberative nature of the logic of appropriateness. Yet, even though this understanding seems better in tune with the practice turn advocated in this article, it fails to capture the practicality of social life because internalist constructivists construe appropriateness either as a structural logic devoid of agency or as a form of habituation that is reflexive in its earlier stages. To begin with the former, some constructivists claim that the internalist logic of appropriateness is plagued with a "structuralist bias" that renders it "untenable as a theory of individual action. In this account, the essence of agency rests with choice and the capacity to deliberate among options before acting: "If the [logic of appropriateness] is to be individualistic in structure, the individual actor must be left with a reasonable degree of choice (or agency)."^^ But this restrictive notion of agency seems unwarranted within the structurationist ontology that characterizes constructivism. Agency is not simply about "defying" structures by making choices independently of them. It is a matter of instantiating structures, old or new, in and through practice. Without practice, intersubjective realities would falter; thus agency (or the enactment of practice) is what makes social reality possible in the first place. In introducing contingency, agency need not be reflexive; and thoughtlessness does not logically imply structural determination. Taking a different tack, a number of constructivists equate the logic of appropriateness with the internalization of taken-for-granted norms. For instance, Checkel seeks to understand how norm compliance moves from "conscious instrumental calculation" to "taken-for-grantedness." In what he calls "type II socialization," agents switch "from following a logic of consequences to a logic of appropriateness."-'^ A similar view can be found in Wendt's discussion of internalization, from "First Degree" to "Third." This process essentially consists of certain practices getting "pushed into the shared cognitive background, becoming taken for granted rather than objects of calculation."^' Norms begin as explicit "ought to" prescriptions but progressively fade from consciousness and become taken-for-granted. Significantly, thus, this internalist interpretation remains embroiled in the representational bias that plagues externalism: the taken-for-granted knowledge that informs appropriateness necessarily begins as representational and conscious.

In distinguishing the "logic of habit" from that of appropriateness, Hopf comes closest to accounting for practical knowledge in IR. As he perceptively argues: "Significant features distinguish habitual action from normative compliance. Generally, norms have the form 'in circumstance X, you should do Y,' whereas habits have a general form more like 'in circumstance X, action Y follows'."""^ This all important distinction, upon which this article builds, represents a significant step toward a practice turn in IR theory. That said, this article seeks to fix three main limitations in Hopfs framework. First, it remains partly embroiled in an internalization scheme not so distant from Checkel's or Wendt's. In using the language of norm selection versus norm compliance, Hopf implies that the internalist logic of habit follows from the externalist logic of appropriateness. By contrast, this article theorizes practical knowledge as unreflexive and inarticulate through and through. Second, while both logics of habit and practicality build on past experiences, the latter does so contingently while the former is strictly iterative."*' Third, Hopf insists his is only a methodological distinction between the logic of habit and the logic of appropriateness, whicb entices researchers to look for evidence of norm compliance in the unsaid instead of explicit invocations.'*^ Though an important piece of methodological advice, this point falls short of granting practicality the full ontological status

it deserves in social theory. Before concluding this critique of IR literature, it is necessary to address the "stronger program" in IR constructivism located closer to postmodernism. By its very epistemological standpoint, postmodernism epitomizes the representational bias: detached from, and in fact indifferent to, the social urgency of practices, many postmodernists intellectualize discourse to the point of distorting its practical logic and meaning. In addition, postmodernist works often embody the "armchair analysis" that Neumann urges to overcome in taking a practice turn.'*-' Against this tendency, a number of

IR constructivists move closer to Foucault's conceptualization of discourse as practice.'*'* But several analyses still fall short of accounting for the practicality of discourse—that is, discourse as a practice enacted in and on the world. Fierke's works on "language games," for instance, usefully emphasize background knowledge but do not take the materiality of practices seriously.'*^

In a similar fashion, the Copenhagen school asserts that security is practice'**; but in restricting its focus to traditional discourse analysis, it evacuates the practical logics that make the securitizing discourse possible. Taking a practice turn promises to help overcome the representational bias in IR theory, whether rationalist, constructivist, or postmodernist.

Reps Focus Fail – 1AROur theory of practicality is verified via inter-disciplinary researchPouliot, Centre for International Peace and Security Studies director, 2008

(Vincent, “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities”, International Organization, Spring, ebsco)

The philosophical metaphysics of the practice turn find solid empirical support in the latest strands of psychological research.^' In his Nobel Prize lecture in 2002, Kahneman argues that there are "two generic modes of cognitive function: an intuitive mode in which judgments and decisions are made automatically and rapidly,

and a controlled mode, which is deliberate and slower."^ These two modes of cognition coexist and complement each other. But intuitive judgments are not mere perceptions although both are equally fast: contrary to the latter, the former "deal with concepts" and "can be evoked by language."^' Psychologists usually refer to these two ways of knowing as "System 1 " and "System 2."*"^ The theoretical revolution here regards automatic cognition: with the exception of the Freudian tradition, psychology has traditionally spent most of its attention on

conscious cognition. More recently, thanks to several experiments, psychologists have found "evidence from everyday life of the existence of an automatic, intuitive mode of information processing that operates by different rules from that of a rational mode."^^ From that perspective, cognition falls into two ideal-typical categories, as Table 2

shows. Though interactive. System 1 and System 2 present different characteristics. A form of cognitive unconscious. System 1 is "a fundamentally adaptive system that automatically, effortlessly, and intuitively organizes experience and directs behavior.'"'" Empirical data suggests that this is the natural mode of operation and that it is a lot more efficient than reflexive cognition . A pioneer in this strand of psychological theory, Reber builds on decades of empirical studies to

establish the pervasiveness of "implicit learning" in cognitive processes. As he argues: "Implicit learning is the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired."*^ Importantly, Reber insists, acting on the basis of such tacit knowledge does not make individuals irrational. Their practices, which are informed by past experiences and exposure to environmental demands, should rather be conceived as "arational,"^^ that is,

based on nonrepresentational knowledge and thought processes. Philosophical and psychological arguments in favor of a practice turn have spilled over to social sciences. For instance, D'Andrade's "cognitive anthropology" intends, among other things, to counter the representational bias in social theory. As he argues, "social scientists sometimes ascribe rules to the actor when it is only the actor's behavior that is being described. In many cases in which behavior is described as following rules,

there may be in fact no rules inside the actor."*' In sociology, Zerubavel emphasizes the social aspects of cognition as well as the tacit dimension of socialization, for instance, in the process of learning a language.*"^ In becoming

part of collectives, human beings learn how to think socially, a skill that rests on inarticulate knowledge first and foremost. It is a similar premise that gave birth to Garfinkel's ethnomethodology or to Giddens's structuration theory.6' More recently, a number of social theorists have advocated taking a "practice turn" in social theory.'" Among the theoretical innovations advanced is an attempt to overcome the

representational bias in sociological theorizing. The key argument put forward is that social action stems from practical logics that are fundamentally nonrepresentional. Practical logics cannot readily be verbalized or explicated by the agents themselves because "practice does not account for its own production and reproduction.""" In sociology, this theoretical strand has been best developed by Bourdieu, whose works comport the rare advantage of being systematically applied to various empirical investigations. In general, the rich concepts developed in Bourdieu's dozens of books and hundreds of articles serve no other purpose than their application—an approach in line with the notion of a practice turn. In IR, a handful of scholars have already demonstrated how Bourdieu's sociology could enrich one's understanding of security,''^ power,''^ integration,'''* or political economy." This article adds to this burgeoning literature by focusing on Bourdieu's attempt to reach at the inarticulate in social life—the huge body of background knowledge that every social being carries and uses constantly, if unconsciously, in daily practices. Many practices appear self-evident without having to reflect about them; how can that be? Bourdieu's conceptual triad of habitus, field, and practical sense offers a most useful apparatus to theorize the logic of practicality.

A2: Liberal Violence

Global liberal civil war is an ahistorical mythTeschke, Sussex IR professor, 2011

(Benno-Gerhard, “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory”, International Theory, https://historicalsociology.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/teschke-benno-2011-fatal-attraction-a-critique-of-carl-schmitts-international-political-and-legal-theory.pdf)

For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a

structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-

cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the

intensification and de-formalization of war in the international construction of liberal-constitutional states of law and the production of

liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt's ‘spaceless universalism’. In this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify Schmitt's long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and de-politicizations’ (Schmitt 1993). But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of a succession of confrontations between the carrier-nations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now . For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist heartland were grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence. For this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal-capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political–existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these

confrontations were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity. Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period.

For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt, Suharto's Indonesia, Pahlavi's Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's pre-intervention

Libya, to name but a few), which were and are actively managed and supported by the West as anti-liberal Schmittian states of emergency,

with concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical

stability and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested state-building projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies . If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is

‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/enemy groupings

and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories of analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles

around sovereign power and the eventual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in

others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These are conflicts within a world, which seem to push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’, which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American supremacy possible in the first place.

A2: Threat Con

Reps don’t cause warReiter 95 DAN REITER is a Professor of Political Science at Emory University and has been an Olin post-doctoral fellow in security studies at Harvard “Exploring the Powder Keg Myth” International Security v20 No2 Autumn 1995 pp 5-34 JSTORA criticism of assessing the frequency of preemptive wars by looking only at wars themselves is that this misses the non-events, that is, instances in which preemption would be predicted but did not occur. However, excluding non-events should bias the results in favor of finding that preemptive war is an important path to war, as the inclusion of non-events could only make it seem that the event was less frequent.

There fore, if preemptive wars seem infrequent within the set of wars alone, then this would have to be considered strong evidence in favor of the third, most skeptical view of preemptive war, because even when the sample is rigged to make preemptive wars seem frequent (by including only wars), they are still rare events. Below, a few cases in which preemption did not occur are discussed to illustrate factors that constrain preemption. The rarity of preemptive wars offers preliminary support for the third, most skeptical view, that the preemption scenario does not tell us much about how war breaks out. Closer examination of the three cases of preemption, set forth below, casts doubt on the validity of the two preemption hypotheses discussed earlier: that hostile images of the enemy increase the chances of preemption, and that belief in the dominance of the offense increases the chances of preemption. In each case

there are motives for war aside from fear of an imminent attack, indicating that such fears may not be sufficient to cause war. In addition, in these cases of war the two conditions hypothesized to stimulate preemption—hostile images of the adversary and belief in the military advantages of striking first—are present to a very high degree .

This implies that these are insubstantial causal forces , as they are associated with the outbreak of war only when they are

present to a very high degree. This reduces even further the significance of these forces as causes of war. To illustrate this point, consider an analogy: say there is a hypothesis that saccharin causes cancer. Discovering that rats who were fed a lot of saccharin and also received high levels of X-ray exposure, which we know causes cancer, had a higher risk for cancer does not, however, set

off alarm bells about the risks of saccharin. Though there might be a relationship between saccharin consumption and cancer, this is not demonstrated by the results of such a test.

Threat con isn’t sufficient to cause warStuart J Kaufman 9, Prof Poli Sci and IR – U Delaware, “Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case,” Security Studies 18:3, p. 433

Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly present, war occurs only if these factors are harnessed. Ethnic narratives and fears must combine to create significant ethnic hostility among mass publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to manipulate that hostility , evoking hostile narratives

and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of chauvinist mobilization . Such mobilization is often spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes of violence) that increase feelings of hostility and make chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side’s felt security needs threaten the security of the other side, the result is a security dilemma spiral of rising

fear, hostility, and mutual threat that results in violence. A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist logic explains why ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war. Even if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity exist, severe violence usually can still be avoided if ethnic elites skillfully define group needs in moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is consociationalism.17 War is likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist mobilization, and a security dilemma.

A2: Epistemology DA Prefer our epistemology – theirs reduces interests to ideas which is more reductionist than the AFF Kitchen, Deputy Director of the LSE IDEAS United States International Affairs Programme, 10

(Nicholas, “Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation,” Review of International Studies 36(1): pp. 117-143)

An alternative structural approach suffered the same difficulty in reverse. Social constructivism discards the rationalist, materialist philosophical assumptions of i nternational relations altogether to conclude that the very meaning of power and the content of interests are functions of ideas . 27 Although this approach has been

useful in establishing the importance of identities alongside interests in establishing durable expectations of behaviour between states,28 the epistemological basis of the constructivist approach is a form of structural idealism or ‘idea-ism’ that stands in direct opposition to the core claims of realism and many of the most basic assumptions of historical and political scholarship.29 This rejection of the rationalist ‘conceptual tool kit’30 leads to the same problem of reductionism of ideas and interests as realism suffers in mirror-image. Wendt’s claim that when IR scholars explain ‘state action by reference to interests, they are actually explaining it by reference to a certain kind of idea’ appears to deny that there are empirically knowable material facts per se. Similarly, if

material interests are actually explained by ideas, it is difficult to comprehend exactly how “the true ‘material base’ can still have independent effects’.31 If, as constructivism contends, ideas are ‘inextricably involved in the production of interests’32 it is futile to distinguish between the two. So although constructivism can help us understand that identities, norms and rules are endogenous to system structure, in doing so the distribution of material capabilities is regarded as an essentially exogenous factor. Where neorealism states that ideas don’t matter,

constructivism tells us that material capabilities aren’t important . The unavoidable conclusion is that

where structural realism reduced ideas to interests, social constructivism reduces interests to ideas .

Neither can capture the sense in which both ideas and interests play roles – sometimes competing,

sometimes complementary – in formulating the direction of states’ foreign policy and the structure of the international system .

Ideas don’t change foreign policy – their “epistemology” focus obscures the role institutions play in making particular ideologies hegemonic – link arguments overwhelm the alt

Kitchen, Deputy Director of the LSE IDEAS United States International Affairs Programme, 10

(Nicholas, “Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation,” Review of International Studies 36(1): pp. 117-143)*ableism modified

Fundamentally the state is made up of individuals. Individuals construct systems, institutions and bureaucracies; individuals lead and follow;

individuals make decisions. On what basis do individuals decide which ideas to hold? The first is the quality of the idea itself – its internal coherence, its congruence with known realities. The second key to success resides in the speaker himself – his intellectual status, his eloquence of advocacy. Thus the power of an idea to persuade others at any one moment in history resides both in itself, and in the power of those who hold it. The causal effect of ideas on policies has tended to be displaced onto the political effects of individuals in IR theory,

so that the persuasiveness of ideas is assumed rather than examined, and treated as constant.77 It is however, important to recognise that some ideas are ‘better’ than others, and are more likely to progress into the policymaking arena, where institutional factors may then come into play. This is not to deny the crucial role of

forces exogenous to them that push certain ideas to heart of policymaking. Whilst the degree to which ideas generate popular support may

provide them with power mediated through public opinion, ideas can take a shortcut to policy success if they have the backing of individuals and institutions that themselves have power . The character of these ‘couriers’ of ideas that may be as important, if not more so, than anything intrinsic to the idea itself.78 At the individual level then, neoclassical realism understands that the ideas held by powerful actors within the state matter. Whilst the intrinsic power of a particular idea makes its progress into such positions more likely, the ideas that will impact most upon foreign policy are those held by those in decision-making positions in the state and those who directly advise them. Thus as Mead notes, ‘It matters who the President is. If Theodore Roosevelt and not Woodrow Wilson had been President when World War I broke out, American and world history might have taken a very different turn.’79 The second location at which ideas may impact at the unit level occurs when individuals with shared ideas coalesce into groups, organisations, and common practices within the state to form institutions that operate in both formal and informal sectors of the policymaking process. The formation of institutions reflects the fact that ideas that are somehow embedded in particular structures are possessed of greater power. Institutions can act as couriers

for ideas in three ways.80 ‘Epistemic communities’ of experts have the policy-relevant knowledge to exert influence on the positions adopted by a wide range of actors. The extent of the influence of such groups is dependent on their ability to occupy influential positions within bureaucracies from where they may consolidate their power, thereby institutionalising the

influence of the community.81 However, their ability to infiltrate bureaucratic posts will depend – at least in part –

on the receptiveness of the existing bureaucratic order to their ideas. 82 A second means by which institutions act

as couriers is by the encasing of ideas in formal rules and procedures at the creation of the institution itself. Once they have become

embedded in this way, those ideas with which the institution was founded can continue to influence policy even though the interests or ideas of their creators may have changed. Thus, ‘when institutions intervene, the

impact of ideas can be prolonged for decades or even generations.’83 In both of these ways, ‘ideas acquire force when they find organizational means of expression’. 84 The third way in which ideas can impact is through the structural arrangements institutions create. These structures set up road-blocks and throughroutes which determine the ease with which ideas can gain access to the

policy process. Indeed, the structure of the institutional framework may determine the political and administrative ‘viability’ of particular ideas, that is, their ability to appeal to current conditions.

Institutional structure therefore ensures that policymakers only have access to a limited set of ideas ,

whether those are percolated up to them or searched for by them.85 In this way, the ideas that form what some refer to as ‘strategic culture’ may provide a reliable guide to a state’s likely reaction to shifts in the structure of the international system.86

Underlying both individuals and institutions are the ideas contained in the broader cultural context within which the state is located. Ideas that are embedded in social norms, patterns of discourse and collective identities become accepted,

‘instinctual’ parts of the social world and are experienced as part of a natural objective reality .87 In this way

cultural variables subconsciously set the limits and terms of debate for both individuals and institutions, and so have ‘a profound effect on the strategic behaviour of states.’88 Mediated through institutions and individuals who are [ ignore ] blinded to potential alternatives, ideas embedded in national culture therefore have the potential to explain ‘why some states act contrary to the structural imperatives of the international

system.’89 The power of ideas therefore rests on ‘the ability of believers in ideas to alter the costs and benefits facing those who are in a position to promote or hinder the policie s that the ideas demand .’90

In the process of foreign policy ‘engineering’, organisations and the ideas they espouse or represent vie with one another for dominance and autonomy.91 Decisions taken reflect the process of formulating the choices to be presented.92 Throughout the process of making foreign policy powerful ideas – whether that power resides in their couriers or is internal to the ideas themselves – are prevailing over weaker ideas.93

A2: Epistemology First Evaluate the benefits of the plan before our epistemology – knowledge is always contextual and fractured which means specificity is the only way to verify the 1AC’s truth claims – focusing debate on our assumptions in the abstract is intellectual hubris and makes managing violence and environmental destruction impossible – turns the k Lake, Poli Sci Prof @ University of California San Diego, 14

(David, “Theory is dead, long live theory: The end of the Great Debates and the rise of eclecticism in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 19(3) 567–587, https://quote.ucsd.edu/lake/files/2014/02/Lake-EJIR.pdf)

*ableism corrected

In the end, I prefer progress within paradigms rather than war between paradigms, especially as the latter would be inconclusive . The human condition is precarious. This is still the age of thermonuclear weapons. Globalization continues to disrupt lives as countries realign their economies on the basis of comparative advantage, production chains are disaggregated and wrapped around the globe, and financial crises in one country reverberate around the planet in minutes.

Transnational terrorism threatens to turn otherwise local disputes into global conflicts, and leave everyone

everywhere feeling unsafe. And all the while, anthropomorphic change transforms the global climate with potentially catastrophic consequences. Under these circumstances, we as a society need all the help we can get. There is no monopoly on knowledge . And there is no guarantee that any one kind of knowledge generated and understood within any one epistemology or ontology is always and everywhere more useful than another. To assert otherwise is an act of supreme intellectual hubris. This is not a plea to let a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand intellectual flowers bloom. Scholars working in cloistered isolation are not likely to produce great insights, especially when the social problems besetting us today are of such magnitude. All knowledge must be disciplined. That is, knowledge must be shared by and with others if it is to count as knowledge. Positivists and post-positivists are each working hard to improve and clarify the standards of knowledge within their respective paradigms. This is an important turn for both, as it will facilitate progress within each even as it raises barriers to exchange across approaches. So, if not a thousand flowers, it is perhaps better for teams of scholars to tend a small number of separate gardens, grow what they can best, and share when possible with the others and, especially, the broader societies of which

they are part. Do not mourn the end of theory, if by theory we mean the Great Debates in International Relations. Too often, the Great

Debates and especially the paradigm wars became contests over the truth status of assumptions . Declarations that ‘I am a realist’ or pronouncements that ‘As a liberal, I predict …’ were statements of a near quasi-religious faith, not conclusions that followed from a falsifiable theory with stronger empirical support. Likewise, assertions that positivism or post-positivism is a better approach to understanding world politics are similarly [misleading] blinding. The Great Debates were too often academic in the worst sense of that term. Mid-level theory flourished in the interstices of these debates for decades and now, with the waning of the paradigm wars, is coming into its own within the field . I regard this as an entirely positive

development. We may be witnessing the demise of a particular kind of grand theory , but theory — in the plural — lives. Long may they reign.